Underground Limestone Castle

They doth protest too much....

2011-12-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

While the Tea Party is judged - with news media fostering a judge-jury-and-executioner role - as a kind of homeless shelter for racists, the "Occupy (fill in the blank)" movement has been hailed as Democracy's great hope. The topic of media favoritism is a favorite of this blog, but there's a much more serious issue at hand, which is the conviction of the "Occupy" folks that capitalism is evil.

That such a statement is taken as a perfectly acceptable and even laudable stance is a dire warning for our way life: a significant portion of the population has been brought up with this notion as a kind of gospel. Don't believe it? Look through a college course catalog, read student papers, listen to the somber pronouncements by supposedly wise men and women that equitable distribution of wealth is not only a desirable goal, but a moral imperative.

With this in hand, it makes perfect sense to camp out at the doorstep of Wall Street, and denounce "Those *** with their ***-in' yachts", and such (Hat tip: A&G). Never mind that it is crony capitalism that is largely responsible for the corrupt bubbles that have plagued homeowners and shareholders alike; what really irks the protesters is the notion that some people have so much, and too many have so little. No further analysis is needed; the mere fact that some super-rich guy has tons more money than you or I do is diagnosed as proof positive that an injustice has taken place, thus the need for "Social Justice", a recently-coined phrase that, while little more than fascism in a new suit, has captured the imagination of the young - well, not really; there's plenty of adults around who ought to know better, but apparently, the much-vaunted "Critical thinking" that was supposedly being offered as instruction in our higher-education system was merely a new pair of blinders.

Gone is the insight by Adam Smith that a mutually-beneficial exchange actually enriches both parties to a transaction; it is much more satisfying to locate and condemn the perceived evil of wealth; the thought process returns to the time when wealth was something that grew in the ground, or was picked off a tree - there was a finite amount of it, and the only way to possess it was by taking it away from someone else.

Flash forward to the present, where we are treated to lectures about the "Ever-widening gap between rich and poor" which is apparently the greatest threat to our social fabric. It's a classic case of misdiagnosing a symptom for the wrong illness. One of the best illustrations of the "Occupy" movement's inherent contradictions was its love for using technology to push its platforms; thus did we see protesters, blogging, tweeting, IM-ing, Facebook-updating, flash-mobbing, and iphoning, all the time rhapsodizing about its purported disdain for corporate greed, while lining the pockets of - gasp! - corporations!

But this amusing juxtaposition is merely an illustration of thought gone off the rails. It's time to de-throne the notion that wealth is evil; a single semester of studying the ideas of Adam Smith would do wonders to our national dialogue, but sober analysis is just not as exhilarating as denouncing an enemy; thus do we have an army of educators, technocrats, and government-dependents, shouting that our salvation lies in state administration of - well, everything. As usual, those who are so quick to denounce government sloth and waste are at the same time apparently willing to turn over the entire notion of private-party contracts, which has formed the foundation for America's success.

Well, say the objectors: America is in fact not successful; just look at all the poverty, graffiti, crime, inner-city schools, and such. Again, the disease is not capitalism, but it's more fulfilling, somehow, to blame the image of Monopoly men, fat-cat bankers, and corporate jets going to Las Vegas than it is to figure out why so many children are being raised in one-parent households (if that many).

The protestors would do well to look beyond the actions of banks, which primarily exist to invest money in as many different places as possible, and look to the examples of government collusion with business that result in so much market imbalance. While GE's CEO lectures us on the need for more tax revenue, his company's accomplishment of avoiding taxes completely last year gains little scrutiny. While Barney Frank announces "Retirement" after decades of enriching himself through his Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac shenanigans, the rest of the population now has to pay for its failures, number one as a company, and number two, in the form of a severely distressed housing market, which was driven into the ditch primarily by those who now claim that government must do "even more" of the same to solve the problem that was its own creation.

And the view that wealth, and capitalism in particular, are to be accused, tried, and executed, should be put back into the sewer of history.

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Presidential pontification:

If it's Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama, Romney can win.
If it's Newt Gingrich vs. Barack Obama, Obama will win.
If it's Romney-Perry, or even Perry-Romney, Obama could lose.
If it's Romney-Newt, or Newt-Romney, Obama will win.

This is probably not what the so-called "Smart" money is saying, nor is it the line at Vegas, but that's our offering for the "Prediction" racket for 2012.

Finally, a better reason to celebrate Mayday

2011-05-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

The effort to turn Mayday into some sort of international day of socialist brotherhood can now recede into the shadows, as the death of Bin Laden will surely be remembered as clearly as will the anniversary of 9/11. Good-bye and good riddance, beast - if there is a Hell, you will surely be assigned to it.

