House of Eratosthenes

You’ll be wanting to head over there for a transcript. I looped the third minute of this a couple times to see if I missed something, and when you watch it you’ll understand why.

Nancy Pelosi is a most curious higglety-pigglety hodge-podge of shrewdness and lunacy. This thing about “you can vote against lifting it but you can’t obstruct it” is something I recognize from some of my animated conversations with lefty bloggers and commentators, I’ve sometimes referred to it as “I never said anything about blowing up the car, I just suggested checking the fuel level with a match” or “Nobody’s saying we should jump off the cliff, we’re just saying walk out to the very edge, climb over the guardrail, face outward and leap forward as hard as you can.” More abbreviated, I call it “I never said A, what I said was B.”

Whatever it is, Nancy Pelosi is very far from being the only person doing it. And some respect is due, I think, she is the former Speaker of the House, constantly lauded as the most powerful female in Congress, plus she’s loaded. Obviously this tactic of “I never said A, what I said was B, and it’s all about B” must be disseminated, somewhere, from some central location, and she must have used it with some success somewhere along the way.

But she’s talking in circles here, contradicting herself in statements just one sentence apart. I think what she’s trying to say is, you can vote against raising the limit but you can’t obstruct the debt itself as it approaches that limit. But it’s like she forgets to make that distinction, and based on her words alone I can’t leap to the conclusion that this is what she meant, just because it would make more sense and it’s kind of close to the guttural sounds escaping her maw. Frankly, she comes across as a dingbat.

Now Mr. Stewart — obviously he’s coming at this with a different orientation compared to me, but it’s still worth pointing out this thing he says after the six-minute mark which is different from my own opinion: Members of Congress are sent there, by the voters, to make government into a lever that will streamline us and make us more efficient. This is the progressive viewpoint that appeals most strongly to Main Street; when people want to get left-wing politics sold to people who don’t care about politics one way or another, this is the packaging. How did Elizabeth Warren put it: Nobody does anything on their own. Okay, she too didn’t say A she said B: Her quote has to do with getting rich on your own. But that is the mindset. A problem is defined, and either we send people to Congress to come up with some solution to the problem, or else nothing is done. Classic False Dilemma. There is no third choice, it’s all of one or none of anything. That was Bill Maher’s argument just now, that anybody who isn’t in favor of the government doing more, must be lazy. He must have been right, a lot of people cheered and clapped when he said it.

I know a lot of progressives, and most are decent people. I try to define my disagreement with them according to the effects of their policies, which over a long term for some reason they don’t notice, and keep it away from the character stuff. But here, I can’t help but nurture some suspicions about character. The “If we’re going to do anything about it at all, we have to have government do it” is a recruiting drive, a zombie-bite exercise, a deliberate attempt to make liberals out of the no-care-that-much crowd. The “I never said A what I said was B” is a retention effort, a shoring-up, an attempt to stop liberals who are already recruited, from seriously considering the arguments of The Enemy, stop them from defecting. And I have the impression that even when that last one is implemented incompetently, the way the Former House Speaker did it, it still works. These things they do to help advance the liberal cause, always seem to work. They work even when they don’t work, going down in defeat only when they face off against a contrary force that is somehow more powerful; two steps forward and three steps back, but still, the two steps forward got done.

When the beneficiary of their actions is the country, rather than the liberal agenda, suddenly nothing works. And we aren’t supposed to notice. They’re going to make us like something better, so they’ll bury us in a great big taxpayer-subsidized abundance of whatever-it-is, and we end up getting sick of looking at it. Or, they’re going to make sure everyone can get something when they need it, by passing regulations against the suppliers…so nobody wants to supply it anymore, the market isn’t given a signal that the reserves are getting low, and we end up with a shortage.

In other words, their efforts to help the country tend to run into this problem in which said efforts produce results exactly the opposite of what was intended. Their efforts to help themselves, don’t ever seem to run into that. Maybe it really does happen, and I don’t notice because the effects are muted. Like for example, the effort to make Barack Obama look like some kind of deity, which I frequently mock in my subtle way by capitalizing the H when I refer to Him. That seems to have backfired, as of today. Well making Obama look like a demigod would be of benefit to Obama, and the democrat party, so it seems to me that when it starts to backfire there is some responsible changing of course, a tripping of circuit-breakers if you will.

Now, Obama’s health care plan is supposed to benefit the country, not quite so much the democrat party (except through the reputation it would gain from solving a vexing societal problem, or at least trying to). That has backfired too. But there’s no changing of the course, no tripping circuit breakers. Oh, no. They’re doubling down. You see it in stories like this (noisy ad auto-plays). No, we’re gonna win. We are confident. Compromise is for losers.

As I said, many progressives don’t care about this stuff, and all progressives do not have all progressive faults. Far from it. This is an elite crowd I’m singling out, even John Stewart isn’t part of it. I don’t think. But what I’m seeing here is worse than any old plain character problem. This is a special character problem that uniquely disqualifies the person laboring under it, from being qualified to fix any problem that really needs fixing. When you have to have this well-oiled public relations machine, that hums along so nicely that it seems to benefit from design and engineering far superior to what went into the solutions you’re presenting from the others who are supposed to be benefiting from your concern and your compassion, something is terribly wrong.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 11/17/2011 @ 07:57

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Lifting, Voting Against, ObstructingWednesday, November 16th, 2011

Lifting, Voting Against, Obstructing
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011