Of course, this prospective project won't be my first.
Back in 2008, when Kenya was experiencing a civil/tribal war and when a man of Kenyan Luo descent was running for president of the United States, I put forth a series of posts under the heading of Kenya Happenings and composed a page entitled Kenya: The Basics. These posts and pages were meant to dispel several misconceptions about the country, its people, its history and the conflict that it was experiencing. Of course, I had a vested personal interest aside from that which all Americans had; as many know, my biological father, Philip Ochieng is also from Kenya and is Luo like Barack Obama, Sr. (On top of that, the two men were friends.)
Because President Obama's African family is Muslim, many observers suspect that he himself is a Muslim. (I do have an opinion on the matter, one that has changed over the years. But that's for another post.) Leaving aside whether he is or not, because of his family's faith, it was and still is often assumed that the Luo tribe itself is primarily an Arab Muslim tribe. Nothing could be further from the truth or more ridiculous. Roughly ninety percent of the Luo are Christians: Anglicans, Seventh-Day Adventists and, increasingly, Evangelicals.
And Arab? Please. The spreading of this fantasy has been caused by a man named Kenneth Lamb, who claims to have done extensive research into the background of President Obama's African family but failed to take this cultural curiosity into account: that black African converts to Islam often begin to call themselves Arab and that governments go along with this fiction. Lamb's conclusion was that President Obama is only 1/8 black African, which means than Barack Obama, Sr. Was 1/4 black and 3/4 Arab.
Does this look like a man who is 3/4 Arab?
Mr. Lamb has since deleted the page containing his conclusions, but they are still being passed around, something that demonstrates the truth of this aphorism. (Here's a fine 2008 take-down of Mr. Lamb's assertions.)
This Great Lie has, in turn, served to distort the existential reality of the entire Luo tribe and of Kenya itself.
As for the war in Kenya, it was primarily tribal in nature, as is often the case where many ethnic groups co-exist within a single nation-state. But the fact that war was started by the political machinations of one Raila Odinga, Kenyan presidential candidate in 2007 and, ostensibly, cousin of Barack Obama, gave it a singular appearance in the eyes of many. (Odinga was appointed prime minister in 2008, which ended the conflict. He was the first prime minister since Jomo Kenyatta held both offices of president and prime minister in the wake of Kenya's 1963 independence. Kenyatta's son, Uhuru Kenyatta, is the current president of Kenya.) And there was additional controversy regarding former Prime Minister Odinga in the run-up to Kenya's 2013 presidential election, during which he was again a candidate. He doesn't seem to take losing well.
And there were these things: the 2008 church burnings and the 2008 Memorandum of Understanding--a document allegedly composed by Odinga in which he promises to share power with Kenyan Islamic Leaders and push for Sharia Law. There is much back-and-forth about its authenticity. (In my opinion, the document is real, considering the fact that Kenyan Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Odinga in the 2007 election. But if it is real, I think Odinga signed it because he is power-hungry, not because he's a Muslim. In any case, Odinga did not push for Sharia Law during his term as prime minister, nor did he grant the Muslims a certain number of seats in Kenya's parliament, as promised in the real/fake MOU. In return, the Muslims abandoned him in his 2013 bid to become president.)
Connecting these items--proven and disputed--with then-U.S. Senator Obama's 2006 visit to Kenya, when he appeared to be campaigning for Odinga--even though Odinga didn't officially launch his presidential candidacy until the following year--many saw a pattern forming.
Of course, I'm one who likes observing patterns and coming to conclusions as well. But the American reportage I read during that time--from both traditional and new media sources--almost always left pertinent details out. And, as I said at the time, both types of media seem to not want to get information from the plentiful Kenyan sources. I don't know what that was about, but it seemed, well, stupid.
Now in 2013, as in 1998, Kenya finds itself reeling after a Islamic terror attack in its capital city. Al Shabaab, a Somalian offshoot of al Qaeda, attacked and brutally murdered patrons of Nairobi's Westgate Mall during a three-day siege. The particulars of it are all over the place, so I won't go into it here.
But when I began to read crap from my fellow Americans like " I didn't know they had malls in Africa," I knew it was time to start writing about Kenya again. This time, the focus will be to explore the foundational enmity between Kenyans and Somalians--in addition to the religious one.
And this time, I have the blessing and knowledge base of family members--not so much to correct any info I put forth, but to give it proper context. That was something that was difficult to come by in 2008. Additionally, after five years of a president of Kenyan descent as POTUS, we have even more context, both for ill and good.
I want to run this project concurrently with my other project, the completion of my second novel, Arlen's Harem. I'll run it as a series for two weeks, to see if there's any interest. If there is, I'll keep going. And I still means that I'm going to need financial help. Donors who are willing can Go Fund Me or, if your want to get my Typepad bill paid right now and coffee in me early tomorrow morning, you can hit my Paypal tip jar.
For whatever reason, Kenya's fate seems to be bound up in ours--Americans. As a Christian, I know that nothing in the lives of the servants of Jesus the Christ is coincidental or accidental. Why God the Father would connect the fates of the Superpower and the tiny African country on the continent's east coast is beyond my ken. But, in the exploration of a political connection between the two countries, I believe that a spiritual connection will be revealed. I can feel it.
So it is that I wish to explore the history and present-day occurrences in my father's country. I am no historian, no do I have any educational credentials. All I have are will, faith and an Internet connection and, in my opinion, the faith is of the highest import.
A wise guy named Solomon asserted that reverance for the Lord--faith in Him--is the beginning of wisdom. That's my lone credential. May it be enough.
Don't get annoyed. It's really not a big deal. I mean, nobody has seen this photo, right?
This may be one of the most famous photographs from the immediate post-9/11 era. Hell, it might be one of the most well-known pictures of all time. Naturally, that means it was almost left out of the memorial.
Michael Shulan, the museum’s creative director, was among staffers who considered the Tom Franklin photograph too kitschy and “rah-rah America,” according to “Battle for Ground Zero” (St. Martin’s Press) by Elizabeth Greenspan, out next month.
for a moment, let's take Shulan's stupidity on stilts at face value. Even if the picture is just too damn patriotic for the type of dainty chest-waxing liberal who runs around calling himself a creative director, that doesn't change the fact that the photo exists. Not only does it exist, but it captures one of the defining moments of that time. To exclude it from the official WTC memorial, especially for such sniffy taste-specific reasons, would be an act of censorship. Funny, I thought the vaunted creative community was against putting limits on the truth.
So how does Shulan think the United States should present itself to the world?
“I really believe that the way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently,” Shulan said.
Translation: "Love of country is soooooooo passe."
Oh but wait, Michael Shulan isn't done:
“My concern, as it always was, is that we not reduce [9/11] down to something that was too simple, and in its simplicity would actually distort the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event,” he said.
Showing the US flag being raised over the rubble of the World Trade Center is 'simplistic'.
I didn't know the September 11th terrorist attack was such a complicated event. Quick Recap: Al-Qaeda extremists, enthralled by Islamic jihadism, hijacked passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attempting to destroy our economy and weaken our government. In the process, 3000 innocent people were incinerated because a murderous butcher named Osama bin Laden hated the United States.
September 11th is only complicated if you perseverate on the the Noam Chomsky-lite ideology of the 'root causes' of terrorism. For these sorts of leftists-, America must forever wring it's hands. The only proper thing to do in the face of something like 9/11 is for the US to abase itself in front of the nation's most virulent haters. The conversation that begins with 'Why do they hate us?' must always be a closed circuit loop that ends with 'Because we deserved it'. That what Shulan ultimately means when he wheezes about the supposed complexity of 9/11.
Here's a hint for people looking for the meaning of 9/11.
The September 11th terrorist attacks were meant to be a direct heartfelt message from al-Qaeda to America--"Die".
One would think Osama bin Laden's earnest valentine of hate directed at the people of America would be pretty easy to figure out. Nihilism is not complex. Slaughtering people is not hard to discern. Or at least it shouldn't be.
It is in our response to militant Islam's murderous attack on America where one can find complexity. The self-sacrifice, the heroism and the ultimate survival of our nation is a tale that needs to be told. It needs to be documented and passed down from generation to generation. One really good way of documenting America's 9/11 story would be to include a picture of the three firemen, raising an American flag in the aftermath of the worst attack on our soil.
The problem is that Michael Shulan isn't just some random dude on the street with a dopey opinion. He's the creative director for the World Trade Center Memorial. In other words, he's in charge of shaping our understanding of the most painful tragedy in recent times. To paraphrase Instapundit, Shulan and the people who seek to explain American culture are just not that into America.
Our elites have, at best, a fleeting affection for the country they seek to lead and define. Most of the time, the people at the core of our culture have an active disdain for America and the people who inhabit it. From the campus Marxoids to the Hollywood Limousine Jacobins to the Washington DC/New York newsmedia hub...and, sadly, the World Trade Center Memorial...the men and women who run our institutions cannot hide their annoyance with the civilizational touchstones most Americans enjoy. This isn't healthy for our short-term culture wars or our long term survival.
If conservatives want to deal with the effete progressives snobs that man our cultural machinery, they'd better start soon. If traditionalists focused on being credible counterweights to the Michael Shulans of the world, it would do a lot to restore some balance in our society. Maybe in a few decades, we won't have institutions that automatically despise American patriotism. That would be nice.
In the very recent past, the two YouTube videos below have become popular in conservative circles. Other than the obvious fact that both videos feature black people, the videos have nothing in common--or so it seems. Specifically, the videos demonstrate something interesting in their contrast.
If you haven't already done so, please watch both of them before continuing with my commentary. The second one comes with a language and violence warning. [UPDATE 2014: The account of the second video's owner has been suspended. Many did not like the truth being told.]
And, just in case you missed it the first time, the following video comes with a language and violence warning.
The first video features Dr. Benjamin Carson speaking before President and Mrs. Obama at the annual National Prayer Breakfast.The second features a woman being stunned by a taser-wielding security guard. The woman and her friend became belligerent with the security guard after he presumes to correct their wayward children and one of them physically attacks him after he corrects the children a second time. (And what wayward children these are! During the verbal part of the confrontation between the women and the guard, the children--none of them any more than five years old--begin to repeatedly call the guard 'gay.' Leaving aside the implications of whether such a thing is an epithet or not--and, to people like these, it is--when I was that age, I didn't have any concept of heterosexual sex, much less anything else.)
With regard to the first video, many commentators have noted the unabashedly conservative content of Dr. Carson's speech. It was, indeed, well-done and one might contrast the two videos in terms of how to and how not to disagree. But that isn't my purpose here.
By now, Dr. Carson's origins and background are well-known. Like all too many Americans, black and otherwise, he grew up without his biological father. But then so did President Obama. And so did I.
And so did Former President Bill Clinton, actor Pierce Brosnan and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas--whose excellent autobiography, My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir, I'm reading right now. And so did singer/musician Eric Clapton, economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, media titan Oprah Winfrey, NBA great Shaquille O'Neal and many, many other successful, responsible and law-abiding Americans of various races, famous and unknown.
As I began to reflect on the two videos and what I know from personal experience and observation, I realized that it has never been all that unusual for children in America to grow up without their biological fathers or even their biological mothers. Many times, such children are without one or both of their parents because of divorce or death and, in the case of growing up without the father due to divorce, the fathers often exit the lives of the children entirely, as was so with me. But just as often, the father is not in the child's life because he and the mother were never married. Such was the case with Jobs (who was adopted by the couple who gave him his last name).
But what makes a Jobs, Thomas, O'Neal, etc. different from the many children we see in this day and age-- who grow up the same way but who are disobedient and disrespectful like the ones we see in the second video?
Could you imagine behaving toward any adult in the manner of those children? That beautiful lady in the post before this one would have beaten me down had I acted like that. But of course, she trained me early not to run wild in public in the first place.
I suspect that none of the children in the second video were born in wedlock. Oh sure there's a man at the end of the video who appears and threatens the guard in the name of his woman and his alleged children. But, I suspect that, at maximum, only one of the children is his biological child and that he and tasered woman are not married. Call it a hunch.
On the other hand, consider the upbringing of Dr. Carson. He and his older brother were raised by his divorced and then illiterate mother. Growing up, the Carson brothers never saw their father. But their hard-working, and, frankly, brilliant mother wanted more for her offspring than she had. From Biography.com:
Both Ben and his brother experienced difficulty in school. Ben fell to the bottom of his class, and became the object of ridicule by his classmates. He developed a violent and uncontrollable temper, and was known to attack other children at the slightest provocation.
(...)
Determined to turn her sons around, Sonya [Carson] limited their TV time to just a few select programs and refused to let them go outside to play until they'd finished their homework. She was criticized for this by her friends, who said her boys would grow up to hate her. But she was determined that her sons would have greater opportunities than she did. She required them to read two library books a week and give her written reports, even though with her poor education she could barely read them. She would take the papers and review them, scanning over the words and turning pages. Then she would place a checkmark at the top of the page showing her approval.
At first, Ben resented the strict regimen. While his friends were playing outside, he was stuck in the house, forced to read a book or do his homework. But after several weeks of his mother's unrelenting position, he began to find enjoyment in reading. Being poor, there wasn't much opportunity to go anywhere. But between the covers of a book he could go anyplace, be anybody, and do anything. Ben began to learn how to use his imagination and found it more enjoyable than watching television. This attraction to reading soon led to a strong desire to learn more.
It's the type of upbringing I recognize.
But what made a Ben Carson or a Steve Jobs different from the children in the second video? What makes the children who grew up in the early 60s and prior without one or more parents different from the menaces to society we've seen all too often in the past four decades?
It's this: individuals--individuals who step into the breach that mother and/or father vacate voluntarily or involuntarily. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, stepparents, adoptive parents. And the individual biological parents, like Sonya Carson, who step up to the task appointed to them. People like her shape a Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon and leader of the surgical team who first successfully separated conjoined twins. People like the tasered woman--and the man--shape drug-dealers, gang members, welfare mothers and prisoners.
Such people like the latter know nothing of hard work, true education, order, responsibility. The reason this is so? Because neither they nor the other parent(s) of their offspring care about their children being better than they are. They don't have to care about this because they know that the government will subsidize all of their "needs" and the "needs" of their offspring.
When individuals are the parents, the child will most likely do well. When government is the parent, the child will most likely do poorly and become dependent on government as well--either taking on government as one parent (illegitimate children) or both parents (going to prison). This isn't rocket science or neurosurgery. From time immemorial, children, with some exceptions, follow in the footsteps of their parents.
This is becoming a problem in America as a whole, but it is primarily a problem among black Americans, a huge one. Since the beginning of the Great Society, black illegitimacy has skyrocketed and hovered in the seventy percent area for some time. Though many black women who have been having children illegitimately are self-sufficient, all too many rely on government to feed, clothe and house themselves and their progeny and the result is demonstrated in not only the second video, but many of the other videos that the security guard, Darien Long, has posted on You Tube. And I see the result nearly every time I step outside my South Central LA home...
The progeny of human mothers and government fathers are doing what chattel slavery did not...ruining a people.
The feds are investigating accusations that New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez had sex with underage hookers on trips to the Dominican Republic, The Post has learned.
“Clearly, they [FBI agents] were pursuing it,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who reported Menendez to the feds last year.
Menendez and his Dominican junkets have come under intense scrutiny in the past 24 hours after the feds raided the Florida office of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Menendez friend.
Tipsters told Sloan’s group that Melgen repeatedly flew Menendez on a private jet to the Dominican Republic, where the doctor allegedly supplied prostitutes to the senator.
Melgen did not respond to requests for comment.
Menendez’s office said, “Any allegations of engaging with prostitutes are manufactured . . . and are false.”
I quoted the entire article, from the supposedly Republican-leaning New York Post, for a reason. Do you see what you're not noticing? If you didn't already know Bob Menendez was a member of the Democrat Party, you certainly weren't going to get that piece of information from Post writer Josh Margolin.
I wonder why the NYPost would neglect to mention that Mr. Menendez is a Democrat. Party affiliation is a fairly easy way for people to identify political figures. For the news consumer, understanding where an elected representative sits on the partisan spectrum is a great help when trying to get a grasp on current events. Yet we never get to know Bob Menendez very well from this article, especially as it relates to his profession. He must be from the very popular Generic Party. Tra-la-la, ho-hum, move it along folks.
Isn't it also strange how this investigation didn't come out until after Boisterous Bobby was safely re-elected? I know Joseph Kyrillos, Menendez's GOP opponent last November, tried to make some hay out this but that tactic was largely seen as a dying campaign's last gasp. Most the of the media blew it all off: "These are baseless allegations against this divorced senator from an unknown region of the United States. Also hookers are notorious liars. Besides prostitution is legal in the DR, so yeah."
We can all see how Garden State voters were rightfully protected from this unseemly intrusive information. Nobody thinks it's important that their Senator is being investigated by the FBI for improperly using a campaign contributor's private jet to hook up with underage hookers at the same campaign contributor's private club located in a foreign country with notably lax prostitution statutes. Citizens would not be at all interested in learning about a situation like this, especially during an election where the Democrat Party was shamelessly moralizing dutifully explaining to America all the many ways that Republicans want to exploit women.
Media observers, including some conservatives, think that press bias is just a matter of how a news organization presents stories. Giving a story a left wing spin is a time-honored tactic for the Democrat Party shill working at an MSM outlet. The media still does this all the time. But it's more than just putting a progressive-friendly sheen on stuff. It's about guarding the good guys--ie Bill Clinton, Barney Frank and Bob Menendez--and punishing the evil retrograde Republicans and conservatives.
...you want to tell me that’s not newsworthy? Turn in your press credentials, clean out your desk and find another line of work, because you clearly have no aptitude for the news business.
See, that's just it. The media loves a good political sex scandal, when it's a Republican at the center of it. When a GOPer does something awful, the press loves to spin it into their favorite narrative--"This latest sex scandal indicts the entire hypocritical Republican party."
When it's a Democrat that's accused of using people like a box of kleenex, suddenly it's not newsworthy.
Protecting the progressive brand is more important than, you know, actually reporting the news.
The main source in the Bob Menendez underage hooker scandal sent the FBI the names offour hookers who confirmed they had attended sex parties with Salmon Melgen and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) in the Dominican Republic. On Tuesday, FBI agents raided the West Palm Beach business of Dr. Melgen who is suspected of providing free trips and even underage Dominican Republic prostitutes to U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.
I'll say this. We live in a country where a person is innocent until proven guilty. None of this has been found to be true yet. Menendez might not have done any of it.
At the same time, I don't see the FBI investigating something like this if there isn't something to it. I mean, do they like wasting time and resources on complete dead-ends? I don't think that happens too often, especially since the target of the investigation is such a high-profile public figure.
I mean, who isn't turned on by a dude grunting weird sexual innuendos about a Supreme Court case that allows people to terminate their pregnancies?
So it's weird when Clint Eastwood talks to an empty chair, but it's totally rad when a man breaks the fourth wall and moans at an empty cradle. Got it.
For those of you without a program to refer to, the actor playing the randiest abortion provider ever is Mechad Brooks. He's some really famous guy in that show that's on one of those channels you watch when you're fighting off a hangover and an eight hour Law & Order-Criminals With SUV And Trials marathons is running or whatever. As you can imagine, filming a pro-abortion propaganda video is a big step up for Mr. Brooks' career. If this Roe v Wade anniversary tribute thingy takes off, he'll get a fifteen second cameo in the next Lady Gaga video and a free season pass to Knott's Berry Farm.
It's also funny how they got a guy to celebrate legalized baby killing. Consequence-free sex has been a leftist dream ever since Margaret Sanger was invited to her first KKK rally, but it's men that have the most to gain from ready access to abortion. They get all the fun and none of the messy medical complications or the increased risk of suicide Just don't accuse them of not caring for women's health.
After the creepiness has worn off, the ad is refreshing in it's morbid honesty. Like the Lena Dunham/First Time campaign spot, the horny nihilists at the Center For Reproductive Rights are gleefully pandering to the lowest common denominator: "Let's have sex then get rid of the inconvenient kid that results."
We get no sob stories about women denied access to 'vital' 'health care'. The pro-abortionists don't gin up some statistically negligible scenarios to tug at our heart strings. Nope. Instead we get the inhuman bump-and-grind brutality at the core of the state-sanctioned baby killer movement delivered to us straight.
The pro-lifers are disappointed that Roe v Wade is still operational. It's ugly that such an unconstitutional and immoral ruling still stands. But there is one thing the anti-abortion activists can take solace in. Never before has the febrile murderous heart of the abortion rights mob been so visible. This means those who value human life will no longer have to fight against the shadowy obfuscations formerly used by the pro-'choice' movement.
UPDATE: Matt over at Conservative Hideout did a post on this clip too. Check it out.
The video is made by a joint called Draw the Line. They apparently think that $9.00 a month birth control is a “luxury item” that only the wealthy can afford.
The weirdest thing about the last year's War on Women dance craze was the idea that spending the same money as two McDonald's meal deals was a serious financial burden. But Obama won on that bullshit, so I guess it was all just the opening gambit. Since our government is now breaking the Catholic Church over it's knee and making them pay for everybody's rubbers, it's only a matter of time before the country gets inured to taxpayer-sponsored abortion.
District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan issued a lengthy letter today explaining the decision not to prosecute David Gregory “despite the clarity of the violation of this important law,” despite rejecting NBC’s claims of a subjective misunderstanding of the law, and despite vowing vigorous enforcement of gun laws.
But it's not like this Important Sophisticated Celebrity Journalist got any special favors. Gregory's wife is totally not BFF's with the DC attorney general or anything.
For a reporter, David "Laws For Thee Not Me" Gregory is a great dancer.
Now that's how you do "Gangam Style", kids.
Meanwhile, Piers Morgan continued to make the case for a highly restrictive immigration policy for disgraced British tabloid editors by having a patronizing sneer-fest with Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro. Watch for yourself. Seeing an English know-it-all shoot himself in the foot (see what I did there?) is must-see TV.
Go to 10:10 to catch the real magic. Everybody is talking about Beerz Morguecrotch calling the US Constitution "your little book", but that's just the obvious self-pwnage. No, the really cool bit is when CNN dude holds up the Ronald Reagan letter and tries to club Shapiro over the head with it.