The unpleasant questions will no doubt follow - e.g., what does this say about our 'ally', Pakistan? Why is the media so desperate to spin this as a bump for Obama's approval ratings? - but for now, it is certainly worth taking a moment to applaud the U.S. military, and dance on Bin Laden's sea-grave.

Goodbye, 2010 - your discourse will not be missed.

2011-01-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

After a late-April entry, this blog went silent for the balance of 2010, and who could blame it? 2010 was a sad year, one in which the process of trading in analysis for blind declarations took great strides. Those who believe that their agendas are justified by cosmic righteousness continued their burning and pillaging, and seem to have recruited many new followers to their cause. As public discourse discovered new lows, mainstream news outlets (supposedly dedicated to the noble cause of impartial fact-gathering) continued their descent into incoherent irrelevance with their ecstatic determination that personal judgment could and should be "the news".

This strategy-philosophy of ends justifying the means was nowhere on clearer display than it was with news "analysts", commentators, opinion pages, op-eds, and all the usual outlets - but their fiery damnation of all those who disagree with them brought the level of debate to shocking new depths.

Do you doubt that 2010 was the worst year ever for reason in debate? Consider:

-Arizona Law

Repackaged by ostensibly centrist citizenry as the coming of the Fourth Reich - and if you're unaware that this level of hyperbole was indulged, just listen to the comments of the Los Angeles City Council (just as though their job description allowed for this sort of thing) - Arizona's new laws dealing with illegals added nothing new to what was already in Federal Law; rather, the state was sick of the feds not enforcing their own laws, and citizens were sick of armed drug gangs, as well as a culture of permissiveness toward anyone from anywhere choosing to take up residency in the state.

Besides the existing much-discussed hypocrisy of selective observation of laws and the blind-eye treatment of racial politicking groups such as La Raza - groups which apparently believe that Mexican nationals should have full entry and residence rights to the U.S. for no particular reason, but don't seem to share such concerns for migrants from China, Rwanda, or Norway - the fiery denunciation of Arizona's law never acknowledged its mirror of Federal law. Such a gaping hole in such circular reasoning should give pause to anyone who thinks that cops are being issued truncheons with which to rough up patrons of ice-cream parlors.

We can and should have debates over the proper number of immigrants to allow into the U.S. - and the open-borders crowd is free to provide any meaningful reasons for its position that it possesses - but far too often, there is an unwillingness to admit to any need of debate whatsoever; it's much easier to refer to non-open-borders people as "Racists" - in fact, it's one of the easiest attack positions to take these days - but its currency is dwindling fast in value, and the naked tribalism of "La Raza" and its brethren is becoming much clearer to ordinary people as the see-no-evil position insists that if the government is putting up signs warning people to stay out of U.S. territory because of Mexican drug cartels, it's still somehow the fault of non-leftist white people.
(Let's face it: groups such as La Raza and its ilk don't care a bit about the best interests of the U.S.; they are only concerned with their tribe - and this is the ideology we were supposed to be moving away from, not re-embracing.)

But of course, the hypocrisy couldn't stop there; the Feds had to publicly distance itself from Arizona's actions, and pretend that they were ready to battle Arizona itself. This is where the two-faced nature of the Obama administration reached new dimensions of shamelessness; Eric Holder, Attorney General and self-proclaimed arbiter of racial debates ("A nation of cowards") announced a legal challenge to Arizona's law without having read the law (by his own admission), just as though a law mirroring Federal Law (which is purposefully being under-enforced) is without legal standing.

Imagine, if you will, a left-friendly blue state passing a law meant to allow local law enforcement to do a job that the Feds have been neglecting, for whatever reason - now, imagine the Bush administration announcing that the law is unjust, and intends to challenge it in court. What do you think the editorial position of The New York Times and the news in general would have to say about that?

But the Obama administration couldn't stop even at this level of absurdity; they had to raise the bar even further (okay, pun intended) by denouncing the Arizona law internationally, and specifically, in a meeting with China, whose own treatment of those on its soil illegally somehow goes unquestioned.

Reason and analysis, zero; hyperbole and b.s., one.

-Greek Riots

Here is a news story that tends to induce yawns and eye-rolling, for what do we in the U.S. have to fear from a story of a far-away country which erupts with angry mobs torching cars and businesses, since that sort of thing seems to happen all the time over "there"? The exhortation to imagine such outbursts in one's own neighborhood falls flat on ears that have been listening to lullabies about the state's limitless capacity to provide care for all.

The problem with this news story wasn't so much the lack of meaningful discussion, but the avoidance of discussing its significance for us, given America's own absurd levels of entitlement debt. There is a never-ending river of revelations regarding government waste, lavish salaries and perks for questionable bureaucrats, and infinitely-accumulating debt, and yet those who believe themselves to be speaking truth to power appear to have bought into the notion that the state is the winner of the debate over the identity of the individual's primary benefactor, and that there is no merit to even attempting to look at things in a less totalitarian way.

