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...
Websites
No links in this post, but that’s okay. This blog isn’t really about links. It’s about the process of thinking things out logically, prevailing notions of current happenings within our culture, and the stark contrast between those prevailing notions and any process of logical thinking. It’s about the elites instructing the commoners on what opinions everybody is supposed to have, when a little bit of personal observation and rational cogitation would cause such opinions to implode — and how rarely that happens.
I’ve made some references here to the confession from Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the minority party in the House of Representatives: The Democrats have no position on Iraq. Refer back to my notes about this in December and you’ll see what I mean. I’m not saying “they haven’t gotten around to making one yet,” instead, what I’m saying is this: They don’t have a plan. They don’t want a plan. There is a plan to make sure they never have a plan. They are proud of the fact they have no plan. They intend to remain planless, and that is their plan.
So I was having a good-natured debate in a thread somewhere last week, and I made reference to the problem democrats have, that after they’ve made their case that Bush and Cheney are crooked and there’s a GOP Culture of Corruption, blah blah blah, and the time comes for them to make the pitch to the electorate which is asking “well what would YOU do” — they got nuthin’. And I wasn’t proffering an argument of “Democrats SUCK!” — although I do think that — the point I was trying to make, is that I’m not sold on the idea they’re going to win. I don’t think they will. In my lifetime there has always been a connection between the guy who wins an election, and a pre-election message of “if/when I get in, I’m going to do X.” If you don’t have the latter, the former won’t be happening. So I think they’ll lose.
It worked out that way two years ago.
And reliable as rain, someone piped up and said they do too have a plan, you can find out all about any issue you want, if you go to their website.
And maybe twenty others said something to the effect of “yeah, and Bush’s plan has gotten thousands killed, so what’s worse?” thus proving my point.
Well, the website-guy promptly went away. I posted a link to support my thesis — the Democrat’s lack of a message isn’t my opinion, it’s Minority Leader Pelosi’s — and I never heard from him again. No, I don’t believe I defeated him with the brilliance of my logic, I think he had something to do. So I’m inclined to doubt that he read what he would have found…
Pelosi said Democrats will produce an issue agenda for the 2006 elections but it will not include a position on Iraq. There is consensus within the party that President Bush has mismanaged the war and that a new course is needed, but House Democrats should be free to take individual positions, she sad.
“There is no one Democratic voice . . . and there is no one Democratic position,” Pelosi said in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors.
What my antagonist was saying, was inconsistent with the facts. You can’t go to the DNC website and find a position on “any issue.” Certainly not on Iraq, on which the DNC is pledged to be position-neutral. From where, I wonder, did he get the idea that you could?
This brought me a bit of deja vous because I heard the same thing during the elections twenty-four months previous. I was saying some liberal candidate was going to die on the vine, because it takes a lot for people to invest a leader with power, when they didn’t know what this guy was going to do. Some lefty woman protested that oh, he HAS said what he’s going to do, you can look it up on his website and everything will be explained.
I can’t remember who the candidate was. It might have been Dean, or Kerry, or that four-star general guy whose name nobody can remember.
What’s up with this bit we keep hearing about “look it up on his website”? If a candidate wants to win, doesn’t he want to get everyone talking about his bold new plan for such-and-such? Isn’t that where all the money is supposed to go?
When the field-marshals tell the buck-privates “just tell everyone to hit our website and all will be explained,” what is it that they have in mind? What’s this talking point look like? Is it “tell ’em to go to our website,” or is it “tell ’em to go to our website where they will find out we want to xxx yyy zzz“? If it’s the first of those two and not the second, then why would that be? Because the campaign strategists want the liberty of being able to change the position in mid-stream, simply by updating the website?
That would impress me as an ingenious way of providing information resources on a network, but a poor way to run a campaign. We live in a world where many things are dynamic, and a candidate’s plan for public office is NOT one of those things. Or shouldn’t be, anyway.
A strong candidate who is destined to be an effective leader doesn’t need a “website.” Not for definining what his positions are, anyway. Either someone is being paid huge money to decide campaign strategy for these races, and has yet to grasp that simple fact…or else the “website” ruse is formed purely for deceiptful purposes, to stifle the debate, and make the supporter look like he’s done a little more homework than the dissenter, even though that is not necessarily the case. I can’t think of a third possibility. And it’s been my experience, that people who are paid big money to know about things, in general really do know quite a bit about them.
We may disagree about whether President Bush’s plan is better or worse than no-plan-at-all. But I hope everyone would agree that an incumbent or challenging candidate taking extravagant steps to cloak his plans in secrecy about such important public issues, even magnifying his potential for defeat by doing so, knowingly, can’t be a good thing.
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