What is it with the liberal fetish for self-defeating interview props? First David Gregory waves an illegal 30 round magazine in Wayne LaPierre's face, then Pierce Organ throws a Gipper quote at Shapiro that promptly does nothing but make the reasonable host gun control fanatic look stupid. It's like media leftists have to have some kind of comforting woobby to soothe themselves when going up against evil reich-wing thugs.
Prop reporting is sorta like prop comedy. The Amazing Jonathan is often brilliant. Gallagher can be funny as hell. Carrot Top will stumble onto a decent bit every year or so. People pay good money to see these guys do their thing. Yet even with all that, there is a stigma against comedians who work with props. Other stand-up guys look down on them. Comedy nerds use prop comics as a punchline.
I think people hate on these guys because the prop is seen--rightly or wrongly--as a crutch. It's like if they didn't have the sledgehammer or the treasure box full of crap or whatever, they wouldn't be able to make a joke. Again, your mileage may vary when it comes to prop comics, but that seems to be the critique against them.
When a reporter uses a prop to make his point, especially when using it against a guest, it's sorta the same thing. Couldn't homeboy use his j-school big boy words to make the same point? Does he have to have the prop to make the segment work?
During the David Gregory/Wayne LaPierre dust-up, the Meet The Press host wanted to put the NRA veep in his place--'You love these death instruments more than you care about kids.' Too bad for Gregory that LaPierre didn't take the bait. Instead, Gregory made himself look stupid. And broke the laws that he wants everyone else to follow.
Morgan's use of the Reagan letter was a little different. There, he tried to use the 40th president's position on assault weapons as a wedge to separate Shapiro from a conservative icon. Unfortunately for Morgan, admiring Reagan doesn't mean blind obeisance to every one of his positions. That made it tough for him to beat up on Shapiro, so Morgan's snippy moral outrage skit fell apart.
Far be it from me to tell the genius liberal media how to run their shows. If they wanna keep using prop reportage, go ahead. After all, how could anybody quibble with Piers Morgan's sky-high ratings?
I mean, PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE!!!!111111!!!111!!!!
Earlier this week, many Americans realized the “fair share” fiscal cliff deal didn’t seem so fair. One Democratic Underground commenter was a little behind yesterday and was shocked — shocked! — to learn that the fiscal cliff crapwich didn’t extend the payroll tax holiday. (They don’t call ‘em DUmmies for nothing.)
“What happened?” he asked. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease will hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will hurt those making over $400,000.”
Forgive me gentle readers, but let me address this emotionally distraught person directly.
Dear Mister Why Is My Paycheck Less This Week,
I see that you are surprised to note that your paycheck is less than it was back in 2012. Let me first say that I too mourn for your lost revenue. It is money that you will most likely never see again, what with the annual trillion dollar deficits our government--completely dominated as it is by the US House Republicans I must add--just keeps running up.
But do not worry. There is a bulwark against the GOP's destructive maddening destructiveness. President Obama, with his bountiful business experience as a community organizer, adjunct part-time college lecturer, lawyer and Chicago politician, knows best how to use your cash better than you ever could. In the glorious future ahead of us, we can all look forward to more great job-creating wage-raising successes like Solyndra, Abound Solar and A123 Systems.
As a good Democrat, you'll be happy to know your President is using your money for many other important investments. Such as the Guantanamo Bay detention center. And drone strikes. And giving guns to Mexican freedom fighters or something. So feel comfortable knowing that while revenues have been raised from you and many other kind-hearted liberals like you, these funds are being well spent on things that you truly agree with.
Now, there will be those outside of the totally mainstream Democratic Underground message board who will disagree with this obvious wisdom. They will tell you that by voting for President Obama, you have in fact chosen to pay higher taxes and thus you should not be surprised to see a lighter paycheck. They'll assert, while smoking a cigar and kicking a puppy no doubt, that our President actually wants higher taxes. The fascist wreckers in our society believe Obama sought out a higher payroll tax as part of the fiscal cliff deal.
This is obviously not true, as I have succinctly pointed out to you.
Now rest your head, friend. I'm sure this is a lot of information for you to process. I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself. Just know that smarter, savvier people than you have it all taken care of.
The least diplomatic person in the fashion world is about to become an American diplomat. Makes perfect sense.
Two years late, give a warm hug to a million brain cells short.
In 2010, we set up an interview with the Syrian leader's wife, Asma al-Assad, a Western-educated former banker and a woman with a reputation as a force for reform in the Middle East. Like many at that time, we were hopeful that the Assad regime would be open to a more progressive society. Subsequent to our interview, as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue. The escalating atrocities in Syria are unconscionable, and we deplore the actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms.
Shorter Nuclear Wintour: Sorry I believed the Assad Regime's bullshit and then published it verbatim in my bubble-headed fashion magazine.
I know Anna Banana put out this little half-assed apology back in June, but it's become a tad more interesting given that the Vogue Meanie-In-Chief may be getting a new job.
There’s a rumor in Washington that the United Kingdom may soon be welcoming a very stylish emissary. According to a report by Bloomberg News, Anna Wintour, the powerful editor of Vogue magazine, is being considered by President Obama for the prestigious post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
I know a lot of us wanna tee off on this Ambassador Wintour idea like it's a huge outrage. It's understandable; I kinda wanna go ballistic too. But the more I think about it, the more I think this more annoying than anything else.
After all, what is an ambassador, really? I know we'd like to think of them as thoughtful diplomats who understand all the foreign-type gobbledeegook that the rest of us forgot in World Cultures class. Unfortunately, a person usually gets the job because she donated the biggest chunk of cash to the winning presidential candidate. The late Christopher Stevens seems to have been one of the few ambassadors who actually understood the language, customs and culture of the country he was assigned.
More importantly, an ambassador's job involves kissing ass. This isn't a quality one would normally associate with Anna Wintour. But think about it this way: If Vogue and Wintour can figure out a way to grovel in front of Dictatorette Asma Al-Assad, surely striking an obsequious pose for England shouldn't be too difficult.
So yeah, floating the Wintour ambassadorship trial balloon is indicative of the Obama Administration's habitual unseriousness. It's governance by D-List niche celebrity, of the type President SolidGold Wonderful seems particularly fond of. Oh well. It's Barry's presidency and I guess he's allowed to run it like an America's Next Top Model episode.
Besides, if we're going to get annoyed over something here, how about the injustice of poor mistreated Sarah Jessica Parker not getting her own ambassadorship?
More, Slightly Related Kinda: Here's a picture of Anna Wintour's favorite power-couple taking in the Parthenon, in Athens Greece.
Jeff over at Protein Wisdom gives us the scoop on the latest doings on the female empowerment front.
This is actually quite interesting: “The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing four military women and the activist Servicewomen’s Action Network (SWAN), has filed a San Francisco lawsuit demanding that female soldiers be forced into direct ground combat (infantry) battalions.”
The lawsuit is being filed because female soldiers have been proven to be just as good ad their male counterparts.
This despite “numerous studies and tests conducted over the past 30 years, in the direct ground combat environment” showing “women do not have an equal opportunity to survive, or to help fellow soldiers survive.”
Oh.
Well.
It must be sexist or racist or sexist-racist (sexiracist?) to keep women off the front lines, so let the litigation commence.
BTW: I'm with Jeff. If a woman can physically and mentally perform to the same degree as a man, she should be eligible to serve in any Obamafied kinetic military actions.
But that's not what this lawsuit is about.
It's about making women 'equal' to men, no matter how badly we have to torture biology and physics and math to make it happen.
Whatever. I for one have had it trying to protect thumbsucking anti-American leftoids from the consequences of their moronic policy prescriptions. Every day, members of the reality-based community furiously beat their spoons on their high chairs demanding the rest of us give in to every one of their thoughtless childish whims.
Screw it. Give the ACLU everything that it wants in this case. Marxists think women in combat is like the bestest idea ever? Cool. We should make Gloria Allred an eleventy-star general just to celebrate this marvelous achievement-free achievement.
As a matter of fact, if you look at the history of America, women have gotten off pretty easy when it comes to fighting in combat. Since the Revolutionary War, the overwhelming number of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen have been men. The US government has been guilty of creating a disparate impact on our male citizens-soldiers. This sort of blatant sexist discrimination against almost half of our population cannot and will not stand.
Currently, the US Army is 13% female and 87% male. Those numbers need to change. If we're serious about righting the long-standing historic wrong our government has perpetrated against men, we must not only must allow women serve in combat. We have to go further, and make the Army an 87% female force.
Call me a radical feminist, but America will never be an equal society when women don't have to shoulder the burden of defending our country. That means our Army must stop taking in male recruits, while at the same time creating a massive new program to recruit and retain female Army candidates. It's the only way we can right one of the great civil rights failures in America's history.
I mean, why not let a Katy Perry video help determine our nation's military policy?
A personal observation taken from the post-election wreckage.
On Election Night, I sat in a coffee house reading Twitter and scanning the Fox News website for the vote tallies. I couldn't sit in my cold dark place without power. I didn't feel like just listening to the radio for the returns to come in. So there I was, drinking a root beer and listening to cookie-cutter smooth jazz as Mitt Romney went down to ignominious defeat.
While making jokes to brighten my mood (Q--What do you call a guy who has $5 trillion dollars in debt, 8% unemployment and the Benghazi disaster? A--Mister President.) I overheard a conversation between two college girls. It went something like this:
Lady A: The election is tonight?
Lady B: Yeah.
Lady A: I kinda like Mitt Romney.
Lady B: Yeah, but he wants to take away student loans.
Lady A: Screw that shit.
Let me add--These two young women didn't seem like bad people. Maybe not as clued-in as one might hope, but not many 19 year-olds are terribly invested in national politics. They were just shooting the breeze at a coffee shop. It was clear that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama did not loom large in their lives. Which is pretty much how most Americans are disconnected from the daily political grind.
A few days later, I found myself at a gas station line waiting to fill some cans to feed my generator. The guy working there looked like he was in his early twenties. He must've seen the NRA sticker on my bumper because he asked me, "Is Obama really looking to end the right to keep and bear arms? Because I'm concerned about that."
Homeboy seemed like a nice enough dude. While he probably wasn't an Obama supporter, he didn't seem like an overly political person. He had a post-election worry regarding the newly re-elected President, but other than that he appeared like the sort of man who didn't engage himself in partisan bickering very often.
Both of these encounters struck me as amazing in their own ways.
It's important to note something sorta obvious: we live in an enormously diverse country. The opinions of the citizenry range from wide left to far right, from the lowest grubby obsessions to the highest spiritual aspirations. Because we are surrounded by this massive continent-spanning society, it's easy to forget just how dynamic our culture really is. Even our most wretched debased theories are vaguely interesting, if only because of the scope of the awfulness involved. On the other hand, our grandest and greatest ideas are so transcendent that they expand human freedom and perspective in previously unimaginable ways.
It's mind-blowing to think that two very different expressions of ideology--"Mitt wants to snatch my college money"/"Barack wants to confiscate my guns"--can happily coexist. Yet they do, in a more or less peaceful way. Our elections are bitterly contested, but for the most part actual wide-spread violence hasn't visited our political disputes for a long time.
What we learned on Elections Day--and this, sadly, is a lesson some of us will have to re-learn a few times now--is that our politics flows out from the vast American culture. Politicians are a reflection of our religious values, our social norms, our manners, our entertainments and even our petty diversions. As of November 2012, the result of our grand national partisan argument makes it unclear whether America really is the center-right country some of us have assumed it was.
Don't get it twisted. There are at least 59 million people who are at least sorta sympathetic to a right-of-center political vision. More people are reading conservative-ish books than liberal screeds. More people call themselves conservative than identify as left-wing. These are very large numbers. They indicate that there is still a sizable electoral minority and perhaps a broad plurality that comes to the ballot box with a traditionalist background.
Having said that, it appears that there are more Americans who believe that college loans (along with a whole host of things) should be doled out by the feds. At the very least, more lefty-sympathetic citizens than right-of-center folks can be motivated to vote. Do left-of-center people believe in big government because their politicians tell them to? Or do they come to the voting booth with progressive ideas already entrenched in their worldview and are simply looking for parties and politicians who can make liberal policies a reality?
I'd also argue that those who choose liberalism and buy it's wares are much like other consumers in our society. Social conservatives lament that American pop culture is full of filth and decadence and arrogance and stupidity. Free-market conservatives often respond that pop culture is merely producing what the market demands.
The same thing goes for American politics. Conservatives are often annoyed that so many people consume so much of the liberal kultursmog; the Washington Post, the Daily Kos, the English Department of Montclair State University and almost anything financed by Harvey Weinstein or written by Aaron Sorkin. Maybe people consume progressive media because it's the only one readily available. Most people will choose a debased culture rather than no culture at all.
Even worse, after another mortifying Election Night loss, righties scratch their heads and wonder why they got buried.
Seeing just how much cultural ground the Right has given up, along with how many delivery mechanisms the Left just flat-out owns, it's astounding that Republicans are able to squeak out any victories at all.
What the traditionalists, free-marketeers, social cons and defense hawks must get through their heads ASAFP is that they're never going to score decisive electoral victories without first scoring some major cultural victories first. They've already ceded so much ground to the vastleft-wingidiocracy. It's well past time for conservatives to start taking American civilization back from the degenerates, racists, whiners and liars that currently run the show.
Only then will the Right start to reverse both their electoral fortunes and the decline of the greatest country in the history of humanity.
The 'Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm--Barack Hussein Obama Children's Choir' were unavailable for this gig.
Shorter Future Children Project: Report your Romney-supporting parents to the Ministry of Love today!
Notice the concerns the makers of this propaganda place into the mouths of children. Endangered polar bears? Not even Premier Obama thinks that. Rampant strip mines dotting the American landscape? That's news to the miners. Conservatives think our failing schools are good enough? That must be why Milton Friedman was a proponent of school choice reform since the Eisenhower Administration. Endless wars? Here's another ten years of Obama drone strikes, you worthless hypocritical peace-creeps.
What's really amazing is wayback machine quality of the ad. The Left always accuses conservatives of wanting to travel back in time, but who is actually living in the past? The writers of the douchey bit act as if Barack Obama is still Captain Jesus-Man Lightbringer promising lower ocean levels and lower middle class tax rates. The last four years--$5 trillion dollars of debt, sky high unemployment, economic illiteracy--never happened for these progressives.
Or maybe this ad is just meant to stir the turd. The only people that might even sorta respond are die hard Obama fanbois and right-wingers making fun of them. So it's not really a campaign spot that's meant to get people to the polls. It's more like the flip-side of Jon Stewart's clap humor.
Okee-dokee. It's your dime, Future Children Project. Enjoy your pointless uninspiring performance art.
In case you were wondering where Part 1 is, clickety here.
I spotted this over at the terrific Coalition of The Swilling. Thanks, Mr. Bingley.
Golden Tate shoved a Green Bay defender out of the way, wrestled another for the ball and was awarded a disputed touchdown on the final play. But it was another 10 minutes before the game actually ended, when the Seattle Seahawks and the stunned Packers were called back on the field for the extra point.
Replacement ref rage may have peaked Monday night.
Just when it seemed that NFL coaches, players and fans couldn't get any angrier, along came a fiasco that trumped any of the complaints from the weekend. The Seahawks' 14-12 victory featured one of the most bizarre finishes in recent memory, and was certain to reignite frustrations over the locked-out officials.
''Don't ask me a question about the officials,'' Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy said. ''I've never seen anything like that in all my years in football.''
''I know it's been a wild weekend in the NFL and I guess we're part of it now,'' he said.
The commissioner, Roger Goodell, insists that the right call was made at the end of the Packers-Seahawks game. In other news: the NFL is officially pissing down the legs of NFL fans, but they assure us that it's actually raining.
The NFL is in some real danger here. The games are becoming a lame joke. Before Monday's game, the players and coaches had little respect for the second-hand zebras. After this latest train wreck, that thin patina of behavioral restraint is probably gone. Next week's games could easily degenerate into a bush league hockey match.
So the replacement refs are a big issue. Even though these men will probably get better in the coming weeks--they probably couldn't get worse, could they?-- they'll probably never be as good as the real zebras. But as bad as the new officials have been, their troublesome tenure brings into sharp relief some of the core problems within the pro football game.
Remember when you could look back on a week of football and see one or two really egregiously blown calls? Yes, maybe your team was victimized by a out-of-nowhere penalty or a dopey non-flag. It might've cost the club a win, but over the course of the season most fans know that the horrible calls will be balanced out by generous rulings. The law of averages and probabilities generally comes out to a rough equilibrium that the vast majority of NFL enthusiasts can live with.
Now, under the new officials, the fan cannot be sure his team isn't going to get screwed week after week. Through inexperience, ignorance of the rules, the intimidation factor from players and coaches and just being overwhelmed by the speed of the game, the replacement refs cannot seem to call a consistent contest from week to week. Or quarter to quarter for that matter. The new guys make everybody involved in the sport pine for the regular officials.
As much as getting the old referees back will improve the flow and consistency of the National Football League, there are problems with the game that even the best on-field judges cannot not solve. In the midst of Monday's Seahawks-Packers contest, former NFL official Jerry Austin was a part of ESPN's broadcast team. Austin, an expert in the rules who had reffed two Super Bowls, said that the play was not reviewable because simultaneous catches could not be reviewed by instant replay. The next day the NFL contradicted him by saying that, through a rules change that had happened over the off-season, all facets of a touchdown play could be reviewed.
When one of the most respected veteran officials in the game is unsure of the rules, that's probably a sign that the sport is insanely over-legislated. Not only are there too many rules in the NFL, they change every year and they are open to an absurd level of interpretation by the people officiating the game. This leads to fan confusion and annoyance; how can you enjoy a football contest if you don't understand the guidelines under which it is played?
It shouldn't take a law degree to understand how a child's game is conducted. We're reaching a point where the sport is being choked to death by its obsession with legalistic minutiae. Even the best regular official on his best day cannot handle the insane number of factors they have to consider when making a call on the field. This points to a massive structural problem that the NFL has not acknowledged.
Think I'm joking about the league killing itself with too many rules? Consider the NFL's international ambitions. American pro football desperately wants to expand beyond the US market. It's spent billions of dollars promoting games in Europe, Canada and Mexico. Yet non-Americans stubbornly cling to their soccer and largely reject our most successful professional sport. The NFL is baffled as to why their game won't take hold in foreign markets.
Compare football's rules to international soccer's diktats. While both are lengthy, the NFL's guidelines are far longer. More importantly, the NFL's guidelines are far more open to broad and ambiguous interpretation: You can't hit the quarterback except when you can, you can't hit the wide receiver except when you can, this player is eligible to catch a forward pass except when he can't, that player is ineligible to receive a forward pass except when he can, etc.
For people who have not grown up with the pro football game, it's much harder for them to understand the various and sundry by-laws of the NFL. If it's a chore to learn all the wrinkles of the game, most people are just going to stick with what they know. In the case of most non-Americans, that's soccer. As a result, the American gridiron sport not only has to overcome foreign people's love of soccer and their understandable reticence to change, but the over-ruled nature of US football itself.
The fact of the matter is that watching soccer is just about the most boring television program ever. Scoring is minimal and not enough happens. The Julliard level of acting required to draw penalties is unseemly and stupid. But soccer has an enormous advantage: simplicity. It's easy for people to understand. Anyone, from an illiterate shepherd in Zimbabwe to the President of the United States, can quickly grasp the basic concepts of the sport. Within a few viewings, much of the nuances can be gleaned as well.
By contrast, American football is violent, exciting and great to watch on TV. The problem is that the sport is becoming increasingly unknowable. If people cannot understand the game, people will turn it off. I used to think it was cool that the television networks include former officials to help fans interpret the on-field action. Now I see it as part of the problem. You shouldn't need the voice of God to understand an offside call. You shouldn't require ten minutes of instant replay with second by second commentary from a retired zebra to determine who has possession of the ball. In short, the referees shouldn't be this visible and this integral to the functioning of the sport.
So by all means, let's bring the real officials back. Under the current situation, each game is a potential humiliation for the entire league. Getting the regular refs on the field will stop the bleeding and bring a much-needed level of professionalism back to the sport. If nothing else, the normal officials will get the games moving faster, which will be a big help.
Having said that, there are flaws in the National Football League that cannot be solved by the real refs. The game is being crushed under the weight of its own rulebook. If it is to continue to grow both here and across the world, it will have to simplify or it will die.
I know there are a lot of folks--Republicans and Democrats--who didn't like Clint Eastwood's address to the Republican National Convention. Let's take a look.
I admit that Clint was kinda all over the place. Whether the teleprompter died or he just abandoned script, the address was not Clint at his best. It might not have been Clint at his worst, though.
Check out the sneering annoyed reaction from MSNBC's lead tedium-dispenser Rachel Maddow.
Even though Clint wasn't really on point, his mockery of President Obama was by and large effective. The bit about Bamster getting a smaller plane was great. Clint's conversation with an empty chair underscored just how vacuous our Great Dingy Captain really is. More importantly, most liberal media viewers--to say nothing of the Obama Cult Stenographers--had never seen anything like that.
The Barry-Lover press corps have basically cocooned themselves in liberalism's cozy blanket of comedic ignorance. They've never watched Red Eye. Their web browsers have never clicked on Iowahawk, Manhattan Infidel or Jim Treacher. The only time they hear an Obama joke is when Jon Stewart forgets to take out his tampon and cajoles Saint Obambi for being too damn nice to the evil reich-wing Rethuglicans. Because the lamestream media all runs on the same premise--Our President Is Not To Be Touched--Clint Eastwood's barbs might've been the first time the socialist media have seen someone make fun of Barack Obama in any sort of sustained way.
Everybody's second-favorite community organizer Saul Alinksy said that ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It works so well because it rallies your troops. Even better, when a well-played joke lands squarely on target, it causes problems for the other side. Look at how the Stalinists were so discombobulated by Clint's mockery of their Saviour. When they went into Panic Alert Obama Defense Level Five, they spent a lot of time addressing Clint's speech rather than dealing with Mitt Romney.