The ideology of the government as caretaker manifests itself in two distinctive dialogues: The first in which the state exerts its power of justice over all aspects of our lives, from business to pleasure, imposing controls and regulations at its personal whim, in order to do to people what they can't be relied on to do voluntarily. The second voice of this process declares that the powers enumerated in the first vision require that the state also act as the provider of employment in its execution of these powers, thus using the first principle of government control to also create a new economy, in which the benefactors of the state are also its employees. This results in an employment sector entirely denoted by government work, with its accompanying generous wages, benefits, medical care, medical leave, life insurance, and a hefty, hefty pension, funding sources be damned.

Thus in the wake of the second of these views - whereby the state is a jobs teat - do we have commentary arguing that Tea-Party resistance to government debt and public-sector union is once again racism (surprise!) and/or war on the poor, as government work is now seen as the de facto employment machinery for poor people and non-whites. That this should be presented as a reasonable argument is an excellent measurement of the degree to which blind ideology has been adopted as a replacement for analytical thought.

Which is why the riots in Greece are so significant, as they illustrate where the path of state-entitlement-to-all leads. Those who continue to bemoan the inability of the state to fund its "obligations" expect everyone else to do so, and that process will escape scrutiny for a while - but at some point, when the state's bill exceeds your own income, will you still think of rioting as some option for other people in a distant and far away land?

The process of state control over the individual is well-illustrated by the events in Greece, but to listen to the majority of our "news" outlets, you are once again steered to a view that the only problem that Greek rioting teaches us is the selfishness and greed of those who continue to oppose the non-stop expansion of government entitlement, to which there are no limits, nor should there ever be.

No, they don't say that last part aloud - but what exactly, then, are they proposing should be done instead?

Health-Care Reform

With the Orwellian title, "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", the government tried to finally gain control over the medical-care system, fulfilling the fantasies of wannabe-socialists everywhere. For those of you who find even the use of the word "socialist" to be some sort of red-baiting scare, you are free to explain the disparity between the horror stories of both the Canadian and U.K. government-run medical services and the pronouncements of officials and commentators such as Paul Krugman, who insist with a straight face that the horror stories "are false".

Leaving aside, then, the possibility that such a system, if well-run, might avoid just enough patient harm to somehow provide sufficient balance to justify its existence, we are still left asking why it is better for the government to run medical care rather than the (admittedly quasi) private sector model we are now discarding? It's always seemed strange that those who heartily agree that the DMV is a denizen of incompetence would at the same time wish for a similar entity to be in charge of medicine and surgeries.

The philosophy behind this bizarre power grab appears to find refuge in the notion that it is somehow more just for the government to be in charge of dishing out medical care, and that medical insurance itself is somehow an immoral concept. But if those who mocked Sarah Palin's denunciation of "Death Panels" still think she was somehow exaggerating, even with the recent re-injection of the concept into the law, it would be nice to hear them explain how rationing of medical care should work. If you ask one of the defenders of the new law about this, you'll probably receive an answer that deals more with avoiding the issue than explaining the law's relationship to it.

If you still think rationing is some sort of smokescreen for an attack on the new health-care "system", ask what the original purpose of the law was. As the so-called news media reported, it was all about providing medical insurance to those who "can't afford it" - if that's the case, then we should all be given coverage via government edict, right? Well, we've got it - hooray! Now, what happens if you're ill, and need expensive surgery? Since the ideology of government-run health care necessarily dictates - and thus limits - the salaries of people like surgeons, you will, at some degree of illness complexity, be told that your surgery won't be covered by your insurance. At least, that's the explanation you'll hear; what you won't be told is that because your surgery costs more than anyone is willing to do it for, you won't receive it.

And thus the conumdrum of Government-run medical care: It's free, except when it isn't. At some tipping point, your life-support plug will be pulled, regardless of the wishes of you and/or your family. If you still insist that we have not implemented a "Government takeover of Health Care", and even delight in pointing to the news item that called this conclusion the "Lie of the Year", you'll find that allowing insurance companies to exist while dictating their terms and operations is a pointless distinction.

Since this new system has come into effect, I can now receive medical insurance even if I can't afford it, right? And if that's so, what's to stop me from claiming that I can't afford it, even if that's untrue? What's that, I'll be penalized? But why should I be, if the goal was to extend coverage to everyone? Either the government is providing medical care, or it isn't. Is there possibly something wrong with Nancy Pelosi's declarations that the bill will provide jobs, reduce costs, and expand coverage? Anytime a politician claims to offer a perpetual-motion machine of this type that defies the laws of physics, look out for your wallet. Concerns over the constitutionality of enforcing the purchase of medical insurance? Nancy Pelosi dismisses such concerns, sarcastically asking, "Are you serious?" Federal judges have already begun to rebuke her.

