baldilocks

What's in Your Coconut?

I notice patterns, more so now than back when I was a young woman--likely because my head was filled with fruitless things with which, all too often, young, single women occupy themselves. It was too crowded in there. Too bad. The ability to recognize patterns could have done me some good back then, both professionally and personally. But, it was what it was. And now, the patterns of life are pretty much all I think about. Allow me to expound on at least one.

Many people subscribe to subjective truth--that each person possesses his/her own truth that may be different from another individual's truth and I have noticed how normalized this way of thinking has become.

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a man, a friend of a friend, on the definition of earning money. For whatever reason, he thought that any money that a person legally possessed was automatically earned--that legal possession and earning were synonymous. We went back and forth about this until I put forth the following scenario: a man is walking down a street and sees a dollar on the sidewalk. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Is it legally his? We agreed that it was. But did he earn it? I'd like to think I won the argument. But I found it alarming that, somehow, the gentleman I was talking to--a reasonably intelligent man--had bound up earning and the legal possession in his mind.

Then there was another conversation with another person about the ethnicity of Jesus the Christ. This lady was adamant that Jesus in the flesh was not a "white European" in the manner in which He is often rendered. I agreed, but in the conversation, the passage in The Revelation describing Jesus' hair was cited. Here it is:

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow…

--Revelation 1:14 (KJV, emphasis mine)

The lady contended that this passage was describing the texture of His hair; that it was like wool, and, therefore concluded that Jesus was "black." When I countered that the passage only described the color of His hair and nothing about the texture, she said that I wasn't "interpreting" the passage correctly. This particular conversation did not end as hopefully as the previous one. (As for Jesus' "race," I am...ahem...agnostic on the subject. Moreover, I don't think it matters.)

But whatever one thinks about the truth of the Bible or the proper translation from its original languages into English, it's fascinating to note that even an English description of a thing is open to "interpretation" in the minds of some; that an explicit mention of a color has many meanings outside of its scope.

And, by fascinating, I mean scary.

I don't think this type of thinking is an anomaly and I certainly don't think that the widespread inculcation of this type of thinking is accidental.

A few years back, I coined the term Coconut Treatment. It didn't catch on but it's still useful for the purpose of recognizing this particular pattern:

Take a coconut, slice it in half, scoop out the meat from both halves and toss the meat—the substance--into the garbage disposal. Then take a pile of dog manure that Fido deposited into your yard, fill both halves of the coconut shells with it and glue the halves back together. What do you have now?

A "coconut."

This is what has happened to words and concepts in the minds of many and it is the fruit of primary, secondary, and collegiate education also known as the Great Dumbing Down. The fruit has been emptied of its nutrients and then painted over or glued back together and called "fruit." At some point, individual words and concepts became subjective. That is, they became fluid and not set in stone. My old blog friend, Jeff Goldstein, has a series of posts on this phenomenon, and a lot of people didn't get that he was talking about this very thing.

(I was going to say that the idea of subjective definition is more common among those with bachelor degrees or higher, but, in the past few years, I've noticed that many who don't have much formal education also subscribe to the notion. The difference between the two groups is this: the latter are less likely to believe in subjective meaning and, even those who do will shake off this idea once it is pointed out and explained. The former tend to be too well indoctrinated.)

Being one of those with less formal education, I had long observed this phenomenon, but until I read Jeff’s intentionalism series, I didn’t know how to articulate it. Then, in last week’s Sunday Morning Book Thread at Ace’s place, OregonMuse, the book thread master, added to my informal education by posting the following

Postmodernism is a complex of concepts that asserts that all our constructs are just that, constructs; that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is necessarily a limited and local one.

and said, jokingly, that

One year of free AoSHQ Premium content goes to the first [person] who spots the giant logical hole in this worldview.

So, being insufficiently indoctrinated with the Coconut Treatment, I was the first one to point out the hole.

According to postmodern logic, postmodernism itself is a construct and, therefore, limited and local.

And, of course, that means that postmodernism, itself, is false, illegitimate and a mere power move, by the postmodern narrative’s own logic.