If that was the only thing Eastwood's speech accomplished, it would've been enough. But it did more than that. Clint's mockery of Obama was probably a hit with many undecided citizens. These are low-information voters who don't pay attention to politics on a day-to-day level. A lot of people who watch the conventions get their first look at the presidential candidates and their parties from these events.
What did these more or less apolitical folks see? They saw a Hollywood icon laughing at the President. Here too, this might be the first instance that they've watched a media figure of this magnitude actually make fun of Barack Obama.
I'm not saying undecided voters are going to make their decision to vote for Mitt Romney based on Clint Eastwood talking greasy about Barack Obama. What is happening is that Clint's derision of the President sends a subtle signal: "Obama is a joke and it's okay for you to laugh at him."
Remember that the lamestream media has all but completely embargoed humor at Premier Barry's expense. Yet here comes Clint Eastwood on an international stage to cut Barack Obama down a few notches. CNN, MSNBC, CBS and ABC couldn't simply disappear Clint down the memory hole like they did to Artur Davis, Mia Love or Brian Sandoval. They had to cover it. Once they did, it opened up Barack Obama to the kind of mockery they've never allowed to hit him before.
That's why the leftist media hacks fudged their Depends over Clint. Even though he wasn't as strong as he could be, Eastwood's jokes will turn more than a few undecided voters. Clint's speech also breaks the humor blockade that many people have when it comes to mocking Obama. After last night, St. Barack is no longer a holy messiah figure above criticism from his petty subjects. He can, in fact, be mocked.
And, as it turns out, there is a lot to laugh at when it comes to Barack Obama.
Funny how it took an 82-year-old Clint Eastwood--a little sloppy, a little doddering, but still strong--to point that out to the rest of America.
BONUS: Here are 170 great Clint Eastwood quotes. Not safe for work; very safe for awesomeness.
"I-i-i-i-dio-"
"Idiots. It's for you."
That's the line Clint should've dropped on Obama's head.
Oh well. Eastwood still rules.
EVEN MORE BONUSEY: Da Tech Guy's post on the Clint speech fleshes out a point I was trying...and I think failing...to make.
Take a look at this image from Memeorandum as of 8:31 AM
And here is the stuff on the Romney speech same page:
What is Missing? Attacks on Romney’s speech!Today was the day that the Democrats should be hitting Romney’s speech and trying to counter it a-la Ryan. Instead the readers of the morning papers, cable TV and the left blogs are reading attacks on Eastwood. Clint Eastwood is playing the same role as a hero in an old western, drawing all the fire so the good guy could escape unharmed.
While the lamestreamers are scratching their heads and angrily snarling at Eastwood, Mitt Romney comes off looking presidential with little pushback from the progs.
In 2016, the GOP should have Chuck Norris karate-chopping an imaginary Joe Biden while dressed like Lady Gaga right before President Romney gives his speech.
John over at the fantastic Sentry Journal has a tale of the strange. I'm pretty much gonna steal his entire post, but it's too good to edit.
Last week my wife and I decided to stop at Burger King for a quick bite to eat. Burger King is currently running a promotional game called Family Food. It’s a scratch game that ask you a question and gives you three possible answers. You of course must select the correct answer in order to have an opportunity to win a prize. The prizes range from food to cash. We pulled the game piece off my large ice tea and she read the question to me. I correctly answered the question and won a $25 dollar gift certificate.
We presented the winning game piece to the employee behind the counter and she informed my wife that we would have to mail the game piece into Burger King in a blue envelop she handed to us. In order to redeem the prize you must provide your social security number to prove you’re are U.S. citizens. When my wife informed the employee that she wasn’t comfortable writing her social security number down on an envelop and sending to people she didn’t know, the employee told her it was the only way we could prove citizenship in order to redeem the prize. The point of the story is if you can’t even redeem cash prizes from Burger King’s Family Food Game without proof of U.S. citizenship, then what’s the big deal about providing some form of ID to prove who you are at the polling stations on election day. I wonder why we don’t hear the cries from the left on how Burger King is disenfranchising non U.S. citizens with their Family Food game.
The mind reels.
We live in a schizophrenic country. To be fair, most of the time America does a good job of hiding it's wackiness. In fact us Yanks are probably the best at keeping our various neuroses out of public view. Hell, there are nations that parade their insanity on a global stage. Compared to that, the US is a model of restraint.
But every once in a while, we get confronted with our own mind-wrenching goofiness. This is one of those times.
Ponder the situation: Burger King, a fast food chain, runs a contest. If you win one of these BK prizes, you must present a form of identification to the company in order to claim your winnings. If John wants that $25, he has to, in effect, show his papers.
These kinds of rules seem to be fairly common; most US companies that run contests like this stipulate that only American citizens are eligible to win prizes in the United States. Further, these sorts of contest bylaws don't raise any hackles in the Bedwetter Community. Nobody whines about 'discrimination' or 'lack of access'. Citizenship as a requirement for eligibility in a company's promotional game is one of those unquestioned parts of American life.
Say, you know what part of American life the thumbsucker caucus questions over and over and over and over again? This whole crazy mixed-up terribly-cliched old-fogie 'citizenship' dealie. Why should citizenship confer any privileges? What's so special about the US and A anyhow? Why shouldn't anyone be able to walk into a voting booth without getting hassled by some stuffy government bureaucrat who has a wacky hang-up about 'rules' or 'citizenship status' or 'laws' or Constitutional requirements'?
Remember what I said about schizophrenia?
The open-borders crowd, ethnic grievance groups and the Left--but I repeat myself three times--have helped create a situation where a person winning a $25 prize from a burger joint has to prove he's a US citizen, but a person voting for President does not.
That, my friends, should be the textbook definition of insanity, at least when it comes to national policy.
More importantly, it cannot be allowed to stand.
Either we give a shit about who votes in our elections or we don't. Either citizenship confers real tangible benefits to the people who have it or it doesn't. If the only thing being a citizen gets you is a Burger King crown, being American has become meaningless.
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.
Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured.
An abortion would have been best for me because there is no way that my love-starved, trauma-addled mother could have ever put me up for adoption. It was either abortion or raising me herself, and she was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped.
Nihilism disguised as selflessness.
Beyond that, look at the amazing speculative leaps Lynn Beisner makes in order to prove her point. If the mother had aborted Ms. Beisner, she asserts that her mom probably would've been better off. In the next paragraph, she runs through the long laundry list of reasons why her mother was in really awful shape at the time she was pregnant with Ms.Beisner.
Well, since we're playing "What if?" counter-factual history games, what makes Beisner think it all that likely that her young abused brain-damaged depressed rape victim mother would've finished high school in the first place? A person with that many strikes against them--and a truly tragic personal history to boot--is far more likely to drop out of high school then to finish with a diploma, regardless of whether the person has an unplanned pregnancy or not. That means no college. It also means no 'feminism or psychology or something' to help her cope with her extremely difficult circumstances.
Now it's true that Beisner's mom had a horrible life before she had her child. Let us suppose that her life was made more difficult by taking an unplanned pregnancy to term. Concede for a moment the idea that caring for a child under less than ideal circumstances was a substantial burden on Mommy Beisner.
The fact remains that the writer Lynn Beisner lives and breathes because, even though her mother was ill-suited to the role of parent, she still decided to give her daughter a life. Isn't there even a speck of nobility to be found in that act? Even if Beisner's mother was a train-wreck, the fact remains that she cared enough to bring her child into the world. While it might be a mundane occurrence, it's still an amazingly selfless thing to do for another human being.
Sadly, Ms. Beisner isn't done pwning herself.
The world would not be a darker or poorer place without me. Actually, in terms of contributions to the world, I am a net loss. Everything that I have done – including parenting, teaching, researching, and being a loving partner – could have been done as well, if not better by other people. Any positive contributions that I have made are completely offset by what it has cost society to help me overcome the disadvantages and injuries of my childhood to become a functional and contributing member of society.
Conservatives are often accused of reducing people down to dry statistics. But what has the theology of abortion done here? Beisner is asserting that her life is pretty much meaningless. She is, in her own words, a net loss. That's about as reductive as it gets.
It is said that a liberal is a person who won't take their own side in an argument. Beisner's thesis is the barren withered endpoint of the pro-abortion movement: "We support infanticide because we are pointless."
This is far beyond just giving women reproductive 'choice'. This Abortion Above All Else philosophy argues against humans and everything they do. Work, being a good parent, romantic love; all these things are to be reduced down to a finite quantifiable value which can be used to determine whether a person made a positive contribution to the world. Because Ms. Beisner clearly hates herself, she sees her own life as something unworthy of her mother's initial sacrifice to give birth to her daughter.
Are the people within the pro-abortion movement prepared to look at their own lives with the same kind of self-loathing criticism? Is the anti-life cause ready to apply Ms. Beisner's criterion for judging a 'good' life to themselves and everyone else? If Ms.Beisner' essay is any indication, the answer is a very chilling yes.
UPDATE (baldilocks): Welcome to Ace of Spades HQ ONT Moronstm and Moronettestm!
Leave it to El Numero Uno Conservative On Fire--aka, Jim--to remind us of yet another enormous mountain of doom that nobody wants to deal with.
When I entered the words “municipal bankruptcies” in my search engine, I found that in February and March of this year that there were a few articles on this important subject. But, they didn’t seem to garner much attention. One such article written in March at the American Dream blog. The article, which I highly recommend, lays out ten signs that America is on the verge of a municipal debt crisis. This is sign No. 10:
#10 In all, there have been 21 municipal defaults so far in 2012. The grand total of those defaults comes to 978 million dollars.
The article also has an excellent video on the effects of even minor increases in interest rates on our national debt.
So, if municipal debt bubbles are so serious, why aren’t we hearing about it from the major media outlets? More importantly, why aren’t we hearing about it from the big investment banks, of which J.P. Morgan is the biggest player?
According to this New York Post article, Morgan has done an in-depth study and found that there is indeed a major muni-bond crisis heading our way. Morgan, however, decided to keep their report secret. Well, except for a few of their best clients. And Wall Street wonders why the public is so down on them.
Read. The. Whole. Post. There are big doin's in that post. Jim does a great job of analyzing the data...which is horrifying.
To be fair, a big issue here is that reporters who cover the whole country are loathe to discuss something that breaks down to a problem in 50 individual state and countless cities/towns. If you told your average New York Times or Boston Globe national news desk scribe about this, chances are they'd blow it off. 'This is a state issue', they'd likely say and not without some plausible deniability.
But that doesn't excuse the rest of the American chattering class. One gets a sense that the reporters who should be reporting this don't want to because talking about psychotic municipal debt makes the blue state model look absolutely abysmal. If there is one voting bloc that is deeply invested in massive welfare structures, big dumb government compassion and--most of all--generous public employee pay-outs, it is the mainstream media. Knowing this it's really not shocking why reporters would clam up when it comes to something this close to their hearts.
It's like expecting them to investigate Eric Holder for Fast & Furious. The leftist Attorney General hates the Second Amendment. The leftist American dinosaur media hates the Second Amendment. So what if Brian Terry is no longer available for comment? Eric Holder meant well, so that's close enough for Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Gail Collins. After all, it takes a lot of double-think if you wanna make it as an Obama-era court stenographer.
The looming municipal debt debacle is something most hacks just don't wanna talk about. So they won't. Until the problem annihilates state and local governments. Then it'll be Romney's fault.
Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt told The Daily Caller Wednesday that he had a right to publish a fake image of conservative commentator S.E. Cupp engaging in a sex act.
Nice.
Look, I've been known to post fart jokes and cleavage pics so maybe I'm not the best guy to say this, but whatever: The American Left is populated by the intellectual equivalent of a third grade remedial Play-Doh class.
You doubt my hypothesis? Go watch your kid play with his classmates for about twenty minutes. Inevitably, the girls of the class will get picked on by the boys. The thing is, the boys aren't teasing the girls because they dislike them. More often than not, they're making fun of the girls because they really like them, but can't express themselves properly. As they get closer to their teen years, this behavior only gets worse as the confusion of puberty kicks in.
After you're done observing your son awkwardly try to start a conversation with his middle school crush by shoving her off the swing set, examine how liberals have reacted to Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham, Sarah Palin and now SE Cupp. It's the same behavior, only less mature.
Conservative woman: "I believe that gun control is wrong."
Liberal: "YOU CAN CONTROL MY GUN ANYTIME, LADY!!!!! AM I RIGHT, FELLAS?!?!?!"
Conservative woman: "I am against abortion."
Liberal: "HAHAHA!!! YOU LOVE BABIES!!!! WHAT DO WANNA DO MARRY A BABY?!?!?!? BABY-LOVER!!!!!"
Conservative woman: "I think Barack Obama is not a good president."
And you can forget all about any attempts at civility if a female right-winger has the gall to forcefully argue her political positions.
Too much sass-talk from the women-folk give liberals a wicked headache.
Why, it's almost like leftists just can't handle strong women expressing themselves or something.
No. That can't be it. They always insist that they believe in equality. Naturally, they show their love for the ladies by not paying them the same as men.
As for SE Cupp, getting attacked by a rolling bag of slime like Larry Flynt is horrible. But she has one very large advantage over Larry Flynt: She's not Larry Flynt.
Hustler got a vicious little cheap shot in on one of their political enemies. I hope the Hustler Photoshop super-geniuses savor their tiny pointless victory. At least Cupp will still have a viable business model in five years. Unlike Larry Flynt's flailing soon-to-be-bankrupt sleaze outfit, Cupp's talent and brains aren't going out of style.
Hey, I don't know if you've heard but President Obama has come out in favor of same-sex marriage.
The Obamatron's announcement that he now supports gay nuptials--after he was against it which came after he was for it--has led to some strange reactions in the leftoversphere. Most have been positively proggasmic. But some have used the occasion to go on offense against their hated enemies.
Here's syndicated columnist DeWayne Wickham (D-Obama Stenographer Media), chastising the Log Cabin Republicans for attacking Obama on his newly-found support for gay marriage while not criticizing Mitt Romney for his belief in traditional marriage.
The Log Cabin Republicans are outcasts within the GOP. The marital equality they seek is opposed by Romney and many of the right-wingers whose votes he hopes will help him defeat Obama in November.
The Republican homosexual group seems bent on subjecting its members to an unyielding brand of political flagellation.
It is apparently willing to pay any price, bear any burden and endure any insult to maintain a toehold in the GOP ranks — a political obsession that is as oxymoronic as a black joining the Ku Klux Klan, or a Jew becoming a follower of Hamas.
Of course, he's correct.
I'm sure you remember the Republican Party's long sordid history of firebombing Greenwich Village cosmetology schools and orchestrating drive-by shootings at San Francisco antique stores.
Worse than the dickbag moral equivalency ploy is the Wickham's narrow-mindedness when it comes to gay and lesbian voters. It simply doesn't occur to him that a homosexual person could possibly be a Republican too. Ergo, these freaky-deaky pink elephant GOPers should go back to being good dutiful soldiers for the Democrat Party rather than sucking up to the hate-fueled Republicans.
Let's flip the script for a second: Suppose there was a large chunk of union-member Democrats who really hated Cap-n-Trade. They agreed with almost everything else on the DonkeyPuncher agenda--ObamaCare, tax hikes, the role of government in citizens' lives--but they really disliked a government-mandated carbon credit trading system. According to Wickham's logic, those anti-C&T union guys should stop being Democrats and join the Republican Party. After all, they aren't marching lockstep with the Democrat Party on Cap-n-Trade, so union people must be barking up the wrong political tree.
Seen this way, Wickham's premise starts to look like chicken-fried nonsense wrapped in a flaky breaded crust of illogic and glazed with a zesty bullshit marinade.
Back in the real world, gay and lesbians make political decisions the same way everybody else does. They base their partisan affiliation on feelings, ideologies, gut instincts and what they generally want out of the government. There are still a few pro-life Democrats, even though the Dems are overwhelmingly pro-abortion. Ron Paul and many of his supporters are Republicans who are against the large well-funded US military most GOPers have embraced. In both cases, the reason why these people remain in their respective parties has nothing to do with some sort of sycophantic apple-polisher's desire to be liked that Wickham ascribes to the Log Cabin Republicans. Instead, pro-life Democrats and pro-military cuts Paulians have all made calculations based on their political priorities. Why Wickham thinks gays and lesbians are incapable of making the sorts of sophisticated voting decisions that everyone else does is a mystery.
I mean, is it so wacky to think there are gays and lesbians who support smaller government, tax cuts and strong national defense?
Is it all that odd that those same homosexuals wouldn't make gay marriage the make-or-break issue that keeps them in the Republican Party?
And a whole lot of other paperwork too, even though Doug Mataconis insists that we don't.
My response to this question is another question, why do we need to see the transcripts?Of what possible relevance are the grades that Barack Obama got at Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard Law School to judging his time in office and whether he deserves to be re-elected? What would it reveal about his Presidency that we don’t know? To ask the same question about Romney, what possible relevance to evaluating whether he’d be a good President his grades at Brigham Young University and Harvard (where Romney simultaneously obtained a J.D. and an M.B.A.) could possibly be. It’s been 37 years since Mitt Romney finished his college education, and 20 years since Obama finished his, as James Joyner asked back in 2008, isn’t there a statute of limitations on the use of college achievements as evidence of achievement? If there’s not, there should be.
To be fair, Mataconis stipulates that Obama's college transcripts might have been more revelatory back in 2008 than they would be today. Good point and its one I'll concede. Obama's record as President is plenty damaging all on it's own. How he did in Western Civ I is not as important as his current position on entitlement reform.
However, here's a question: Do businesses and organizations use college transcripts as a way of judging prospective hires? Do companies demand college records as part of the application process? Are college transcripts used as a way of comparing and contrasting several candidates who are going for the same job?
Let me get this straight: Getting the assistant regional manager position at Staples means showing college scrips, but scoring the US President gig doesn't require any presentation of higher education records.
Okay.
Makes perfect sense.
Especially in modern America, where getting college credit isn't necessary for hardly any jobs.
But Mataconis isn't done.
...the demands for transcripts is often linked to the equally erroneous belief that he wasn’t properly vetted in 2008. As I noted earlier this month, that’s a ridiculous idea:
Barack Obama has been President of the United States for nearly four years now, and he’s been on the national scene as either a candidate for President or as President since 2007. The idea that we have no idea who the man is, or that he hasn’t been “vetted” is simply an absurd fantasy that partisans are using in what looks for all the world like a desperate effort to find something, anything that they can use against him in the upcoming election.
Yes, because the press didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to report that Obama ate dogs.
Mataconis seems to be arguing that conservatives should focus on 'important' issues rather than on demanding the media do a better job vetting the President. Now that's a noble sentiment. But why did the Right have such a good time hammering the Exotic Food Connoisseur In Chief about chowing down on Fido-burgers? It wasn't simply to playfully zing Barack Obama for a few days. There was a political motivation in answering back as well.
In 1983, Romney took his family on vacation and, faced with a packed station wagon, put his Irish setter Seamus in a travel kennel strapped to the roof of the car. Romney constructed a special windshield in an effort to make the dog more comfortable, but Seamus ended up relieving himself on the roof, which reportedly caused much consternation among the Romney boys. Ever since the story got out -- it was reported by the Boston Globe in 2007, during Romney's first run for president -- Romney opponents have used it in semiserious and sometimes fully serious ways to portray him as insensitive.
In late January, for example, top Obama campaign aide David Axelrod sent out a tweet that included a photo of Obama with his Portuguese water dog Bo in the back seat of the presidential limousine. "How loving owners transport their dogs," Axelrod wrote.
It wasn't a random comment. "They're obsessed with the dog thing," liberal journalist Chris Hayes said on his MSNBC program Sunday morning, referring to the Obama campaign. "And the reason is that, I have heard, in focus groups, the dog story totally tanks Mitt Romney's approval rating."
Under Mataconis' rubric, Team Barry is engaging in yucky politics when bringing up Mitt's supposedly poor treatment of his dog.
When this or any other charge of allegedly dirty pool is brought up against the Obama campaign, Axelrod and Co. inevitably answers with a hearty "So what?" A fair fight is the other guys problem. That means they really don't give a shit what Doug Mataconis or anybody else thinks should be discussed. When they brought up the Seamus story, it was because they knew it damaged Mitt Romney's chances of beating Barack Obama in November.
Mataconis thinks that elections are about winning arguments. They're not. They're ultimately about winning votes. Which is what Obama was trying to do by beating Romney over the head with the Seamus story. But when the Right engages the issue to turn it back against Obama--again, in the hopes that their preferred candidate would get more votes than his opponents--guys like Mataconis wring their hands over distractions.
Worse than that, Mataconis doesn't see the larger issue, which is the utter stinking corruption of the mainstream media. Think about the most recent example. Barack Obama stops fighting his feelings and embraces gay marriage. Naturally this causes everyone in the media to simultaneously proggasm over the President's new-found enlightenment. The next day, the Washington Post runs a story about a school age Mitt Romney possibly bullying a classmate who may or may not have been gay.
Forget that Robert Stacy McCain has spotted the flaws, baseless insinuations,White House/media coordination and outright lies in the WaPo story. The fact is the Washington Post blatantly tag-teamed with Camp Obambi to damage Mitt Romney on a political issue. Not MSNBC, the Daily Kos or The Nation. Instead, it was the completely nonpartisan, totally unbiased, nope-no-sir-no-dog-in-this-fight Washington Post that was Obama's press enabler here.
Whether it's the MSM making Barack Obama's college years terra non grata or coordinating an attack on the Republican nominee for president, the result is the same. The American media is a major component of the President's re-election campaign. They are actively participating in the fight to marginalize St. Barry's opponent.
Mataconis wants us to ignore all that. He'd have the Republicans and conservatives fighting by the Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Democrats and the MSM bring a shotgun into the ring. That's the smart move here.
Because Obama's college transcripts are not 'relevant'.
They're only irrelevant if you don't want to see how badly the media is gaming the system.
Ultimately, getting the President's college transcripts is not really about vetting the President. It's part of vetting the mainstream media. The MSM, which hates anything to the right of Noam Chomsky and desperately wants Obama to win in November.