I started writing this post weeks ago, and, after reading OregonMuse’s post, it occurred to me that postmodernism is the very fecund parent of subjective definition. Oh, I’m know that I’m not the first person to come to this conclusion, but, keep these things in mind: I have only a two-year degree and, what little I do know and think about comes from volitional reading, observation and from thinking ideas through to the end. (I had heard of postmodernism, but whenever I began to read anything written by its adherents, my eyes began to close.)

Something else that occurred to me about postmodernism, besides its logical fallaciousness, is that its advent has been long predicted. Speaking of the perilous times in the Last Days, Paul in his second letter to his protégé, Timothy, writes this:

But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.

--2 Timothy 3:13 (KJV, emphasis mine)

Lying and being lied to.

Postmodernists like to make their written offerings seemingly complicated, but such are really quite simple, and I mean that in both senses.

It is but one big gigantic lie, negating itself even. Above, I likened postmodernism to a mother with countless children and those who read the Bible know who the father is. Subject truth and definition? The Lie-baby.

It’s up to each individual to see the lies for what they are, to shake off the indoctrination.

 

Guardian Writer--"I Wish My Mother Had Aborted Me" (KingShamus)

The pro-choice movement:  They thirst for death.

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 Morons^tm and Moronettes^tm!

Was He or Wasn't He?

Well. Would you look at that?

I still don’t believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  But please don’t react before considering my reasoning.

As most of my readers know, like Barack Obama, my biological father is Kenyan and my mother is American. Mom--no fan of the president’s, to be sure--does not believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya either.  Her reasoning makes sense. 

Mom went to Germany as a young teen—she’s a military brat—and, as a result, is familiar with the international transport procedures of the 1950s and 1960s. (Coolness factor: she returned to the United States by sea.)

Additionally, Mom gave birth to me in the same month and year that Stanley Ann Obama gave birth to Barack Obama.  Armed with intimate knowledge of travel and child-birth in the Dark Ages, Mom says that there is no way that Stanley Ann Obama could have given birth in what was then British East Africa, gotten papers, immunizations, etc. in order, and made it back to the other side of the world in time to apply for extension courses from the University of Washington (state) two weeks after her son was born.

Assuming that the details surrounding the president’s birth and his mother’s actions during that period are accurate (yes, I know), I don’t think the birthplace was a mistake by his literary agent as that agent claims.

It was a purposeful inclusion by the author.  Roger Simon agrees and thinks that this issue is related to the MSM’s refusal to vet the president’s college transcripts.

Barack Obama has a history of dissembling—much of it designed to make himself look better than the average American, especially the average black American.  It wasn’t enough for him that his father was Kenyan; he had to make himself even better by claiming to be born there. “Better?” I hear you ask. Yes, better, from the perspective of a person long-simmered in hatred of this country.

Allow me to give a little insight to the mindset. Often, when I mention that my biological father is Kenyan, people assume that I was born in Kenya as well, usually in the context that it is better to have been born somewhere other than in the United States.  The assumption is an irritant for two reasons: 1) I am “proud” and grateful to have been born in the United States of America, and 2) If I had been born in Kenya, there would be no reason whatsoever to mention the birthplace of my father.

If Barack Obama did lie on his literary bio, did this bit of lying in the service of pride of self and hatred for this country back-fire on him?  Can't say that it has. That bio has been in the public domain for all to see since 1991, but no entity of the mainstream media saw fit to present this very pertinent fact to the American voting public.  Fancy that.

Then, again, what happens if he wasn’t lying?

 

DeWayne Wickham: Get Back On The Democrat Plantation, Gay Republicans! (KingShamus)

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?

It's only strange if you're DeWayne Wickham.

Yes, We Do Need To See Obama's Transcripts (KingShamus)

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.

Sarah Palin Pwns The Media--Again (KingShamus)

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.

Keep Being Douchebags, Howard Fineman & Paul Krugman (KingShamus)

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.

A Democratic Congresswoman has been shot in the head; another dozen were also shot.

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.

Amazing.

Thanks to Political Math, who found the Lefty Hall of Shame link (NSFW) and posted it on his twitter feed.

You want a perfect summation of the RINO? (King Shamus)

Here it is, courtesy of Bob Belvedere.

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?

(Cross-Posted at Blog De KingShamus)