The President needs to be investigated. But the left-wing press corps and the Gulfstream Jacobins in the entertainment industry need to be vetted as well. After all, they're playing for the same team. Only a person who has deliberately blinded himself to reality would fail to see why the goverment-media complex needs to get taken down.
Old And Busted: Getting people off the public dole.
New Hotness: Getting lots and lots of people back on the public dole.
The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007.
Political Junkie Mom is right. Having the Obama administration do stuff to increase employment or oil production is just silly rugged individualist conservative yakkety-yak. Far better for the government to do the things its really good at, like fostering long-term dependency.
But hey, it's not poor people who are getting pounded by this administration. The "rich" are about to get their comeuppance as well.
If you thought paying your taxes was painful this year, get ready for more heartache next year, when taxpayers could be on the hook for almost $500 billion in higher taxes... That's the size of "Taxmageddon."
Taxmageddon is the tax hike set to slam the economy and taxpayers on Jan. 1, 2013. It's made up of seven different categories of tax cuts set to expire, and six tax hikes from the health-care law set to kick in, as soon as the ball drops on New Year's Eve.
The Left's definition of 'shared' sacrifice: Make the poor into a permanent underclass so they can easily be exploited for votes while simultaneously punishing anyone who tries to escape the statist suck-hole of fail.
Or maybe I'm being too hard on Obama and the rest of the progressive movement. Perhaps I'm ascribing a conscious plan to people who really have no idea what they're doing. It could be that the President and his administration are just incompetent dolts.
Then again, that would go against everything we've been told about Barack Obama for the last five years. People who identify themselves as conservative think Obama is scary smart. Scions of the Left have insisted that Barack Obama is a great intelligence. How many prestigious universities did Barack Obama go to? Occidental, Columbia and Harvard represent the pinnacle of higher education not just in America but across the globe. Anyone who wrote not one but two memoirs before the age of fifty has to be pretty sharp.
If President Obama is as smart as his sycophants and enablers insist he is, then he has the intelligence to see how his proposals affect the nation. That means that Obama is happy to see more and more people on food stamps. Obama wants to hammer Americans with tax hikes. The current state of affairs in the United States is pretty much exactly what the community-organizer-in-chief ordered.
Here's the rub--I think Obama is going to play dumb during this campaign season. In 2008, dude was supposed to walk on water during a three dimensional chess marathon while simultaneously developing a vaccine for athlete's foot. In 2012, everything--and I mean EVERYTHING--will be somebody else's fault. Crappy economy? Damn you, Bushitler. Wallet-punishing gas prices? Darth Cheney and his roving band of nefarious petroleum speculators are killing the electric car with their diabolical oil-based superpowers. Stratospheric unemployment? John 'Satan's Personal Oompaloompa' Boehner simply won't let America have the kajillions of eco-tastic green jobs that every US company is just dying to create.
That line of nonsense cannot be allowed to fly. Obama has constantly billed himself--and actively encouraged others to sing from the same hymnal by the way--as a super genius. Its time to throw that achievement-free arrogance back in his face.
Dedicated to the memory of the fearless Andrew Breitbart.
Note: I began composing this essay some months before the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman shooting, but, in its wake, I felt that it was time to finish it and post it.
Usually I’m reading several books at once and using Kindle for Blackberry iPhone has exacerbated this low level of ADD.
One of the opened books on my device is Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West. The subject matter is obvious; however, in the preface and the first few chapters, Harris barely mentions Islam at all. Instead, he does two very valuable things: he defines his terms and lays the ideological foundation for those terms as they relate to his subject. The two sets of players in the scenarios that Harris describes are: rational actors and tribal actors or fanatics. All of the following excerpts are taken from the book’s preface.
Throughout most of human history, men have not behaved like rational actors but like tribal actors; and in many cultures of the world today, they continue to behave that way. They have no choice. When everyone around you is a member of a tribe, you must either belong to a tribe or be an outcast. Whereas the rational actor asks himself, “What is best for me,” the tribal actor must ask himself,” What is best for us?”
*****
[W]hat limits [the tribal actor’s] freedom is not so much the pressure of the tribal mind applied externally, but rather the fact that the tribal actor thinks with the tribal mind, and so cannot even imagine doing things differently from the way they are done by his tribe.
*****
The rational actor has the luxury of appealing to his conscience in order to condemn the behavior of his own community.
*****
The tribal actor, on the other hand, cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of his tribe. For the tribal actor, the highest ethical idea is: “My tribe, right or wrong.” The mere idea that his tribe could be wrong is unthinkable for the tribal actor, since he defines as right whatever the tribe deems right, and wrong as whatever the tribe deems wrong.
So let’s see how these observable truths relate to black Americans.
We have seen black Americans like former presidential candidate Herman Cain (R-GA), Rep. Allen West (R-FL), and Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC)--people who are obviously black and of African descent, using the eyeball test and known heritage--be deemed "not really black.”i Men like the foregoing are those who are not Democrats, who oppose the policies supported by the Democrat Party and who do not politically support Democrats of any race or color, not even the present President of the United States of America. But how can black Americans who are not Democrats or Liberals or Leftists become not themselves? And what gives Democrats—even white ones—the authority to determine who is black and who is not?
The following videos have a common theme.
The pride/shame dynamic is what is on display here. This feature is used rein in members of a tribe who step outside of pre-defined tribal boundaries.
Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we look into the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.
Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were bought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: the Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery, Americans of African descent were confined to a certain level of society. A few managed to break the barrier, but the vast majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson allowed state and local governments to pen them.
But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as a tribe within a nation and they harkened to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded.
These landmarks of legislation stated that we belonged to the American “tribe” all along. But, concurrently, another idea—an ideology--was on the ascent as well: Black Pride.
Pride. When we hear the word, we interpret it in two ways.
So-called benign pride is represented in the following example: we are proud of ourselves when we achieve hard-won goals-- educational, personal, etc.; we are proudof cherished relatives and friends who do the same.
The not-so-good type of pride is that which the Bible warns against--"the high look," “the up-tilt of the chin.”
Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but the idea of “Black Pride" served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially a good thing, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.” Many (most?) black Americans believe that blackness is a way of thinking and a political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative--isn't really black. This idea stems further from the Left co-opting "black pride" and using it to keep anger and grievances alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. We've seen it happen many times. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America.
Pride is what is always has been: inordinate high opinion of one's superiority and goodness; the preening to appear better than on-lookers. (My great-aunt calls it “floor-showing.") That we had to use pride--a sin--to “rid” ourselves of the mindset of shame and degradation is the problem. We went too far in the other direction, so far in that direction that the things which are destroying us--the things which we should be ashamed of--we have deemed inherent to blackness and called them good. We call the chains of the New Slavery--bastardy, illiteracy, mis-education, self-genocide, etc.—our due, our rights. And we believe that any of our number who breaks free ideologically and tries to tell their brethren how to be free is a traitor to the tribe. (Harriett Tubman would understand.) Shame is no longer an option, except as a cudgel for those who point this out. ii
In addition, we deem the New Slavers--the modern-day Democrat Party--to be our friends even though their forebears were always the perpetrators of overt black American slavery and oppression and they have lured all too many of us into contemporary bondage. This sort of tribal pride blocks the ability to see what's right in front of one’s face and the ability to accurately map out the future. It blocks reality.
Herman Cain was dead on when he called it brainwashing and it has been a decades-long process, coinciding with the Left's agenda to hollow out the institutions of this country.
Here’s the thing: I think that certain types of tribalism are beneficial to those within and even without some sets of tribal boundaries. Some years back, Bill Whittle famously expounded on the tribe of Sheepdogs, those rough men—and, sometimes, women--who make it their business to protect sheep from the wolves of this world. “You choose your tribe,” said Bill, and allowing oneself that choice is the province of rational actors. This isn’t to say that one should separate self from one’s racial, ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. However, it is to say that blindly following each one of the presumed norms of the tribe into which one was born is folly and it is the province of tribal actors. That is the place where into which all too many of my fellow black Americans find ourselves locked, mentally and emotionally.
Through this mindset, black Americans have become the organized Left's shock troops in latter’s war against America and all too many of us have become the Left's overseers, tasked to force the "deserters" back into formation using the tools of ridicule and shame. I almost said that the Left was at war with black people, but the Left doesn't esteem blacks enough to deem us as their enemies. We are merely tools to be used for the task at hand—to foment violent racial discord which will have to be put down using infinitely stronger government violence--and to be discarded when the task is completed, assuming that there will be any of us left after the New Civil War. And we let ourselves be used for one reason: tribal vengeance; for slavery and for oppression.
I submit that the Obama Administration, representing black Americans and no others, declared a tribal war against white Americans when Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party after the latter's blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Department of Justice’s inaction sent a message mirroring that of the US Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (1857): that the white man has no rights which the black man is bound to respect. Leftist ideology has been inculcated into black Americans for quite some time now and one of the strategies of this process has been to keep alive racial anger and the desire for tribal vengeance for past oppression. The Obama Administration's inaction in the above matter was merely a formal declaration, but the anger has long been simmering and, all too often, it boils over. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. And I think that many Americans have gotten the message.
Assuming that the above is true, let’s leave aside morality and conscience for a bit and look at this declaration strictly from a strategic point of view. Leaderless families and the resultant black-on-black killings are prevalent among black Americans and directly attributable to the lure of LBJ’s New Slavery Great Society programs. (I contend that these two features are merely the aforementioned ‘shame and degradation of being black’ re-packaged and internalized. If the leaders of a people—men—don’t love their progeny enough to marry the women who bear their children and/or remain in the lives of those children long enough to bring them into functioning adulthood, why would those children love themselves or those who look like them? And abortion is merely the black female method of black-on-black killing.)
So we black Americans murder ourselves within in womb and without, assert the former as our right, and ignore the latter. These methods of self-genocide have greatly thinned the “troops.” Taking this into account, one logically concludes that starting a war with a “tribe” that outnumbers us 12-1 and outguns us is pure folly.
It will bring the tribal suicide which we’ve been slowly committing, to a quick and devastating conclusion.
Turning back to conscience and morality, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reserves vengeance to Himself, and instructs Jewish and Christian believers to forego it. But even if one does not believe in Him, it’s easy to see the chaos which is nearly always brought about by the unending cycle of human vengeance. You murder/enslave/oppress mine, then I take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress yours. Then you take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress more of mine. Then I…
Is this what you want, Americans? I do not.
Harris points out that rational actors can only live as rational actors if those around him—those in his society—continue to behave as rational actors as well. He also says that, when a rational actor finds himself surrounded by tribal actors—fanatics—it becomes rational for a rational actor to revert to being a tribal actor. The alternative is to perish.
We all tend to forget that all human beings are only a few steps away from reverting to the Law of the Jungle. Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated and the Muslim world still demonstrates the truth of this. Will we Americans—all of us--continue in the way of most of humanity? Everyday, I pray not.
[i] It’s interesting that Liberals think that black people have a certain way of thinking embedded in the DNA. White supremacists think this as well.
[ii] Until recently, I found it puzzling that some black Liberals hurl all manner of racial epithets at black Conservatives; but now I realize that it’s the pride/shame mindset. Those who use this tactic, however, don’t realize that it’s ineffectual on persons who recognize it for what it is.
(Re-edited.)
UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus: Democrats Responsible for Black Culture of Anger. More precisely, Leftists are. Read the comments, tremble for your country and, most importantly, pray to The Living God for mercy and deliverence.
Jeff Goldstein, kickin' it on the satirical tip over at Protein Wisdom, gives us a sneak peak into the likely liberal reaction if ObamaCare gets overturned.
See? There’s that far-right extremist conservatism again, insisting that laws must be followed to the letter, and not simply be ignored to accommodate the spirit of “social justice”.
They fetishize a document, and yet they care not for 26-year-old children forced (by choice) to live without health insurance! It’s an abomination. And I think it is the kind of decision, should this be the Court’s final ruling, that, like Citizens United before it, suggests that the Court can no longer be trusted to act compassionately, and can therefore be ignored.
For the greater good.
After all: the ruling is just words. And the only power they have, really, resides in our willingness to accept them and/or enforce them. But who says we have to do that…?
That's just crazy, right? Would a President really just ignore the Supreme Court, a coequal branch of the federal government, just to get his way?
President Andrew Jackson dismissed the Supreme Court's decision in the Worcester v. Georgia case. This paved the way for the removal of the Cherokee Indian tribe to Oklahoma. Jackson basically told Chief Justice John Marshall and the rest of the Supremes to blow it out their collective ass.
Besides the Jacksonian precedent, it's easy to forget all that would be lost for the Left if ObamaCare gets annihilated. How long has the progressive movement wanted a nationalized health care system? Harry Truman called for it back in 1945. ObamaCare represents a liberal dream come true nearly seventy years in the making.
Besides that, what did it cost the Democrats to get their health care plan passed? The Louisiana Purchase and Cornhusker Kickback revealed the level of corruption the Democrat Party was willing to stoop to in order get their way. The political drubbing the party took in the 2010 midterms displayed the Party's willingness to endure a brutal self-flagellation in service to the cause of socialized medicine.
Seen in that context, who thinks the President and the rest of the Stalinists are going to lay down and accept the Supreme Court striking down ObamaCare?
It could be a 5-4 decision. It could go 6-3. Hell, it could be a 9-0 decision to vaporize the bill. It doesn't matter.
The Left won't allow some silly old enumerated powers shit get in the way of getting their way.
This is going to require a Republican Congress and a Republican president and probably another originalist Supreme Court justice to finally kill ObamaCare--and that still might not be enough.
Just remember: Everybody knows the GOP field of presidential candidates is a pack of weak sisters compared to that rara avis Barack "Scary Smart Exceptional Temperament" Obama.
President Barack Obama blamed Fox News for his political woes in a private meeting with labor leaders in 2010, saying he was “losing white males” who tune into the cable outlet and “hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7,” according to journalist David Corn’s new book, “Showdown.”
...Corn writes that after the midterm elections, Obama told labor leaders in December 2010 that he held Fox partly responsible for him “losing white males.”
“…Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in…The Republicans have been at this for 40 years. They have new resources, but the strategy is old,” Corn recounted Obama as saying.
You remember how George W. Bush constantly whined how MSNBC hurt him among the douchedrinker neo-hippie voting bloc, right?
Then again, why is anybody surprised when the crybaby-in-chief loses his shit over conservative criticism of his record? Other people write his books, yet he gets all the credit. He skated through his 15 minute US Senate career by voting 'present' and showing up late to hearings. The American media coverage of Obama's presidency has run the gamut from fawning to tongue-bath.
Everywhere this spoiled brat of a man has gone in his political career St. Barry has been somebody's pretty silky pony. From the Chicago Left to national progressive organizations, Obama always had to be sheltered from the tough-minded critiques of his policies. His achievement-free self-esteem couldn't handle the shock of real sustained dissent.
Obama thinks that Fox News caused his party to lose the white male vote in 2010. It couldn't be that white males honestly disagree with the President's administration. Nope. Of course its racism and Fox News that pushed the caucasian persuasion dude caucus to vote with the Republican Party. That explains everything. [sarc/]
I snagged this link from Iowahawk's twitter feed. Thank you, sir.
Testifying before the House Budget Committee today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Chairman Paul Ryan the following: “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
Actually, President Obama sort of did have a definitive solution. He created a debt commission, which devised a long-term debt reduction plan. Which the president rejected. And instead, we get this new budget proposal, which makes no effort to deal with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—the long-term drivers of U.S. federal debt. The debt curve never gets bent, as the above White House (!) chart shows. (Yes,the chart comes from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.) It just goes up and up and up—until the heat death of the universe or the economy is struck by a Greek-style debt crisis.
Read the rest, as James Pethokoukis basically slaughters the argument that this administration has any inkling or desire to reign in spending.
Turbo Tax Timmy is a funny dude. The guy who couldn't figure out how to pay his own taxes is annoyed by Paul Ryan's long term debt reduction plan. Meanwhile, somewhere Dane Cook is seething over Daniel Tosh's latest comedy routine.
As hilarious as Geithner can be, he's just a reflection of his feckless incompetent boss. Back in 2008, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half. See, Barry can make with the yuks too.
Question: Could Romney, Santorum or Gingrich be any worse on the federal budget than Obama?
That's what this election is really about. Not Mitt Romney's feelings about his tax rate. Not Rick Santorum's position on jimmy hats. Not Newt Gingrich's expansive views on serial divorce.
None of that stuff is vitally important to continued existence of this Republic.
Don't get it twisted. All of those other debates--and all the secondary discussions that spring from them--have a great deal of merit in certain contexts. Free societies should have many ongoing discussions about numerous topics if they are to survive in a complex and ever-changing world.
I'll even grant that if it was twenty or thirty years ago, those kinds of issues would've been featured more prominently in an election season. Relatively good times give folks the luxury to drill down on a lot of stuff. When the entire lawn is perfectly mowed down to putting green length, the single blade of two foot tall crabgrass looks far bigger than it really is.
The problem is that the US can no longer afford to look solely on ancillary issues and make political decisions. Why? Because, as the chart suggests, pretty soon America won't be able to afford shit.
Baldi is right: America is at a crossroads and there is no back tracking out of it. Naturally, Barack Obama doesn't want you to recognize this reality. He is the smiling ignorant face of a man running at full speed directly into the blades of a corn combine. His budget represents the bankrupting hope and the backbreaking change inherent in the assumptions of the statist status quo.
Obama desperately wants you to focus on the flaws of the GOP candidates. His record cannot withstand a cursory glance, much less a thoughtful critique. So yeah, lets all really pick through the records of Romney, Gingrich and Santorum.
With a fine-toothed comb.
For the 80th time.
This week.
Yeah, that'll be awesome.
Or lets not do that. We know what the GOP guys are all about. Their various quirks and personality traits have been thoroughly examined. More importantly, their positions are all very much known quantities. If Republican voters don't know what the candidates stand for by now, they're not really paying attention.
No, the focus has to shift back to the Arrogant Incompetent Affirmative Action Hire-In-Chief. Obama's budget should be all the impetus any conservative needs to put their eyes back on Barack Obama. His spending plan is practically designed to get right-wingers furious at the President all over again.
I say we give Obamster what he wants. Our president deserves to be the center of Republican attention. Lets make him and his leadership the only important issue in this campaign.
It's only February, and it feels like a lot of the wind has gone out of the sails of the conservative base. The culprit? With just four states checked off the 2012 primary season, the results simply aren't very encouraging. Ron Paul continues to fight the good fight against fiat currency, the last 50 years of American foreign policy and chemtrails. Rick Santorum cannot seem to gain any traction as a viable center-right alternative candidate. Meanwhile, Captain Ahab Gingrich and the Romneytron 2012 Self-Guided Political Action Figure have turned each state into a clash of personalities rather than a fight over ideas.
Why did it come to this? RightHandMan has some harsh--but fair--words.
In 1976, the Republicans watched Reagan lose to Ford and then saw the repercussions of that loss in Carter’s four years. Thing is, Reagan didn’t want to run for President – but did. Know why? Because the people demanded it.
In 1976, the American Conservative Union pushed Reagan to run against the establishment supported and Presidential incumbent Gerald Ford. The establishment supported the wrong guy (the moderate), told us that a conservative like Reagan could never win in the general election, and went on to fail in the race against Carter anyway. The establishment strikes again in 2012 but…No Reagans.
Shame on the conservatives who sat on the sidelines instead of running. Shame on the citizens for not demanding better.
It's our own damn fault. This whole godforsaken clusterf--k of a Republican primary dogpile is our fault.
I understand when people talk about how the Establishment 'wants' Romney to win. I get how they can feel cheated by a process that seems designed to hand Mittens the nomination. At the end of the day though, it still comes down to people supporting, or withdrawing their support from, certain candidates. The conservatives and Republicans who did not want Mitt Romney to be the party's nominee simply didn't do enough to make sure that didn't happen.
But it isn't just the vast right-wing conspiracy that dropped the ball. While we're in the spirit of circular firing squads, let me take aim right back at myself. I jumped on the Herman Cain train with my heart, but I should've given it a little more thought than I did. While I had my doubts about the man being completely ready for prime time, I truly believed that he was a star that would shine brighter as time went on. That simply was not the case.
I still think Herman Cain is an impressive guy. He has a deft grasp of economics, he's a successful businessman who has beaten the odds to rise to the top of profession and he is a forceful public speaker who can connect to audiences. These are all tremendous assets that should not be discounted simply because he didn't do well during the course of a presidential campaign. There is a future for Herman Cain somewhere in the political world, even if we can't quite see it yet.
At the same time, Herman Cain and all his wonderful qualities were not able to get the job done. Presidential politics requires an absurdly varied skill-set. Just having visionary ideas isn't enough. Simply being a good orator won't cut it. Merely carrying around a huge warchest won't work either.
Very few people in the world possess the vast talents necessary to play at Commander-in-Chief Level Boss status; even fewer have the desire or stomach for it. Ever wonder why the GOP cannot seem to create another Ronald Reagan? It's not just that the Republican Party tends to dislike movement conservative candidates, although that's certainly part of the problem. It's because Reagan's combination of temperament, knowledge, endurance and skills are so exceedingly rare that finding another giant world-changing figure like him is damn near impossible.
Conservatives--myself included--should recognize that fact. They should also recognize the limitations of the candidates in the field. Most politicians are not going to be awesome right out of the box. Reagan's iconic status is in part a product of the passage of time. In the 1980's, most of the Left and more than a few on the Right thought Ultra Ronaldus Magnus was a bird-brained failed actor who was intent on nuking the world. Even those in the conservative movement who voted for and agreed with the President still criticized him. It's only been relatively recently that Reagan has become respected--if not loved--across the political spectrum.
As time has passed, I think I saw more in Herman Cain than was actually there. I thought that he had the potential to be a transformational politician. It turns out that Mr. Cain is merely an incredibly impressive man. For what its worth, I'm sorry I didn't recognize his limitations as a candidate. Had I been a bit more skeptical a little sooner, I probably would've moved faster to find a more viable Not-Romney.
2012 has been full of lessons. Sometimes those learning moments have been delivered with a bit of a sting attached. Rather than cry over it, it's best to learn the lesson quickly, move forward and be wiser in the future.
Did anybody watch last night’s GOP presidential candidate debate on NBC? Apparently, 7.5 million people sat through it. One wonders how many people managed to keep their eyes open past the first hour.
To be fair, I was catching up on the zany antics of everyone’s favorite misanthrope doctor on "House” (Spoiler Alert: Crotchety title character says rude things to people) so I missed the first hour of the debate. Once I got around to Brian Williams & Co.’s turgid after-school detention session cleverly masquerading itself as a debate, within a minute it was clear something was up. Turns out that NBC made applause verboten within the auditorium. What should’ve been ‘Newt v. Mitt-Thunderdome’ morphed into a Lunesta-enhanced quaalude-soaked Ambien-fortified paint-drying observation session. With socialists as the hosts. By the time Mitt or Newt or Santorum or whoever started talking about self-deportation–I was starting to get drowsy, so the memory is hazy–I was wishing I could self-deport myself to a time when I didn’t know NBC was holding their shitty debate.
I saw no questions about Solyndra, Fast-n-Furious or the looming collapse of the Eurozone. So of course the candidates had to answer a question about Terri Schiavo. Apparently America has so few pressing problems that we have to go back seven years to find trouble.
Naturally, I did a fair amount of pissing and moaning about this on Twitter. Because whining about stuff always helps, right? Leave it up to the professionals at Hot Air to actually try to do something about it.
Last night, my friend Peter Ingemi expressed his dissatisfaction with the NBC debate — and the presidential debates in general — by proposing that Hot Air run a Republican primary debate, moderated by yours truly. Peter says he’s “dead serious” about this:
Just watched yet another GOP debate and was totally unamazed by the lack of questions on fast and furious and BS questions such as: “Why did the Bush Tax Cuts fail?”. I think political types are sick of questions from people who want the GOP to fail.
I have a solution:I suggest Hotair send an invitation to each candidate for a 2 hour debate moderated by Ed Morrissey.
This got quite a response on Twitter last night and this morning. It even has its own hashtag, #hotairdebate, and it’s been endorsed by the Boss Emeritus, Senate primary candidate Jamie Radtke, and a number of bloggers. It even got an Instapundit endorsement, who said the proposal “sounds like a winner.”
Sounds like a winner to me too.
For those of you who have teh Twitterz, I say we all tweet Mitt, Newt, Santorum and Paul’s Twitter accounts asking them–politely–if they could take part in a Hot Air debate. Hashtag the message with #hotairdebate. Lather, rinse, repeat for a good long while until somebody responds.
If they say yes, fine. If they say no, ask for an explanation. I mean, why would the GOP nominees allow themselves to be hammered by the raft of CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC lefty hack reporters, yet not take part in a debate at Hot Air?
Every single one of these candidates professes his fidelity to American conservatism. They seek the nomination of a party that advertises itself as a right-leaning caucus. All four of these men should jump at the chance to defend their records, define their ideas and make the case for their campaigns in front of a Hot Air audience.
Conservatives are rightfully annoyed by the debates. They’ve been run by liberals and for liberals. A Hot Air debate would do much to rectify the MSM bias in this primary season.
Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22 and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.
I was reading Ace’s remembrance of Hitch. Like Andrew Breitbart, I peruse Ace’s comments section almost as much as I read the posts themselves. Most commenters were respectful and more than a few were quite mournful of the loss of Mr. Hitchens. As the comments piled up, another train of thought developed, which could be characterized as the ‘Hooray, The Mouthy Atheist Gets His Comeuppance Sack Dance’. Several commenters, who identified themselves as Christians, seemed to revel in the fact that Hitchens would be damned for his atheism.
Tacky? Definitely.
An un-Christian response to the death of a human being? Surely.
But then again, what was the grand project of Christopher Hitchens’ life over the last decade? For many people–especially those not familiar with his stance on Islamic radicalism, his disgust for President Bill Clinton or his slow drift away from the political left–Hitch was best known as the public face of atheism. And it’s not like he was particularly gentle about his dislike for religious faith. No, he was a loud-n-proud attack dog for the anti-God side.
It isn’t all that shocking to find that many Christians grew tired of Hitchens’ snarling barely contained disdain for them. Believers are instructed to turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies, but believers are still human after all. Even the most patient Christian will chafe at having his beliefs trampled on over and over again. This is especially true when the trampler in question never bothers to wipe off his boots before stepping on his intended target. Hitchens’ brand of atheism was pointed, angry and more often than not insulting. When he railed against the Church or other religious institutions, it seemed as if his aim was not to change minds but to injure people he perceived as enemies.
In America and the West, Christians have endured decades of writers, entertainers, artists, intellectuals and other taste-makers who attempted to shame believers out of their faith. For many, Hitchens was simply the latest in a long line of pompous know-it-alls trying to make them feel stupid for taking the words of the Bible to heart. Seen in that light, it’s more surprising just how few Christians have piled on in the wake of Hitchens’ passing.
Beyond the question of religion, Christopher Hitchens was a writer that reveled in the act of making ideological allies uncomfortable. Since the time of Clinton’s impeachment, Hitchens was seen by many on the Left as a traitor to the cause. For the audacity of going against American liberalism’s champion, Hitch was vilified by the kind of people who had spent decades using him as an ideological buttress to hold up their arguments.
For many progressives, the final straw was Hitchens’ continuous defense of the Iraq War. The idea of Hitch making friends with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush was simply too much for many committed leftists to tolerate. The excommunication of Hitchens from the socialist project was all but complete by 2004.
Even as the intellectual Left was ejecting a former comrade from their midst, Hitchens simply wouldn’t or couldn’t play nice in the sandbox with the Right either. Besides his utter hatred for organized religion he made sure to slam other facets of the broad traditionalist caucus. Sarah Palin got no love from Hitch. Neither did the Tea Party; Hitch accused the movement of racial bigotry whenever asked about it. Ronald Reagan, one of conservatism’s great political heroes, was worse than useless in the writer’s judgment.
How much of Hitchens’ argumentative rhetoric came from honest disagreement? How much of it was mere posturing? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The joy Hitchens seemed to take in making people squirm suggests that a good deal of his personality was a well-rehearsed form of contrarianism. This isn’t always so bad; there are far worse sins for a writer than being against the prevailing attitudes of his time.
Still, watch the clip and note how Hitchens goes after Reagan. From our vantage point in the Age of Trillion Dollar Obama, 90’s-era lefty critiques of Reagan’s budget deficits seem ridiculously quaint. More absurd is the sight of a man who at the time still considered himself a member of the socialist movement using national debt as a focus for his attack on the 40th president. For a polemicist who launched into countless tirades denouncing the hypocrisy of his various hate-figures, the grasping for this particular club to bash this particular target is just the sort of cynical opportunism Hitchens made a career out of railing against.
But what a career. To say Christopher Hitchens had a gift for writing is like saying that Lady Gaga has a passing interest in publicity. Even whenyoufoundyourselfdisagreeingwithhim, he was still far more interesting than most political writers are on their best days. Hitchens was a master of fusing his thunderous moralism to a seemingly effortless ability to create provocative imagery. For this alone, he will be missed by writers and readers across the globe.
But it wasn’t just his writing that made him great. His public persona, an improbable amalgamation of a priapic boozed-up British university student and a joyfully overfed bookworm, made him a joy to watch in a public debate. It was also that improbable mixture that was so surprising. A nicotine-fueled drunk nattering on in a cartoonish plummy Oxbridge accent about Cold War-era Eastern European leftists or some other historical obscurity should not be compelling, yet somehow Hitchens made it work. It’s possible that only he could’ve done pulled off that feat.
For this conservative, it was most enjoyable seeing Hitchens crack on his former leftist pals. Watch and laugh as Hitch eviscerates knee-jerk liberal Eric Alterman’s anti-Iraq War arguments. What comes across most clearly from the clip is the sense that Alterman could not—even at such a late hour--relinquish his lingering hurt over Hitchens’ defection from the liberal sphere. Even as Hitchens piles injury upon injury, Alterman still pines for Hitch to come back to liberal side of the aisle. The barely concealed passive aggression from Alterman gives the game away.
Sometimes a man is defined by his enemies. In many ways, Hitchens was defined by the old comrades he had pissed off over the course of his meandering exit from the progressive movement. The resentment still remains, even after a decade. Repellent lefty shrew Katha Pollitt took the occasion of Hitch’s passing to settle some bitter old scores with her former colleague. Kevin Drum damned himself by damning Hitchens with faint insult. Dave Zirin spun a chance barroom dust-up with Hitch into a comically melodramatic confrontation, complete with a bizarre slapdash amateur psychoanalysis of Hitchens to boot.
Again and again, one is faced with a rather startling revelation: The Left needed Christopher Hitchens far more than he ever needed them. They craved his stylish prose, his combativeness and his intellectual curiosity. More importantly, liberals desperately wanted to be able to claim Hitchens as theirs alone. When Hitch started palling around with liberalism’s enemies, it devastated the socialists--as it does still today.
Was Christopher Hitchens a right-winger, as his many progressive critics accused him of being? Surely not. William F. Buckley once said that an atheist could be a conservative, but a God-hater could not. Hitchens’ disgust for organized religion alone will probably always deny him entry into the conservative caucus. His various other heterodoxies from traditionalism make considering him a man of the Right impossible.
However, measuring Hitchens by this yardstick is unfair. The man loved his eccentricities more than being a rigid partisan. It was his sort of scattered unpredictable politics, the kind that infuriated both friends and enemies alike, that made him interesting. To complain about Hitchens’ lack of ideological ‘correctness’ misses the point. Hitch forced everyone who read him to question their own assumptions, even for just a moment. During a career that spanned several periods of ideological inflexibility, Hitchens' ability to break through convention is the greatest gift he could give to his readers.
Hitch would agree with the sentiment that the world is a far better place with people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden dead. Conversely, the world is a far better place for having Christopher Hitchens live in it for sixty-two years.
So, what exactly is the debt ceiling? Put simply, it's an arbitrary limit set by Congress on the amount of money the U.S. government can borrow. The theory behind the debt ceiling, which was enacted during WWI, was that it would limit government borrowing and keep it from growing out of control.
CALLER: I was wondering, Mr. Limbaugh, what do you think if Washington and the government doesn't come up with a budget, is there a good chance that I will not be getting my Social Security check next month?
RUSH: Totally up to Obama.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I'm gonna give you some numbers on this. Your Social Security check should be made with ease. There is money. In fact, one of the ways that it happens is that Treasury bonds, by law, will be sold and redeemed and the money used to fund Social Security payments.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: That is a matter of law. It's certainly a matter of choice. It has nothing to do with running out of money.
Politicians will argue that when the US Treasury loses this ability then the US will default. This is however, technically incorrect. The US Treasury will be able to pay all of its $30 billion dollars in bondholding due the month of August at the expense of other programs from direct funds received from taxation. This would stop the US from going into a technical default and buy the Congress time to get its act together.
"The fact is we will pay our debts if it’s the last dollar we have. There are enough assets in Social Security and Medicare to pay the benefits of those programs for several years. Other programs can be funded from tax revenue. There certainly will be disruption...But this is not a deadline we should rush and make a bad deal and do something that cuts benefits from seniors without giving them better choices."
You know why the markets aren’t in complete panic over Obama’s reckless debt-ceiling brinksmanship? Because they don’t take it any more seriously than I do. It’s so transparently a phony political kabuki dance — a show-bizzy publicity stunt whereby Obama depicts himself as the Only Adult in the Room — that investors simply can’t believe anyone could be that stupid.
But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on — or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.
And that's it, kids.
We are officially in a Democrat-managed fantasy land. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had a grand plan in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election. The scheme entailed giving our money, our kids' money, our grandkids' money and our great-grandkid's money to a narrow collection of favored union hacks, crony capitalist suck-ups, racial grievance specialists and the bureaucrat class. When in the 2010 midterm elections the American public expressed it's deep-seated nervousness with the Donkey-Puncher Party's Mark McGwire on steroids spending, St. Barry of the Sacred Pantscrease decided he would simply ignore the public and continue as if the GOP House majority didn't exist.
That's why this is occurring. The President can yakkety-yak about protecting seniors or getting corporate jet owners to pay their fair share. Dude can go on prime time TV and make his lame-ass campaign sloganeering disguised as an actual policy speech. None of that matters.
The President has caused this fake as hell media-driven crisis. He wanted this to occur. Most of all, he wants enough Americans in full-on panic mode over this so he can paint the Republicans as wild-eyed maniacs and beat them in 2012.
It's always been about politics for Barack Obama. It's never been about making the nation stronger, getting the economy moving, putting people back into the workforce or even just keeping Social Security as is. With this man, the modus operandi is always getting as many people as possible to be dependent on government so he can than use those folks as a bought and paid for voting bloc for his reelection. Spending, deficits and debt don't even kinda enter into Obama's calculations.
Meanwhile, America is quickly coming to the point where her debt is going to be 100% of our GDP. That spells doom for...well...everything.
But whatever. Let's keep pissing our pants over Obama's manufactured crisis. That doesn't totally play into his hands and help his flagging political fortunes or anything.
Bob Belvedere, a blogger you need to read, takes this view of the modern liberal mindset.
Leftism is incompatible with American Values. It despises custom, morality,and Right Reason. It rejects the importance of tradition and, in fact, scorns and spits on it. Leftists seek not to learn from the wisdom of those who have come before them. They disdain the hard-won knowledge that politics is the art of the possible. They seek to remake the world in their image, to be as gods.
How can you deal with such people?
You can’t because they believe they have found The Answer — that secret knowledge that the man of the Right believes can only be known to God. The Left believes mankind can be perfected, whereas those on the Right know that Human Beings are, well, human, in the purest sense of the that word — they err and will always err, they are flawed and will always fail.
Thus, the Right seeks to craft governments and institutions that put checks on the damage erring men can do. The Left, on the other hand, believing that people can be perfected, sees no reason for such restraints. Their faith in the idea that the Eschaton can be Immanentized, leads them to brook no opposition because, well, how can you oppose the Illuminated Wisdom they have discovered unless you’re an idiot or a fool? It is a torturous logic they follow and it leads, inevitably, given the frustrations they will experience imposing it on their flawed fellow Human Beings, to them torturing their fellow Human Beings. And it has in every single place it has been tried.
Read the whole thing. It's that good. I'll be here when you come back.
People have been saying this for a while, but Mr. Belvedere's post is a strong reminder of a fundamental truth: The progressive movement has engaged in a slow-motion just-slightly-under-the-radar civil war on traditional America for at least the last 50 years. The roots of this conflict lie in several places. Early utopian dreamers like Hebert Croly and John Dewey, frustrated by 18th century classical liberalism, laid the intellectual framework for several generations of liberal activists. Woodrow Wilson's Constitution-bashing administration is a key component. FDR's 'let no crisis go to waste' opportunism enshrined many unconstitutional assumptions into the fabric of American politics. All of these factors and more led to the rise of the 60's-era New Left radicals such as Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky. This driving force in US politics has scored many victories in the last five decades.
A skeptical reader might ask how the last fifty years in American political life can be seen a 'war.' After all, it can be argued that the Constitution creates the conditions for gridlock, narrow-issue voting blocs and partisan rancor. One could make the case that the modern wrangling we see over the national debt, abortion and our various wars is nothing more than business as usual. To some extent, the people who take this position are not completely wrong.
However, consider the following scenario: a state supreme court threatens to create a right to gay marriage if the state legislature doesn't do it on their own. The earliest American thinkers--even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall himself--couldn't have imagined a scenario where the legislature would be told by the judiciary to make a law. It goes against what most citizens in the modern era think of when they consider the roles of elected officials and the courts.
Think the situation laid out above is crazy? If you do, well, you're wrong. That's just the kind of insanity New York just went through in the push to legalize gay marriage.
The strategy used by the American Left, in which they use their ideological companions in the courts to force a result that progressives demand, is 'democratic' in roughly the same way that Josef Stalin's show trials were 'legal'. They both have the patina of the rule of law, but, in reality, they're both shams. In both instances, a large force bullies another party in order to come to a pre-determined outcome. Most importantly for our purposes, by going so far outside the bounds of constitutional law and tradition, progressives have all but abandoned previous understandings of how America governs itself. This amounts to nothing less than an act of war by the Left against groups of citizens it regards as not just political opponents, but as outright enemies.
It helps if one thinks about American politics like a football game. Imagine that the Washington Redskins are playing the New England Patriots. For three quarters, both sides play by the standard rules of the league. There are lead changes and penalties and back-and-forth action, but the teams play within the framework of NFL regulations; i.e. a touchdown is six points, pass interference is illegal, etc. Then, at the start of the fourth quarter, Washington announces that it will play the rest of the game with 12 players on offense and defense, as opposed to the customary 11. A few minutes later, the 'Skins proclaim that their team will play with a round soccer ball (as opposed to the regulation football) and that they can merely kick it anywhere into the end zone to score a touchdown. Moments later, Washington announces that it will arm its players with hockey sticks which their team can use in any way they please. Finally, the Redskins bribe the officials to allow the Washington club to do whatever the hell it wants.
In this admittedly fanciful situation, it should be clear that while the New England Patriots were busy following the previously understood rules of the NFL game, the Washington Redskins had abandoned playing football altogether. The Washington squad was playing an entirely different game in order to beat New England. They didn't just cheat in order to get a blatantly unfair advantage over their opponent. By going so far outside the regulations, they had in effect declared war on the Patriots.
The same is true of American liberals over the last several decades. They have used anonymous bureaucrats, the judicial branch, moronic Republicans, the mainstream media and any other useful club to expand the size of government and ravage the old Constitutional order. Rarely do liberals score major victories through legislation alone. When they do, it is usually done over the strenuous objections of the citizenry.
This is war. It's not a war fought with bullets or bombs (except when Bill Ayers is really worked up). Instead, it's a war fought with statist regulations, legislation from the bench, Arlen Specter and Learjet liberal Hollywood propaganda. But just because there aren't battlefields and graveyards doesn't mean there isn't a serious conflict going on in America between liberals and conservatives. Whoever wins that fight will determine not just the fate of America, but the world economic and political order created by the US's influence.
The Crack Emcee brings us a CNN anchor dude getting emo.
You’ve got to love this. They went after her – again – and they got nothing! All they’ve exposed is the media’s craven nature and it’s willingness to act as the go-to guy for the Democratic Party. Watch the clip. At one point the reporter looks *stunned* because he’s got to admit the person he’s “investigating” is somebody good who he clearly admires. It’s like he was given the job of killing a kid and he,..just,..can’t,…do it.
Da Emcee nails it...again.
How about we call the former governor by her rightful title. Sarah Palin: The Most Vetted Non-Presidential Candidate Ever.
Did anybody go through Barack Obama's e-mails as US Senator when he announced his run for the Presidency? If the media did, you never heard about it. Ya gotta think that if the lamestreamers did find anything in an Obama email nit-pick expedition, some producer or editor at one of the big media dogs would dutifully toss it down the memory hole. Wouldn't want the general public to get an unfoavorable impression of the Left's Chocolate Jesus sacred worship figure.
Numerous news outlets have decided to crowdsource the Palin e-mails. Did these same media organs go with this tactic when ObamaCare was being debated? How about Cap-n-Trade? What about the Porkulus? Nope. None of that got our Fourth Estate a-rolling like Palin's e-mails.
Amazing.
I'm a Herman Cain supporter. I hope he is the GOP nominee in 2012 because I think he's got the best shot at beating Obama. Having said that, here's an argument for a Sarah Palin presidential run: Nobody can touch the chick. They can't lay a glove on her. Her detractors couldn't hit her with an RPG if she was the broad side of a barn and they were standing ten feet away.
The Left throws everything at her. They have fired every salvo they possibly can. They've had squirrelly weirdo reporters move next door to her house. They engage in bizarre conspiracy theories about the 'true' mother of Trig Palin. They blow her verbal 'gaffes' into week-long exposes, then get cranky when it turns out that she was right.
The progressives almost always come out looking worse than she does whenever they get into a food fight with Palin. She makes them look ridiculous. Better still, because the left cannot stand to get humiliated, they forget the first rule of holes: when you've put yourself at the bottom of one, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Instead, they continue to take shots at her, hoping that just once they'll get lucky and put an end to her career in public life.
Chances are that the media has found every possible trouble spot Sarah Palin might have in her background. Barring something completely out of the blue, there are no scandals lurking in Palin's history. If there was, you can be sure the MSM would've reported it by now.
You can argue against Palin on stylistic grounds. You might think her snowbillyisms and folksy demeanor won't translate into a winning formula in a national election. You can even question some of her policy emphases.
The one big advantage Sarah Palin has over everyone else in the 2012 presidential field is that there will be no surprises. Every rock has been turned over. If she runs for the White House, you can be sure the media will keep digging into her past. You can also be sure that Palin will beat them more often than not. In a race that is certainly going to be a media-driven death march against whoever the GOP nominates, being a proven MSM slayer is no small thing.
I believe both parties, and most people in the public eye, would agree, if they could make an agreement which could be enforced and relied upon, that "We shall not beat up each other over this stuff."
That would accrue to everyone's interest in the political/media class. Note I speak only of this class. I am not saying that this agreement would serve anyone else's interests. But it would serve politicians' and media-types' interests.
You don't screw with me, I don't screw with you. For this class, such an agreement would be mostly upside.
But the problem is, of course, the same one as is the whole point of the Prisoner's Dilemma: You can't trust your opponents to go soft on you.
So what do you do? Concede the field, in which case only your own allies get pummeled like this, but you sweetly avoid pummeling their guys in the hopes that they will honor their side of the bargain?
They won't. They never do.
Read the entire piece. It's full of win.
Both American political parties, from the show horses on down to the foot soldiers, simply cannot maintain the kind of reciprocal understanding Ace describes. He's absolutely correct when he says that the political class would benefit enormously from a mutual agreement to shut the hell up about it's sex scandals. For a lot of reasons, politicos can't resist the attack dog urge. Interestingly, it wasn't always this way.
In the 60's, when John Kennedy had hot and cold running girls installed at the White House, the Republicans knew about JFK's peccadilloes and decided to keep their powder dry. Whether it was out of a desire to keep their own shenanigans private or just out of a sense of deference to the presidency, the GOP were tight-lipped about President Kennedy's numerous extramarital excursions. Congressman Weiner's misadventures in web-based hook-ups make it clear that the old early sixties circumspect attitude is not just gone, but probably can't come back.
This inability on the part of the Democrats and Republicans to hold their fire is a big reason why Mitch Daniels' idea of a truce on social issues is so monumentally wrong-headed. Who polices that agreement? Nobody could; even if every Washington DC politician said yes to it, no single person or organization would be trusted by either side to act as a fair mediator/enforcer.
Another problem with Daniel's truce is that even if the politicians went along with the deal, the mainstream media most certainly would not. The most knee-jerk attack dog partisans in American politics are the editors, producers and reporters that make up the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the lamestream Democrat Party rah-rah chorus. If they have access to information that helps Democrats or damages Republicans, they will run it. This will force Breitbart and his allies to do the same thing when they get information damaging to the Dems. The truce would be over almost before it started.
In fact, given how cuddly the MSM is with the Democrat party, a truce on social issues could only hurt Republicans. With the exception of Fox News and several big-name rightish blogs/websites, the conservative argument against abortion, gay rights and other lifestyle debates is almost never given a fair treatment by the big news outfits. Under the Daniels scenario, Democrats could truthfully say they weren't scoring points while their allies in the press and Hollywood kept pushing the progressive agenda. Republicans would have few options. They couldn't expect the MSM to help them out. Worse, the Republican's sorta allies on the Right blogs--the ones that might be able to pump up a conservative social agenda--just don't yet have the same kind of reach that the lamestreamers have in the media universe.
Finally, just how far down the political totem pole would the truce go? Would it only affect the Beltway folks? If that's the case, the social issues gag order would unravel as soon as a state legislature votes to approve gay marriage, put limits on abortion, allow prayer in school or mandate that teachers instruct students on condom use. Just because DC pols swear off social issues legislation doesn't mean the states have to. As soon as a controversial social issue flared up at the state level, national Republicans and Democrats would almost have to weigh in. That would put enormous pressure on the truce's architecture; once one politician says something, others are going to want to discuss it too.
Weiner's train wreck is a reminder of just how impossible a voluntary censorship of any kind is in modern politics. Political figures cannot be bound by informal gag orders. Mutually assured partisan destruction won't hold anybody back from using damn near any club to beat their opponents over the head. The price is too low and the payoffs are too high.
Allahpundit over at HotAir.com makes an astute observation about the rising political fortunes of Herman Cain.
By the way, note his choice of hat here and the country/western soundtrack. Like I said after Frank Luntz’s focus group went nuts for him in South Carolina, he may very well emerge as the “southern candidate” in the field. How the media’s going to square that with their deathless assumptions about southern conservative racism, I have no idea — but it’ll be amazing to watch.
Read the rest, I’d say.
What does it mean to be from the South? If you listen to the scions of popular culture, all you have to do to find a racist sexist homophobe proto-fascist is talk to a denizen of old Dixie for five seconds. It’s such a lazy intellectually dishonest position, but many people have internalized that sentiment. For some, merely hearing a Southern accent means the speaker is thinly-disguiseduber bigot. The truth is far more nuanced, and much kinder to Southern folk, than tired shopworn stereotypes.
Does racism exist in the South? Of course it does. Flawed human beings, not choirs of angels, live in the South. The real issue is just how much race plays in electoral politics. The 2008 presidential election gives us an indication of the race factor. It seems like the answer is 'Not nearly as much as you might think'. Barack Obama beat up on John McCain in North Carolina and Virginia, two key members of the old Confederacy. Obama's victories would suggest that caucasian persuasion racial animus wasn't enough to stop voters in these states from pulling the Donkey Lever.
Since the South isn't a bastion of knee-jerk race hate, here's an interesting question--What happens when 60% of Southern whites vote for Herman Cain in the 2012 general election? How does pop culture, with all of its built-in lefty prejudices, react to that?
There are two probable outcomes to that hypothetical scenario. One is that Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment universe will pull an Officer Barbradyand act like that Cain's snagging the cracker vote is no big deal. The South is still racist, but those stupid hillbilly wingnuts are so thick that they can't help but vote Republican even though the GOP nominee is a black man. Lord knows the media loves to ignore things that mess with their preferred narratives. The old head-firmly-buried-in-ones-own-ass approach has served the entertainment biz quite well over the years, so this is quite likely to happen once again.
The other possibility is that pop culture figures acknowledge that southern whiteys voted for a black man, but will argue that Herman Cain doesn't count as a true brother because he's conservative. As strange as that sounds, it's well within the bounds of cultural Left's playbook. According to Jesse Jackson Jr., if you're black and you don't vote for health care reform, you're not really black. According to the weird feminist sisters, Sarah Palin's right-of-center leanings means she's not really a woman.
Both of the above predictions/probabilities make the Left look incredibly stupid. Which is all the more reason why Herman Cain should be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Make Cain the GOP standard-bearer, then watch how Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Chris Rock struggle to explain that Herman Cain's victory doesn't count as racial tolerance. Failing that, put Cain at the top of the ticket, then get a good hearty laugh when doucherocket cultural critics like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West try to explain to average Americans that Herman Cain really is not black.
Summary: "I'm not apologizing for RomneyCare. I thought it was cool, so whatevs. Also, I'm not changing anything from my 2008 health care plan because that would look like I was flip-flopping and I sorta have an image problem about being a slippery political weasel."
No really, watch the clip. Then come back and tell me that's not pretty much what homeboy said.
Meanwhile, Allahpundit does his counter-intuitive reaction thing to Romney's speech.
No one would have believed him had he apologized so there was no sense in doing it. On the contrary, if I were advising him, I’d tell him to go on the attack and make his opponents be as specific as possible in what they’d do differently. The more he can discredit their plans as unworkable, the more he can reframe RomneyCare as the best choice from a very bad set of health-care policy options. In fact, if he’s feeling extra cheeky, he could use the public’s ruinous love affair with Medicare to his advantage. Under RomneyCare, the state forces you to buy a product from a third party; under Medicare, the state forces you to buy the same product from the state. It simply calls it a tax instead of a mandate, and instead of granting you coverage immediately, it shafts you until you’re 65. Do Pawlenty, Gingrich, et al. also oppose the “mandated” premiums known as FICA? I’m not sure Romney wants to go the Mediscare route since it’ll make fiscal cons even angrier at him than they are now, but if he gets desperate enough, look out.
If Mitt has any chance of getting the GOP nomination, Republican primary voters will first have to get over their lingering reservations about Romney's past social liberalism and his more recent changes of political heart. Importantly, the party rank-n-file will have to get over it's virulent hatred for ObamaCare. If the President's government medicine scheme is no longer seen as a huge threat, RomneyCare will not seem like such a big deal. That means that Mitt won't have to keep defending his Massachusetts health plan. Most of all, issues like foreign policy or terrorism, will have to come to the forefront of GOPers concerns.
The rub for Romney is that his doubling-down strategery can only be successful if a bunch of things break his way. The irony here is that super-achiever alpha dog Mitt finds himself in a position akin to a middling baseball team just before the regular season begins. What do the managers of these kind of clubs always say? 'If our ace starting pitcher stays healthy, we'll win a pile of games.' 'We can be successful if the third baseman can repeat his slugging stats from last year.' 'The team is gonna do real well if a few of our rookies pan out and live up to their potential.'
Ball clubs like that almost never succeed. Why? Because there are simply too many factors that have to go right. Let's say the stud hurler keeps himself from getting hurt for the entire year. That doesn't mean those year one noobs are going to pan out. The third baseman who hammered fifty home runs last season? He just tested positive for cattle steroids and will be lucky to plink out fifteen dingers after his fifty game suspension and his lack of chemically-enhanced power.
Romney is in the same position. Because of his problematic voting record and his insistence on defending his health care plan, Mitt has to rely on a heaping helping of good fortune. All politicians require a large infusion of luck to get elected. In Romney's case, his chances ride on a set of circumstances that isn't likely to fall into place. By making this speech, Romney has decided that he's most likely not going to be president.
I ask because that's the only reason I can figure why he pwns himself, then doubles down on stupid via his Twitter stream.
In a recent post at the Washington Post's site, juicebox mafia capo Klein thinks he's figured out who Barack Obama really is.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.
It's important to note just who is making this wack-job statement. As noted by my new blog homie Proof, Ezra Klein was the founder of the junior high mutual zit-squeezing club Journolist. The four hundred reporters, academics, professional liberals and assorted mouth breathers in the listserv were basically a wing of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with future Obambi Cabinet members to boot. Needless to say, Klein has a serious intellectual interest in rehabilitating his teeny bopper fan boi crush's political fortunes.
Now, let's look at the 90's era Republican's 'best ideas'. The individual mandate that some Republicans championed back in the day was...and more importantly, is...unconstitutional. I know Klein thinks the Constitution is just some old impossible to understand scrap of parchment, but when something is plainly unconstitutional that pretty much makes it a stupid idea, not a good one.
As for cap-n-trade, I don't know if paid Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein has been keeping up with current events, but anthropogenic climate change has been revealed to be a fraud. C&T was a policy cooked up in response to fears of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Why would Republicans keep advocating a policy that supposedly solves a problem that does not in fact exist?
Finally, we get to Klein lauding President George HW Bush for raising taxes. Ezra pats Pappy on the back for 'getting the job done' on the 1990 budget deal in his original piece. Funny thing is that Klein never really specifies how these tax hikes were successful, either as policy or politics. He just sorta says they are and moves on.
When confronted about the shakiness of his 'Republican raises taxes = epic win' theory, Klein has a ready retort:
This is the part when you realize that debating Ezra Klein is like having a discussion with Barry Bonds about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs. No, it's even worse than that. It's like debating a pre-med student on specific techniques and methods involved in neurosurgery. The dude is simply in way over his head.
How did Bush the Elder get wacked for raising taxes? For one thing, Bill Clinton hammered him for it in campaign ads.
That ad was a staple of Clinton's 1992 campaign. What makes the spot so effective--and what Ezra Klein simply cannot grasp--is that HW Bush's raising taxes gave Clinton ammunition that didn't just wound the President, but also damaged the Republican brand on a critical everyday checkbook issue. Why does Klein think people vote for the GOP anyway if not because of tax policy? It must be for the Republican's famous snappy fashion sense and party-hearty attitude [sarc/].
The best part of Klein's journey into fail is when he is again confronted with his stunning lack of understanding, he resorts to the lamest of rhetorical evasions and promptly moves the goalposts. But hey, far be it from me to point out how badly his argument is falling apart. Let's let Klein's own source, that he dutifully pointed out, do it for us.
If politicians are not rewarded at the polls for the choices they make, don't expect other politicians to make similar choices.
What exactly are we dealing with here? Klein brings up a political period from the recent past. It's not like it's a hundred years ago, when the issues and characters involved are far removed from our current context. Nor are we talking about particularly deep or convoluted political theory. No, this stuff is pretty easy to understand.
Which makes me believe that Ezra Klein is not just another overpaid undersmart liberal. By producing such an elementary amateurish piece--and then digging further down into the proverbial hole--it's clear Klein is a masochist.
Blogger pal Chris Wysocki of the great Wyblog notes that we're entering a very special season.
Yes, it's that time of the year again. Time for the feminuts to whinge about Lilly Ledbetter and having to work for slave wages just because they don't have a penis.
Except it's not true. None of it. There is no male-female wage gap.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
I want a raise.
Haha, you and me both homie.
First of all, you should be reading Wyblog because he rules, so get to it.
The popping of the male/female pay differential myth is a needed reality check for the ultra orthodox feminist left. As necessary as this story is, it's just as important to recognize that the Feministing/GloriaSteinem cohort absolutely will not budge from their militantly wrong assertion that men get paid more then women. It's a foundational doctrine of feminism; going against that sacred text would be like asking David Brooks to stop writing hand-wringing mush-mouthed columns for the New York Times.
The thing is, the popular understanding of feminism (as opposed to the far-left campus version) got a few things right. Women should be paid the same as men for the same kind of work. That's just fair.
However, the further down the reading list you go on the Sisterhood of The Snarling Harridans' syllabus, the more incorrect stuff you find. From the role of men to the bizarre confused ideas about abortion, lefty feminists can't create paradigms that even sorta resemble reality.
The worst mistake that feminists have made in the last 40 years is their relentless denigration of motherhood. Remember when Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman described becoming a mother as "...the most important role of my life"? For many people, this was a charming sentiment. For at least a few feminists, this was simply not kosher. Check out Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams' reaction to Ms. Portman's announcement (quoted from The Other McCain):
Why, at the pinnacle of one’s professional career, would a person feel the need to undercut it by announcing that there’s something else even more important? Even if you feel that way, why downplay your achievement? Why compare the two, as if a grueling acting role and being a parent were somehow in competition? And remind me — when was the last time a male star gave an acceptance speech calling fatherhood his biggest role?
For now, forget the tin-eared insensitivity. That's a feature--not a bug--when it comes to feminist writing. More importantly, Ms. Williams' sentiment is a symptom of fundamental misreading of the importance of being a mother.
The Left in general, and feminism in particular, has spent a great deal of time, effort and money infiltrating the commanding heights of the culture. From the universities to the federal bureaucracy, feminists have carved out a sphere of influence from which they can push their ideas. In the course of a few decades, radicalized women (and not a few indoctrinated men) have become a sizable part of the national discussion on any number of issues.
The problem is that even with all the influence feminists currently wield, it pales in comparison to the power that mothers have in shaping the future. If feminists really wanted to create a society where, in the words of Gloria Steinem we raised girls like boys and boys like girls, feminists would be squeezing out children by the cart-load and raising the kids from the nanosecond they're born. Mothers have the kind of 24/7/365 access to a child's mind that a feminist ideologue can only dream about in her fevered fantasies.
Imagine if feminism hadn't drifted into BettyFriedan/BarbaraEhrenreich employment-centrism in the early 1970's, but instead had focused on actually changing American culture at its roots. The results would be stark. In fact, if that had occurred, the US would be hardly recognizable.
Conservatives and traditionalists often become angry when feminists demean the vital importance of motherhood. It's an understandable reaction; nurturing matriarchs are central to the emotional life of almost everyone and it's hard to hear it when some campus theorist makes it seem like mothers aren't important. Instead of being angry when feminists dismiss motherhood, we should just politely nod and move on, rather than give these leftist maniacs any bright ideas.
The great Jerome Corsi documents yet another shrapnel fragment flying off the continuing Obama train wreck.
Bill Ayers: One more, one more (question)
Question:Thank you sir, thank you, thank you. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that President Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father," quote: "may be the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
Ayers: I agree with that.
Question:What is your opinion of Barack Obama's style as a writer and uh …
Ayers: I think the book is very good, the second book ("The Audacity of Hope") is more of a political hack book, but uh, the first book is quite good.
Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …
Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?
Question: What's that?
Ayers: I wrote that book.
Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.
Question: You wrote that?
Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.
Oooooof.
WND contributor Jack Cashill seems to thinkthis is a shot across Barack Obama's bow. In his opinion, the very anti-war Bill Ayers is angry at Obama for the President's Libyan war kinetic military action. I think that's a pretty good assessment.
I don't believe that's the entire story here though. I think Bill Ayers is suffering from a classic case of 'Tire Tracks From Under Obama's Bus' Syndrome. Peace Prize Barry basically used Ayers like a kleenex. Instead of Ayers catching at least a little credit for penning Dreams--something like 'By Barack Obama and William Ayers'--homeboy got a whole lot of nothing.
It might have been easier on Ayers to get no props for Dreamswhen Obambi was a hack community rabble-rouser or a benchwarming Illinois state Senator. When the former Weatherman watched Obama become a Democrat Party show-horse and media-created President, without ever acknowledging Bill Ayers' full contribution to the St. Bambi mythos, that was probably incredibly grating. Obama's North African adventurism may have been simply the last straw.
More importantly than Bill Ayers needing to recover from his skinned knee and bruised ego, this episode is just one more nail in the coffin for the Barack Obama 2008 campaign narrative. Dreams From My Fatherwas a big piece of Obama's intellectual curriculum vitae. As opposed to the supposedly illiterate Dubya or the crusty old warrior John McCain, Candidate Lightbringer was a serious author who had written not one, but two books. Dreams and The Audacity of Hope were meant to display Barry's intellectual firepower. While the junior Senator from Illinois had almost no legislative accomplishments, his alleged mastery of the written word was supposed to assure nervous voters that they were supporting a true Renaissance man.
And now we see the myth of Obama's intellectualism crumbling. All it took was one of the key enablers in Bamster's web of lies to get pissed off at his former protegé. Barry's chickens are finally coming home to roost.
But really, one can't be completely shocked when a politician as weaselly as Barack Obama is found out to have inflated his resume. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's comments about Clement Atlee, Senator HopeyChangey's barely-there congressional record had much to be humble about. No empty-suit candidate with a similar doughnut hole in his history could do anything else. Obama is clearly no exception to this fibbing phenomenon.
The blame for Obama being able to pull off this sham rests not with the president, but with the American mainstream press. The New York Times/MSNBC/Washington Post Axis of Fail constantly pats itself on the crotch for brave truth-telling. Instead of digging into Obama's shady past, they did everything they could to bury damaging details about their preferred candidate and attacked his opposition.
Better still, this MSM willful blindness also reveals just how badly they suck at the one job in which they're supposed to be experts. They're the ones who were supposed to figure out just how much Bill Ayers figured into Barack Obama's narrative. The lamestream press allowed the illusion of Barack Obama's superior intelligence--a major component of his appeal to voters--to flourish without a question. By doing that, they set themselves up to be punked by bloggers who have shown more initiative in the last two years than Big Media has shown in the last two decades.
UPDATE: Now a big ole' Memeorandum thread too. Time to pile on while the piling on is good, I say.
Via the American Thinker. I think John Hawkins is spot on in detecting the sarcasm here, but if you’re inclined to believe that Ayers is The One’s ghostwriter, you’re bound to detect a “deeper truth” in his tone.
... I think he enjoys mocking people who push this idea and enjoys it doubly when they can’t detect the mockery. In fact, I’d bet that this is his stock response anytime the book is mentioned in his presence — insisting that he wrote it to see if the listener laughs and then toying with them if they seem credulous. But as I say, your mileage may vary.
Yeah, this doesn't exactly work for me. AP's analysis blithely discounts Jack Cashill's work that pretty much proves that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams". Cashill lays out the bones of his argument here.
To credit Dreamsto Obama alone, one has to posit any number of near miraculous variables: he somehow found the time; he somewhere mastered nautical jargon and postmodern jabberwocky; he in some sudden, inexplicable way developed the technique and the talent to transform himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without any stops in between.
If anything, the last few years should make Cashill's thesis even more believable. The Duffer-in-Chief is not exactly breaking his back as President. Dude works harder on his NCAA basketball brackets than on seemingly anything else. The guy requires a teleprompter for both formal and informal occasions. It seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama would put in the work necessary to become a strong writer.
Moreover, why can't two things be true at once? Why can't Bill Ayers be sarcastic and be telling the truth at the same time? I mean, it's sorta weird, but it's not such a strange thing. Ayers is a squirrelly lib hack. It makes weird sense that he'd do something so goofy and underhanded. Homeboy probably gets a little thrill thinking how clever he is laying out this secret in plain view.
Baldilocks wondered when President Obambya was gonna get around to asking Congress for authority to...you know...go to war.
I too have a question--Does SuperGenius Hussein McSmartyPants have a plan or is he just making it up as he goes along?
“Our military action is in support of an international mandate from the [United Nations]Security Council that specifically focuses on the humanitarian threat posed by Colonel Qadhafi to his people,” the American president said. “Not only was he carrying out murders of civilians, but he threatened more.”
Okee-dokee, St. Barry. So you're just doing your Euro-hip Nobel Prize winning humanitarian act. Right. Got it.
“I also have stated that it is U.S. policy that Qadhafi needs to go,” Obama said, noting that a United Nations resolution last week authorizing force against Libya is based on humanitarian concerns, not regime change. “When it comes to our military action…we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate.”
Wait...what?
I hate to get pushy about this, but which one is it Bamster? Are we enforcing a no-fly zone, or are we trying to stick a fork into Mad Moammar?
Maybe we should ask newly butched-up warlord Nicholas Sarkozy what the hell is going on here. He might have a clue. Obama clearly does not. Even better than the President's feckless display of spectacular obliviousness is the fact that he's created a foreign policy scenario where a sawed-off twerpy French Prime Minister probably has the best handle on the situation.
Besides Obama delivering the change we can all be horrified by, it's important to consult history. Erwin Rommel famously remarked, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Very true, but the Field Marshall never told us what would happen to the plan when we finally made contact with our allies. In case you've gotten confused, we're supposed to be protecting Libyan rebels from the predations of Colonel Qadaffi. Nobody really knows who the hell these people are, who they're friends with or what kind of government they want to create in the place of the current. Armed with that lack of information, of course we should throw our support behind the Libyan rebel forces.
Just to be clear: Obama has just gotten us into a war where we're not really calling the shots while we're somehow doing most of the fighting with no clear idea what victory would look like for people who probably despise us with a thousand year old Kaaba-sized chip on their shoulders and who will most likely plot against us once we're done doing the wet work for them.
...among the leftmost wing of the House Democrats. Good to see it.
Reps. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Mike Capuano (Mass.), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Rob Andrews (N.J.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) “all strongly raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions [in Libya]” during that call, said two Democratic lawmakers who took part.
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) even asked why President Obama's actions aren't impeachable. And from an unnamed Democrat lawmaker:
“They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress...They’re creating wreckage, and they can’t obviate that by saying there are no boots on the ground. … There aren’t boots on the ground; there are Tomahawks in the air.”
In my previous post, a guest tries to float (verb usage intentional) the idea that there was no congressional authorization for either of the Iraq Wars, among other actions in which the United States Military has been ordered to engage. Of course the assertion about the two Iraq conflicts was easily disputed. I haven't bothered to look up the others, most of which were conducted by Democrat presidential administrations.
I do hope the Left wing of the congressional Democrats stands firm. We will see.
A great deal of commentary and comments has been generated which compares the horrendous situation in Japan to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Observers note that while New Orleans residents—and even police officers—took disaster’s opportunity to loot businesses and homes, the Japanese survivors of the 9.0 earthquake and the resultant tsunami have absolutely abstained from such behavior. People who know far more about Japan than I have concluded that the absence of such behavior is due to Japan’s singular, nearly undiluted culture—a thousand-year long tradition in which honor is the only thing one has and the loss of which is the greatest loss imaginable.
This makes sense. After all, most material things that are lost can be accrued again relatively quickly while one is still living. Lost honor, however, is very tough to regain and is, sometimes, gone forever.
Some of the comments have bordered on the racialist—that the Japanese don’t loot because it’s not in their racial make-up and that others—namely blacks—do so because it is part of our racial make-up. Leaving aside the insult, I think the difference goes deeper than that, even deeper than the concept of lost honor. There’s something that the Japanese understand which all too many black and other Americans used to understand but now do not: that what one does in public and how one treats his/her neighbor(s) affects not only the individuals involved but also the entire community. This concept applies to local communities and to the larger community; the nation. Not understanding that is the downside of individualism. (Of course, honor-shame cultures have their downsides as well; Japan has a very high rate of suicide.)
I submit that Katrina’s New Orleans was a manifestation of a people—namely black people—who have voluntarily given up their honor and their sense of shame. They have abandoned themselves.
Black Americans—specifically, the descendants of American slavery--are the most American of Americans; I said this before and I’m certainly not the first to make this observation. Unlike all other immigrants to America, our ancestors were forcibly cut off from all of the totems of their various West African tribes: names, languages, family structures, belief systems. These things have buoyed all other ethnic groups—including recent African immigrants—in their sojourn to this country and all of them had the choice to hold onto the elements of their cultures that fit into the American ideal and discard those which were incompatible. American slaves were granted no such luxury. Our ancestors were emptied of their identities and re-created in the image of what America had for them. And, up until roughly fifty years ago, much of that image was molded by oppression and scorn.
However, most black Americans held on tightly to the universal totems of personal and communal honor: love of God, family, love of community, industriousness, self-reliance--all of which also flow and follow from America’s founding document. (That America strayed away from those principles with respect to black Americans isn’t the point, that those principles even existed is. And, with those concrete principles in hand, black Americans were able to point to them and say to other Americans, “live up to your—to our-- principles.”)
We may stem from Africa, but we are not of Africa—not even me. Our character and (sub)culture are wholly American and, largely, our American ancestors fashioned these for themselves--appropriating most of the good things which America had to offer and which largely insulated them from the bad. That is the inheritance which all too many of us have repudiated.
What we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was a microcosm of the character disintegration of this most American of Americans. It wasn’t born of DNA nor of the historical effects of slavery; it was born of the wholesale abandonment of a character tried and refined by fire and of the principles which held black Americans together in prior times of adversity.
If mother and father don’t love child enough to at least try to create the most tried and true environment for the nurturing of that child, it follows that neither mother, nor father, nor child will love and respect neighbors or community. We declined en masse the prescriptions and proscriptions of God regarding the family and allowed government to usurp the place of the head of the family--the husband/father/leader/protector. We abandoned the identity which our forebears shaped for us and put chaos in its place. And when disaster strikes, it’s every man and woman for self. Multiply that times a few million.
In short, the average Japanese person loves his (Japanese) neighbor and does not covet that which belongs to that neighbor. It’s part of their culture—their belief system. And they’ve held to that system without Judaism or Christianity being a significant part of their society. They know who they are and from whence they’ve come.
Matt over at the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts on the so-called 'Worst Generation'.
My parent’s generation spent the wealth that was so painfully earned by their parents. Then, they created failed program after failed program, all paid for with trillions of borrowed dollars. And when the programs were clearly failures, and, in fact, made things worse, they plodded on. The kept following the leftist narrative, and never-ever cut their own benefits, no matter how unsustainable they were. They also rejected the spirit of their parents, who had endured the great depression, and survived WW II. Their parents had sacrificed, but the boomers wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it immediately.
Read the whole piece, ya'all.
While I agree with much of Matt's sentiments, I think the Baby Boomers sometimes get a bad rap. After all, they didn't come up with Social Security. That was second-gen progressive Franklin Roosevelt's idea. The Great Society programs--Medicare, Aid To Families With Dependent Children--were dreamed up by Lyndon Johnson.
No, the Boomers didn't create a lot of the now-crumbling social spending architecture that threatens to destroy America. What many folks in the post WWII generation did was assume that the nationalized Ponzi schemes and subsidization of personal failure they inherited from older generations were going to continue without consequence. With that monumentally absurd analysis in place, the New Left movements that arose in the Baby Boom generation set about creating ideologies and rationalizations that reinforced their flawed assumptions.
Look at one example. Conservatives assert that welfare is destroying the American family. Baby Boom feminists (and their intellectual progeny) argue that the traditional family is outdated and sexist. The nuclear familial arrangement, with its coercion and fundamental unfairness towards women, is not worth being concerned about. The dissolution of that unfair institution is not only necessary, it should be welcomed. Welfare might be hurting marriage and the old family arrangements, but it's just doing the needed work to get society to the post-traditonal family that feminists crave.
While some elements of the Boomer left were busy cementing themselves into soft socialism and cultural Marxism, many others entered into the media. Take a gander at who sets the agenda in much of the MSM. Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the head of the New York Times, was born in 1951. Steve Capus, president of NBC News, was born in 1963. The editor of the Washington Post is Marcus Brauchli, who was born in 1961.
These folks--and many others in the legacy media--are all part of the post-war Baby Boom. How many times have you watched some gauzy nostalgia-laden montage of 60's and 70's era protests/concerts/hippie love-ins/Timothy Leary yammerings? The reason why these dreadful creations are so ubiquitous is because the Boomers who look back at that time so fondly are the ones who make up the majority of American news organizations. Further, most of the contemporary coverage of the baby boom social movements are almost always positive. The excesses of dudes like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman or Bill Ayers are generally airbrushed away. Even better? The self-congratulation to actual accomplishment ratio is usually quite skewed. "Hooray for us, we stopped the Vietnam War and stuff. Also, we listened to the Velvet Underground, so yeah..." Yikes.
Because Baby Boomers--especially lefty boomers--dominate the media, they paint a distorted picture of 60's/70's youth. If you just watched CNN or read Time Magazine, you'd think every teenager in America from 1966 to 1978 was an idealistic acid-gobbling Vietnam War protester who lived on commune in Southern California with her Native American spirit guide, seven sex partners and five children named after various wildflowers while David Crosby constructed ever more elaborate water bongs and Gloria Steinem ritualistically burned her bra. The reality is that boomers during their formative years inhabited a broad continuum, from stern straight-laced traditionalists to wild-eyed liberal doucherockets, and that many of these neat categorizations we're fed just don't add up.
What is the worst sin of the Baby Boomers? The knee-jerk leftism to which some of them continue to bitterly cling is annoying as hell. The unreal self-descriptions and constant back-patting is tiresome. The thing is that none of them would be particularly fatal. They'd just be aggravating.
The most egregious error committed by the Boomers isn't any of that crap. According to Stanley Kurtz, via the great Pundette, the issue for the 'Worst Generation' is the fact that they didn't make babies.
In 2005, I reviewed some of the first books on the subject and concluded that a demographically induced economic crisis could spark a revival of religious traditionalism, a far more radical decomposition of the family, or both.
At the time, it looked as if a possible demographically-induced economic crisis was at least a couple of decades away. We seem to be running ahead of schedule. To a large extent, the economic troubles here and in Europe already factor in the unsustainable entitlements of the future.
Although an economic crisis is imminent, and the underlying cause demographic, I haven’t noticed many calls for increased child-bearing. That is in striking contrast to the world-wide movement in response to the less proximate and more theoretical global warming crisis. It’s a measure of how unthinkable changes in our post-sixties life-styles still are. Yet it doesn’t mean change won’t happen, if and when a demographic-economic crisis truly strikes.
It probably doesn't matter all that much that a lot of Boomer peeps smoked a gazillion pounds of OG Kush looking for a cheap buzz or a spiritual experience or whatever. The tendency for elf-esteem boosting hagiography of 60's and 70's accomplishments doesn't explain our present difficulties. The leftist leaning of many in that generation by itself doesn't damn the post-war generation.
The fact that they couldn't be bothered to squeeze out a few more kids here and there is the lasting destructive legacy of the baby boom demographic. In many cases, it wasn't purposeful. Their intentions were often noble, or at least not totally self-serving anyway. Often there were perfectly rational rationalizations for their reproductive decisions. Career moves, financial choices, a concern for the environment, bad relationships, high divorce rates; all those things tend to slow down the baby-making. More, all of these factors could've happened to any generation.
I really don't think baby boomers sat down as an entire generational cohort and decided to stop making kids as much as their parents did. I also don't think they all planned a demographic collapse that would threaten the entire economic future of the America. There were definitely more than a few Boomers who were worried about overpopulation, but for the most part it was a host of decisions and life events that slowed the Boomer breeding.
The problem here is, like so many other good (or at least not-evil) intentions, America has managed to pave a road right into the abyss with miles of supposedly good plans and allegedly smart ideas. The Boom generation didn't mean for this to happen. Nonetheless, we find ourselves in dire circumstances due to some very misguided decisions.
This is the test of our democracy. Ms Piven must be delighted.
'Delighted?' That repellent old socialist windbag is panting for more of the same as we speak.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where all but the most blinkered left-wing ideologues actually live, Herman Cain throws down a marker.
Big ups to RS McCain for posting this vid. Read the rest of his piece as he makes some good points and includes a smidge of Breitbart magic as well.
As for Herman Cain, he declares, "Wisconsin in ground zero for the rest of America"
Listen to this man. He speaks the God's honest truth here.
As I said in an earlier post, Obama has sent his troops into this fight. Organizing For America pretty much sat on its hands during the 2010 election season. Unlike in November, the President has decided to enter this battle with both barrels blazing. He is gambling that with OFA assistance, rent-a-goon union tactics and good old fashioned media bias, he can get Wisconsin Republicans to back down.
Obama must not be allowed to win this fight.
Ponder this scenario: The GOP in Wisconsin is broken. They give in to Democrat demands and business as usual reconvenes. The consequences from that loss would be dramatic and immediate. First, this will embolden the Obama political hack groups to pull this kind of stuff anytime a fiscally conservative statehouse gets too uppity. If the Cloward/Piven/Alinsky tactic works in CheeseHeadLand, the Left will naturally seek to use these same political moves everywhere else. Obama will send out OFA to infiltrate, disrupt and disarm any state's attempts to slow the growth of government.
Governors from states that are in similarly dire budgetary straits--like all 50 of them--will look at this hypothetical conservative failure in Wisconsin with great interest. They will learn that there is no political gain to be had from trying to evade the budgetary dilemmas they face. Runaway entitlements, public-sector union issues, basic fiscal discipline...all those concerns will go by the wayside. Politicians will instead recalibrate their messages to voters; the big fight in the next election cycle will be which party can best deliver the gubmint cheeeeeeeez to state-dependent voters.
Just a reminder: Even after the compassionate conservatism of the Bush years, Republicans will never--EVER--win that argument. If faced with the prospect of Republicans offering an efficient well-organized welfare state or Democrats promising a generous fluffy relaxing social safety hammock, voters will choose the Donkey Punchers every time. When a little kid cries for a Snickers bar, he really doesn't care how much money Mommy saved when she bought the thing. No, the child only cares that the chocolate goody gets to him as soon as possible and that there is more where that came from. Same thing with is true with the electorate if faced with that kind of 'choice.'
What Obama and the Dems are trying to do is nothing less than the repeal of the 2010 midterms.
Wisconsin might not be America's political Ragnarok. Perhaps I'm misreading just how big this thing is. However, the fact that Barack Obama has decided to expend such effort and has unleashed his rabble-rousers tells me that this is a massive deal.
Daniel Pipes ponders the notion of an Islam compatible with democracy.
Just as Christianity became part of the democratic process, so can Islam. This transformation will surely be wrenching and require time. The evolution of the Catholic Church from a reactionary force in the medieval period into a democratic one today, an evolution not entirely over, has been taking place for 700 years. When an institution based in Rome took so long, why should a religion from Mecca, replete with its uniquely problematic scriptures, move faster or with less contention?
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Pipes breaks down some of the massive hurdles Islam has to leap over in order to embrace democratic ideals.
A point Pipes doesn't touch on is how the modern Western world has treated the various Islamist movements it has run into over the last 50 years. Since Sayyid Qutb gave birth to the modern jihadist movement, elements of the West have been bombarded by various facets of Islamic violence. Whether it has come in the form of stateless entities like al-Qaeda, belligerent theocratic governments or a combination of the two is beside the point.
So how have the elites in America reacted to the decades-long aggression of expansionist Islam? Accomodation, moral equivalence and feckless dhimmitude. Among other pathetic reactions. Then we wonder why Islam continues to pick on us.
Non-Muslims can't do much to reform to Islam. As Pipes notes, that kind of wrenching cultural shift takes a long time. Democratization is not something the West will be capable of accelerating very much.
But that doesn't mean the West has to lay down and accept terrorist Islam's deranged premises about the separation of church and state, the role of women, property rights or religious pluralism. Nor does it have to tolerate the violent acts of murder and mayhem the Qutbist keep throwing at us. Instead of that, the West could decide to tell Islam--through words and deeds--that certain things won't be tolerated. Like honor killings, imposition of sharia, the crushing of religious minorities or female circumsicion.
Would that turn Islam into a religion that welcomes democratic reform? Probably not. But it would probably be better than the subtle message of approval some in the West insist on sending to Islam.
By now, most people have heard about the shooting in Tuscon, Arizona that left six people dead and wounded eighteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. This pointless act of violence by a deranged young man should be denounced by every right-thinking person. Unfortunately, some of our allegedly right-thinking media commentators are trying way too hard to make their ridiculous political points.
First up, here's Howard Fineman, calling on Obama to use the Tuscon shooting for his own purposes.
Now comes Tucson. The deaths there are not about politics, ideology or party. From what we know, Jared Loughman's acts were those of a madman divorced from reality, let alone from public debate.
But that doesn't make Tucson politically meaningless. The president need not, and should not, speak of ideas or programs or parties. What he can speak about, and what perhaps he will speak about, is civility.
Arizona has become a ferociously divided and dangerous place, in which our indispensable need to argue--arguing is, after all, who we are as a people--seems at times to veer into an abyss.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords--"centrist" Democrat, survivor in a district with more Republicans than Democrats and more independent voters than either--has prospered in Congress by crossing lines and doing so with a sense of earnestness and good will.
Like her, the president has been attacked harshly of late from both sides: by progressives who regard him as a sellout, by Tea Partiers who regard him as a power-mad socialist usurper.
He and Giffords think of themselves as fellow travelers on a middle path of civility and compromise in a dangerous world. The president will likely argue that, implicitly if not explicitly.
Fate works in strange ways. This event is the first on the watch of Obama's new chief of staff, and a deal-making, turn-the-heat-down approach to politics is what Bill Daley is all about.
As was the case with Clinton, Obama may be able to remind voters of what they like best about him: his sensible demeanor. Amid the din and ferocity of our political culture, he respectfully keeps his voice down, his emotions in check and his mind open.
That is the pitch, at least. The trick is to make it without seeming to be trying to make it. He will, after all, be speaking at a funeral.
Jeeeeeeeebus.
There is so much fail here, it almost overwhelms reason.
First, Fineman strains mightily against observable reality to draw a connection between Giffords, an actual moderate, and Barack 'I Won'Obama, a hard left statist who has to be dragged kicking and screaming to split the difference with Republicans. In fact, there is no comparison between the Representative and the President besides the fact that they're both Democrats. Quick tip for Fineman: When you call your partisan opponents hostage-takers, you're reaching across the aisle with a sharp left hook to the jaw. If there is a mood of partisan rancor in Arizona--or America--Obama hasn't done anything to alleviate it and done much to perpetuate it.
Even worse is Fineman's fetishization of 'civility'. Note that liberals only care about civility when they're the one's catching a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whooping at the ballot box. The 2010 midterm elections are still a giant source of pain for Democrats and their media enablers. Now that conservatives have a tiny chance to enact some small-government ideas, the professional Left wants Republicans to 'tone down' all this 'hot rhetoric'. In Fineman's five brain cell math, the GOP's insistence on dismantling Obama's health care reform bill = Tucson shooting.
Here's another problem. Homeboy wants America to have more 'civil' political debates. Forget for a moment that for Fineman, a well-mannered conversation means the Democrat Party gets it's way on every issue forever. The bigger issue here is that Fineman wants Barack Obama to score political points at what sort of event? Oh yeah, a funeral. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a scenario more impolite than somebody throwing partisan bon mots over the body of a nine year old child.
Wait, did I say 'impolite'? What I meant to say is 'vulgar and nauseating'.
But hey, maybe Howard Fineman is right. After all, the Paul Wellstone funeral was a rousing success.
Next up, here's Paul Krugman. He's a New York Times columnist and a massive douchetool, but I repeat myself. Watch as this Nobel Prize winner completely beclowns himself.
We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that “the whole Tea Party” was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous “crosshairs” list.
...You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.
This is what it sounds like when liberals wet the bed.
Let's break this down. Krugman wants us to believe that elements of the conservative movement created a climate of hate that led to this shooting. A cursory glance at the artifacts left behind by the shooter proves Krugman wrong. Take a look the alleged murderer's Youtube page. Here are his favorite books.
Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.
Funny. I don't see Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh mentioned in there. Try as I might, I can't find any Tea Party pamphlets or conservative manifestos either. Why, it's almost as if Paul Krugman is using his own political template for what he thinks the American conservative movement is and projecting that distorted image onto the Tucson shooter.
Again, Krugman is arguing that his right-wing bogeymen pushed the attacker to violence. If that were the case, there should be something, even a minute scrap of evidence that suggests that the shooter was influenced by conservatives. In fact, the shooter's most beloved tomes seem far less like a Tea Partier's book club assignment and far more like a slightly off-kilter high school sophomore's summer reading list.
If we want to really pick through the books and find a pattern, you'd be hard-pressed to find any real partisan trend. "Animal Farm", "Fahrenheit 451" and "Brave New World" are well-regarded works of fiction loved by members of the Right, Left and apolitical. If "The Odyssey", "Gulliver's Travels" or "The Old Man and The Sea" are right-wing calls to arms, they're the most well-disguised revolutionary tracts ever. "We The Living" was written by Ayn Rand, so in some bizarre left-wing fever dream, this could be evidence of the shooter's right-wingery. But then what are we supposed to make of "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf"? These are the holy texts of international and national socialism and not exactly beloved political tracts within the conservative movement.
Contrary to Paul Krugman's bullshit on stilts masquerading as sober analysis, there is no coherent political philosophy to be found in the shooter's favorite books. But surely for Krugman to tar the Palin/Beck/Limbaugh axis as inciting violence, there must be something going on in the shooter's intellectual life. Perhaps the attacker's Youtube videos showed Krugman the indications he needed to make his accusations.
Nope. Nothing here.
Maybe this video?
Once more, we find nothing in the attacker's personal statements that indicate that he had any intellectual connection to the Tea Party, conservatives or Sarah Palin. That begs the question: From what part of the political spectrum did the shooter come from? If you answered "Insane Street In The Nutbar Development Right Smack Dab In the Middle of Crazyville", give yourself a gold star. You just did better at examining the motivations of the Tucson gunman than an overpaid undersmart New York Times hack.
Howard Fineman and Paul Krugman: Kindly go to the back of the short bus, sit down and shut the hell up. Your services are no longer required. For anything. Ever.
UPDATE: RE-Violent political rhetoric.
Paul Krugman had a pathetic crying jag over Sarah Palin's 'infamous' targeting of vulnerable Democrat representatives for the 2010 midterms. If that picture...which I had never seen until today...is so inflammatory, what about the DailyKos? Jim Treacher finds this little gem.
"[Gabrielle Giffords] is dead to me."
BoyBlue posted this diary on January 6th, 2011. By Paul Krugman's dainty standards, this is eliminationist rhetoric that contributes to a climate of violence. But since this angry missive came from the a left-wing site, I guess this doesn't count. It's just sober political talk, right Paul?
What's even cooler is that Markos Moulitsas took down the post. Yup. It's gone down the memory hole. If it was done out of a sense of class or fear of political blowback is anybody's guess.
The Giffords shooting has already turned into a left-wing cluster bang. The problem is that it's only going to get worse.
UPDATE II: Of course, more elements of the progressive movement have chimed in blaming conservatives for the shooting. One problem: It's not right-wingers publicly calling for violence.
Hey Eugene Robinson, Joshua Marshall, and Keith Olbermann: Your propaganda cartoonist, your socialist-apologizing little pissant artist, your tantrum-throwing scribbler is the one that is saying that America needs violent revolution to fix it. It's not the Right that's saying this stuff. It's Ted Rall, respected member of the statist movement, that's proposing a violent overthrow. Then you have the nerve to use some maniac with no political motivation beyond his own insanity as a tool to try to make your patent lies about conservatives stick.
The fact that this leftist narrative coalesced so quickly tells us a few things about liberals. They're liars. Ironically, for a political movement that breaks it's arm patting themselves on the back for being geniuses, the left revels in group-think. Worse, there is absolutely no tactic too low for them. The only thing they care about is if the strategy works to wound their enemies.
UPDATE III: Eugene Robinson says that the Right has a monopoly on violent political rhetoric. Check out this link [WARNING: Not Safe For Work] and you tell me-Is Eugene Robinson senile or is he just conveniently lying about the eight years of liberal demonstrations during the Bush presidency when Robinson talks about the Right's supposed lead-pipe lock on inflamatory partisan rhetoric?
Face facts. Many elements of the Left spent the Dubya years using the most vile, disgusting, hate-filled language against America, Israel, the American conservative movement and others that progressives deemed as enemies of their movement. MSNBC, The New York Times and many other left-of-center media organs did nothing to condemn this broiling leftist rage. In fact, many of them stoked the fires of partisan hate while pretending to be sane comentators. Eugene Robinson and others in the 'respectable' liberal camp want us to forget all that vitriol--again, emanating solely from the Left--and focus on a single political graphic used by Sarah Palin as evidence that the Right is the only part of US political life that employs violent rhetoric.
First, Glenn Reynolds on what the GOP should do in 2011:
...ignore the press. The establishment media still have their power, but they've never been weaker, and they're perceived by an ever-greater percentage of Americans as simply an arm of the political-class Democratic Party. If you pay attention, they have power over you. If you do what you think is right, they don't.
Historically speaking, this seems to be the hardest thing for many Republicans inside the Beltway to do.
The social scene in Washington DC is chock full of soft (and hard) statists. If it was up to the swells at the Washington Post, the federal government would always grow. And really, why should any of the smart set in the media-government complex want conservative governance? Getting back to a limited constitutionally based federal apparatus would mean the end of the taxpayer funded gravy train.
The other thing that the incoming Republicans must realize is that the media hates them. Not 'dislikes'. Not even 'disagrees with'. Hates. A freshman GOP congressman might get a few invitations to DC cocktail parties if he votes against some piece of conservative legislation. Attending those soirees comes at a cost. The very necessary reform of our government will be stymied, of course. More importantly for the Republican gadfly, hanging with the Washington kool kid set means being a slave to their whims. The media only loves GOPers when they take a crap on Righties. Once the apostate Representative votes for right-of-center programs, the big media folks will turn off their Strange New Respect.
Next, Jay Cost has some sic transit gloria mundi-style words:
...what's most memorable about the 1946 election is that it wasn't a harbinger of a post-New Deal realignment. Two years later, the Republicans were swept out of power as thoroughly as they had been swept in, and apart from a brief and bare majority at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, they wouldn't recapture a House majority until they were led by a guy named Newt. What happened?
One major reason for the GOP's failure to retain the majority was the response of the Democratic party to the results of 1946, wherein the party moved quickly to outflank the GOP on the Communist issue. It's no coincidence that Americans for Democratic Action -- a liberal interest group that was resolutely anti-Communist -- was founded in January 1947 just as the 80th Congress convened. President Truman fought the Republicans tooth and nail on domestic politics over the next two years, but on foreign affairs he and the Republicans, led by Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, hammered out a bipartisan policy that would remain in place more or less for the next quarter century. What's more, under the advice of his political counselors, he also went after Henry Wallace, the former cabinet secretary and vice president whom Truman had fired after he publicly promoted a soft stance on the Soviets. Wallace's third party candidacy in 1948 was just what Truman needed to push most of the Soviet sympathizers out of the Democratic coalition, thus undermining one of the major Republican arguments from 1946.
The GOP's big pick ups during the 2010 midterm elections happened--in part--because voters are nervous about galloping Obama style liberalism. There is a deep concern amongst the citizenry about runaway spending, crippling debt, long term unemployment and the perception that government is incompetent when dealing with real world problems. In early January, it seems impossible that Obama and the Democrats could outmaneuver the GOP on the small-government/entitlement reform/jobs front. But it is very possible. The Republicans aren't known as 'The Stupid Party' for nothing.
If the GOP lets Democrats retake the high ground, they will forfeit a massive opportunity. They will throw away the nation's best--and possibly last--chance to get America back to a Constitutional framework. Worse for the GOP, they'll irreparably damage their small government brand. There are already more than a few conservatives who don't trust the Republicans as it is. Let the GOP go back to their Hastert-era big stupid spendaholic ways and you can almost garauntee the formation of a right-wing third party.
The Republicans can take bold solid steps to reform the federal government. Or they can devolve and die. The choice is in their hands.
Ever wonder why there doesn't seem to be a lot of genuine stars in pop culture anymore?
Well, John Nolte comes up with a pretty sharp zinger of an explanation.
Any actor who chooses to make something — anything, including their sexuality – a part of their identity, limits how the public will perceive them up on the screen. This is true for straight actors as well, especially those who have made their sexuality a big part of who they are. Beneath all that Barbie doll there might be a genuine actress, but Pam Anderson’s very public sex kitten persona limits her roles. And just to be fair and non-partisan… In his later years, it simply wouldn’t have been possible for Charlton Heston to play an anti-gun ACLU type without harming the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief. The whole idea would’ve come off as some kind of in-joke, and if that joke wasn’t meant to be part of the overall story you have something of a disaster on your hands.
Read the whole thing. Nolte takes a few whiney gay actors down a peg or two in his piece. Heads up, Richard Chamberlain. "The Thorn Birds" really wasn't all that great.
Nolte touches on something very basic, but something that a lot of entertainers forget nowadays. It's the mystery that keeps people interested in media personalities long after the person has reached their creative zenith. Nothing sustains a career in pop culture more than some strategic obfuscation to keep the audience guessing.
For instance, the private lives of the members of Led Zeppelin were anything but common knowledge back in the 70's. Beyond the fact that three members were married and that they all lived in England, the public didn't have much access to Zep. The band consciously cultivated a nearly impenetrable mystique, which kept people wondering about them. This aura of mystery--along with the undeniable songwriting talent--helped to make Led Zeppelin a massively successful band.
Consider this little nugget about Zep: In 1975 the band released Physical Graffiti, their sixth studio album. Members of the band gave very few interviews to support the release of their album. There were no cameras following Jimmy Page around to document his every move. Robert Plant didn't discuss his political affiliation or his partisan ideology. John Paul Jones and John Bonham were likely to jokingly sneer or angrily snarl at any reporter who asked them who they voted for in the last election. The group didn't mention the causes or charities they support. Led Zeppelin simply let the music speak for themselves.
The results? Physical Grafitti immediately became a massive seller. Not only that, the group's entire back catalogue re-entered the Top 200 as well. The tour that supported the album was incredibly lucrative as well. Led Zeppelin had become the biggest band of the 1970's.
Distance between the musicians and their audience was critical to Led Zeppelin's success. For actors, that sense of mystery is even more important. A rock vocalist is basically playing himself...or at least some facet of his personality...when he writes, records or performs music. An actor is playing a different person everytime he takes on a new role. That means that the actor's real personality can't be so well-known that it smothers the part he's trying to play.
This is not to say that successful actors don't create personas. However, there's a big difference between a 'type' and 'My actual self and my movie self are pretty much the same'. Sean Penn may have been a talented actor back in the Yuri Andropov era, but any role he takes nowadays is overpowered by his off-screen leftwing douchebaggery. The only movie persona Penn has left is the one he plays in the real world--Thumbsucking Liberal Hack/Commie Dictator Apologist/Smug Peace Creep.
To see how a real star should operate, look at Kurt Russell. Russell is a member of the Libertarian Party, but he doesn't make a huge deal about it. Surely the man has causes that he champions, but you don't hear him talk about them all that much. It's common knowledge that he's in a long term relationship with Goldie Hawn, but Russell hasn't put the intimate details of his sexual history into the public record. Consequently, there is no outsized real-world Kurt Russell that fights against the roles he takes.
Look at Russell's performance in the flawed sci-fi action flick "Soldier". Compare that to his work in the more successful comedy "Overboard". Both movies call for very different kinds of acting, but because Russell doesn't have a lot of off-camera drama going on, he's entirely believable as both a near mute futuristic warrior or as a charming modern day rogue. Viewers might not connect with everything Russell does--homeboy is just as prone to the occasional cinematic dud as anybody else in show biz--but his private life never interferes with movie goers' suspension of disbelief.
The modern entertainment business can't seem to grasp the absolutely vital necessity for mystery. Instead, the stars blab about their politics, their personal lives and their STD's at the drop of a hat. As a result, the lack of separation between the performer and the audience has made the art small and the artists even smaller.
The political composition of U.S. adults held fairly steady in 2010 compared with 2009. Conservatives remained the largest group, followed by moderates and then liberals. At 35%, the percentage of moderates has declined to a new low, highlighting the increased political polarization that has occurred over the past decade.
...While the political pendulum in Washington can swing widely, Americans' political ideology, like their party identification, tends to shift more gradually. Such a shift has been underway in recent years. While the changes are not large, they are unmistakable. Moderates are growing fewer in number while the percentages of conservatives and liberals have expanded. Conservatism has gained ground among Republicans and independents, while the growth in liberalism is strictly among Democrats.
Liberals will look at the Gallup poll and have an immediate response: "What about 2008? Liberalism won in that year."
Sure about all that, Nancy? Obama ran as a sane, cool-headed moderate. Conservatives warned that St. Barry was a flaming lefty, but most voters either couldn't be bothered to dig too deeply into Obama's troubling ideological pedigree or just didn't think it was that big a deal considering the Bamster's GOP opponent. In 2008, Republican George Bush was presiding over a crumbling economy and two foreign wars, one of which was fairly unpopular. John McCain ran a weak-willed feckless campaign that did much to alienate and demoralize his very necessary conservative base. When he did do something right--like pick Sarah Palin for VP--the campaign promptly misused that most valuable asset when it couldn't afford even the slightest mistake. If the Democrats couldn't win big in that electoral year, they were never going to score a major victory.
Again, how did the Donkey-Punchers get their wins in '08 and '06? (I throw 2006 in because it set the table for the unified Democrat government of the last two years.) They ran guys such as Bob Casey, Jon Tester and James Webb, men who could pull off a fake-o-la centrist political stance when needed. Look at the Democrat campaign messages in those years. 'Open, honest, transparent government'. 'Most ethical congress ever.' '95% of Americans will see a tax cut.' The self-description we got from the Democrats in 2006-2008 could be summed up as: "We're in the middle of the road and we're not Bush. Pretty please vote for us and we'll be your BFF's."
By the fall of 2008, Dubya was seen as ideologically brittle and only slightly more popular than raw sewage, shin splints and homelessness. Running in the middle while opposing Bush was smart strategy for the Democrats. However, while it may have been the politically intelligent move, it was not--and is not--what anybody would consider openly left-wing.
Liberalism did not win in 2006. It did not win in 2008. Instead, it cloaked itself in moderation, a reasonable tone and...in the case of Barack Obama... a pretty princess visage. While the Left bided it's time, George Bush, Denny Hastert and most of the elected GOPers busied themselves with soiling the party's small government brand.
Once the Left ascended in 2008, with it's big congressional majorities and an ideologically copacetic presidency, how did it govern? Like progressive statists, of course. Now, if liberalism were truly on the rise, why did America's left-of center party get creamed in the off-year elections of 2009 and subsequently pummelled in the 2010 midterms?
The Gallup poll gives us some very important lessons about American politics. First, it shows just how aberrational the 2008 election was in relation to the ideology of the America electorate. More importantly, the Gallup data indicates that US voters will be potentially quite receptive to conservative policy initiatives if these ideas are articulated and fought for with vigor.
Cross-Posted at Blog De KingShamus. Big ups to the rad Baldilocks for letting me hang out and post here.
How many times have we said that to ourselves or to others? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds?
For conservatives, the freedom-crushing size and liberty-lessening scope of the federal government is an ironclad fact, as true as water being wet or Lady Gaga being a first order publicity whore. Liberals have a ready retort when right-wingers complain about the growth of the DC leviathan. "What would you cut?"
I think it’s time for all Americans to step-up to the plate and help take some pressure off the President, the Senators, the Congressmen, all the Czars and Agency Heads, and etc. I think that We The People have just plain been asking too much from our leaders and the strain is beginning to tell on them.
Here’s the problem. Our leaders in Washington just have too much on their plate and it’s all our fault for demanding so much from them.
...So here is what I think we should do. Let’s institute what I call Government Light. I think We The People need to dramatically reduce the work load on our poor public servants. I’ve got some ideas on how we could do that. Instead of al these zillions of things we’ve been asking government to do for us I have a much shorter lists of what we should be willing to settle for:
Provide for the common defense. You know. A military to protect us from our enemies and to protect our borders from invasion.
To create a body of objective laws to protect the God-given rights of all citizens.
Develop a judicial system to capture those that break the laws and try them and to punish the guilty.
Establish a stable monetary system.
Develop and maintain a national infrastructure in order that commerce can freely occur between state and with other nations.
I think if our government only had to focus on these five things, the mental health of our public servants would improve dramatically and We The People could take care of the rest of our needs instead of burdening government for everything.
Jim from the always-interesting Conservatives On Fire has come up with a nice working framework.
There's just one problem with it. It's not the drastic withdrawl of the central government from citizens' lives. It's not the austerity measures that would result from these new directives. In fact, none of those things are terrible in and of themselves.
No, the issue is that CoF's plan assumes that liberals have created the mega-state in order to actually solve problems. In fact, that's only a very small part of the left's reasoning vis-a-vis the ever-growing federal gubmint beast. The major snag with Jim's program is that it won't allow hacks to rob from the taxpayers.
Ponder the omnibus spending bill that just took a dump in Harry Reid's mattress. The thing was designed to be massive and impenetrable. The Senate Democrats tried to get it passed in December, after the Donkey-Punchers got their heads handed to them in the midterm elections. It was also brought to the Senate during a time when the American voter is most inattentive. The bill was loaded with pork in the hopes that Senators and those constituents who were paying attantion could be bought off.
Limited government is great. But if you're really looking to redistribute wealth and pad you're own fiefdom, there's nothing like the crazy unlimited variety of government to do the trick.
Further thoughts: I realize that the latest omnibus spending toothache was smashed. But over the years, this type of gargantuan budget bill--packed to the rafters with ridiculous earmarks, porktastic programs and barely concealed graft--have passed through Republican and Democrat congresses with relative ease. Conservatives won a victory of sorts by killing Senator Reid's fantasy budget, but it's one win in a sea of defeats.
Let's look at a random year...2003...and see what fiscal idiocy we can find.
$44,239,000for projects in the state of Senate Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee member Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and House Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee member Tom Latham (R-Iowa), including: $33,000,000 for the National Animal Disease Center in Ames; $700,000 for the Midwest Poultry Consortium; $280,000 for the Iowa Vitality Center; $235,000 for dairy education; $210,000 for hoop barns; and $100,000 for the Trees Forever Program.
We can draw a few conclusions from this wee nugget of fail. Maybe there was a need for a National Animal Disease Center in Iowa. The Hawkeye State, like many parts of the Midwest, is deeply invested in agriculture. Perhaps there such an institution had to be started by federal dollars.
This begs the question: What about the private sector? Did nobody ever think to create a company to deal with animal diseases before Tom Harkin...one of the dimmer bulbs in a dimbulb-centric US Senate...came along? Furthermore, what about state governments? Had nobody without DC cash been able to study or treat ailments that afflict our four-legged friends before 2003?
Beyond the dubious need for the National Animal Disease Center comes another realization: We're still paying for it. The NADC is part of the United States Department of Agriculture, thus federal dollars are used to hireand retain workers. What about building maintenance or cafeteria staffing? That's on us as well. Much like the Corporation For Public Broadcasting or Ben Affleck, the NADC is the government-friendly hole that keeps on sucking.
Bear in mind that this is just one relatively small portion of the 2003 federal budget turd sandwich. Buried within that bill was an army of ridiculous spending. Taken individually, these more or less tiny chunks of pork look like the cheesy punchline to a lame joke. Put together, they amount to nothing less than the biggest heist in history, making the most lucrative bank robberies, Ponzi schemes or Soros currency shenanigans seem minute in comparison.
More depressing than that? The 2003 appropriations bill represents just one year's worth of porky goodness. This spending is not an abberation. It was, and pretty much still is, business as usual.
And that's the problem. People do not want to be bothered paging through a gazillion pages of legalese and congress-talk to separate the worthy wheat from the wasteful chaff. More, folks have heard so many stories about $50 hammers and $100 toilet seats that they've become numb to it. Inertia and inattention have conspired to make the federal budget very hard to shrink. The budget creation process was designed to keep people in the dark about just how much they've been getting robbed.
The last omnibus bill was defeated, which is a good thing. With any luck, it's the start of a movement to reign in federal spending and--more importantly--scale back the influence Washington DC has in our daily lives.
Here before us is another reason we, the outsiders, the TEA Party folks in action and spirit, must show no quarter towards the GOP Establishment. Besides living in a collegial and congenial past that no longer is [call it what you will, the Gerald Ford or Bob Michael Era], the GOP and conservative Elites have a track record that is strewn with utter and abysmal failures. In fact, historians not yet born will label them as the Useful Idiots of the Left who, by their weaknesses and naiveté, help bring about the lamentable situation we now find ourselves in.
Bingo. Read the rest of his post; Bob's got some good stuff in there.
This is what kills me when people talk about the Republican establishment and their fetishization of electability. It's one thing to acknowledge that RINOs and moderates can often get elected easier (in certain states/districts/campaigns) than a rock-ribbed across-the-board rightwinger. This is a fact that we shouldn't simply dismiss out of hand. For instance: looking back on the particular circumstances of the race, Mike Castle probably had a better chance of winning the Senate election in Delaware than Christine O'Donnell.
However, what would we--actual factual conservatives--have gained by getting Castle into the Senate? He would've voted for Cap-n-Tax in a potential dead-duck congressional session. He was still going to be pro-choice and anti-Second Amendment. Knowing his record, his first term in the US Senate would've been marked by ArlenSpecterian hands-across-the-aisle moments of capitulation to various facets of the liberal nanny-state agenda. A hug for Obama would not have been completely out of the question.
Would a guy like Mike Castle, a classic go-along-to-get-along DC establishmentarian, have the stomach for repealing ObamaCare? What makes anybody think Castle would be capable of defunding the utterly wretched NPR or abolishing the utterly useless Department of Energy? In what possible scenario would a guy like Mike Castle vote against illegal immigration amnesty? Could Mike Castle, famous for his chummy, clubby attitude towards Democrats, actually go along with his own party on something substantive like real free-market entitlement reforms? Many signs point to an emphatic 'no.'
Not only would a potential Senator Mike Castle be a thorn in the side of conservatives, he'd be doing everything he can to damage the already-tarnished Republican brand. While he was busy building a media-backed Fiefdom of Royal RINOLand, he'd also happily throw monkey wrenches into GOP-backed fiscal discipline measures.
So conservatives would get lots of drawbacks and almost no benefits from a Senator Mike Castle. But the Tea Party and it's allies were supposed to forget all that because Mike Castle happened to have a weak 'R' behind his name? Really?
If you really think about it, the United States has been granted an embarrassment of riches. Within our borders are vast quantities of natural resources. We have abundant fertile land that feeds not only ourselves, but much of the world. America is vast in size, buffeted by oceans that grant her a measure of separation from the potential unrest that has marked the history of the Old World. In short, Americans should spend every Thanksgiving expressing undying gratitude to their Creator for giving the country so many wonderful advantages.
As much as resources, climate and size matter, America has been granted something even greater than all those things. As the writer Julian Simon noted, people are the greatest natural resource. If that's the case--and it is--the US armed forces are a sterling example of Simon's fundamental truth. For Thanksgiving, I decided to take a look at one particular great American.
In his Silver Star citation, Marine 2nd Lt. Brian M. Stann is praised for his "zealous initiative, courageous actions and exceptional presence of mind" during seven days of fighting in Iraq.
But Stann, now a captain, is not into fame or self aggrandizement.
"It’s not about awards, especially when you’re out there," said Stann, 27. "It’s about defeating the enemy and getting your boys out alive."
From May 8 to May 14, 2005, Stann was part of Operation Matador with 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines.
The action started when Stann’s platoon was given about 35 minutes’ notice that it needed to head to the Ramana Bridge, north of Karbala...Aother unit was supposed to provide a blocking position at the bridge, but when they couldn’t make it on time, Stann’s platoon was sent to fill the gap.
As it turned out, a lot of the enemy had settled in that area. Stann said his platoon was engaged in a "constant gunfight" until it was relieved, and then he and his Marines had to fight their way back to base.
The worst fighting was May 10, when his platoon was sent back to the bridge to stay and got ambushed on the way, he said.
The insurgents hit Stann’s platoon with roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide car bombs, destroying a Humvee and a tank recovery vehicle that was hauling wounded, he said.
"We had a rough night."
Stann’s Silver Star citation briefly summarizes his actions during the ambush.
“Second Lieutenant Stann personally directed two casualty operations, three vehicle recovery operations and multiple close air support missions under enemy small arms, machine gun and mortar fire in his 360-degree fight," the citation reads.
Stann didn’t want to get into specifics about what he did during the fighting.
"Everyone has done some courageous things," he said. "It’s just part of our calling. It’s part of our job."
Instead, Stann preferred to talk about his Marines.
Despite the casualties and carnage, they did not panic, he said. They kept their heads, beat back the enemy and evacuated their wounded.
"Because of that, the casualties that we did take did survive," Stann said. "Guys that lost limbs lived. Guys that took shrapnel and things of that nature to the head lived, and they wouldn’t have lived if we hadn’t have done that."
Throughout their deployment, Stann’s Marines focused on their job, whether it meant sleeping in their Humvees on hot nights or manning a machine gun at 2 a.m., he said.
Stann, who was born at Yokota Air Base in Japan and then moved to Scranton, Pa., said his Silver Star represents what the Marines under his command accomplished.
"They executed flawlessly, and we’re talking 19- to 20-year-old kids, and these are tougher situations than 90 percent of Americans will face," he said.
In your time today, please say a prayer for our armed forces.
More importantly, we should thank God that America still produces men and women like Captain Brian Stann. We will chow down on our turkeys and potatoes and gravy in large part because of the efforts of incredibly brave folks. They are more courageous than most of us will ever have to be. For that, we should be eternally grateful.
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, I'm reading right now. And so did singer/musician Eric Clapton, economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, media titan Oprah Winfrey, NBA great Shaquille O'Neal and many, many other successful, responsible and law-abiding Americans of various races, famous and unknown.
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