But all this illustrates why forcing companies to provide insurance eventually becomes a flat-out takeover; the false economy that it dictates will be abandoned, and that's when the government announces that it must, due to the current "crisis", step in and run the show. If this isn't the goal, it would be nice to hear such from the reams of analysis flowing forth from those in the news who claim to be keeping us informed, rather than the bowing, scraping, and knee-jerk declarations that the mess before us produced by power-mad Democrats is somehow "Historic".

Tax Cuts for "The Rich"!

This class-warfare cry never gets old, apparently, but never did it achieve such heights of froth as it did toward the end of 2010. It's a simple situation turned into a mountain of anger towards those who create wealth: At what rate of progress should taxes be collected? Never mind that most of those who denounced "tax cuts for the rich" couldn't even tell you the difference in tax rates for Obama's proposed cutoff of a quarter-million dollars in annual income; the real medal-winner of 2010 was the notion that George Bush had somehow reduced tax rates in a horrendously evil giveaway to his wealthy cronies, while completely ignoring Bill Clinton's hike in such rates.

If you're going to argue for higher rates of taxation as a matter of justice, you'd do well to analyze how and why higher rates bring about a better result; instead of such justification, we get lectures about Republicans with hearts of stone. Illustrating perfectly the coercive nature of the protests against any reduced taxes for supposedly "wealthy" earners, the option of every American to make a donation to the government to make up for his or her own perceived shortcoming in tax rates is almost never mentioned, while the lectures continue that forcibly taking such money is somehow the height of justice.

Current "News reporting" makes infantile generalizations on a daily basis, and its hostility to debate and analysis exposes the underlying condition of demagoguery perhaps better than any other example - it's on display every time you hear the phrase, "tax cuts for the rich".

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Few tears will be shed for the passing of 2010 and its dismal attempt to discuss ideas, but there will undoubtedly be more in the wake of the realization that 2011 promises much of the same, only worse.

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p.s. - yes, there should indeed be an entry here for "Journolist", whose naked betrayal of its purported journalistic aspirations is possibly the best example in 2010 of media hypocrisy - but that will have to wait for next time.

Where's the &%@$# Lottery money?

2010-04-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

First of all, here's the link for the official explanation of how California Lottery money is disbursed to schools.

Everyone who isn't in a coma or otherwise impaired hears the annual cry of "Not enough money for schools" come election season - whether it's national, state, or local elections, there's a din comparable to a concert by The Who from the usual crowd - to listen to them, you'd be forgiven for thinking that schools are woefully underfunded (again), and that unless we approve the latest round of increases, your children's teachers will be replaced by rocks, and everyone will have to use feather quills and stone tablets for their writing assignments.

It's a clever scheme, using dire threats to scare voters into pulling the lever for either education spending increases, or against any attempt to rein in such spending - and it tends to work.

But to take perhaps the most glaring national example, California, is to beach a whale of a whopper, especially in light of the cash extravaganza for "Education" that the California lottery was supposed to provide.

Currently, the state lottery runs television advertising in prime-time slots, at no doubt extraordinary expense, to inspire more purchases of lottery tickets. One has to marvel at the logic trail: products and services tend to be advertised in primo times and locations precisely because they are profitable, and are looking to expand their customer base. The California lottery certainly doles out some impressive jackpots, but such prizes are clearly not bankrupting the enterprise; if the lottery were at all unprofitable, it would be gone in a flash, and you'd see no prime-time t.v. ads.

At the time the lottery was introduced, we were given tales of riches beyond man's wildest dreams being generated for schools - and yet, here we are years later, and are the exhortations to increase funding for schools any less in din and volume? Every year, we are fed horror stories of how schools are teetering on the brink of collapse, with no hope except for the hapless voter to approve yet another tax increase - or a new tax, take your pick.

California's teachers continue to earn well above the national average, but somehow, it's not only insufficient, it's nowhere near enough, if you listen to the scare mongers - what is it that they are trying to protect?

This dance, played out year after year, ignores the entire concept of economies of scale - that is, structures that expand or contract in proportion to their base. Are we really to believe that back when California education was the best in the nation, that it was so only because there weren't as many students in the system? If that were true, it would be impossible to expand the population; the schools would collapse under their own weight, or citizens would be taxed at 100% - so it cannot be true that "Rising costs" are anything other than an expansion of the bureaucracy that feeds off those doing the actual work in the schools.

If the doomsters speak the truth, then the California lottery hasn't done its job helping education, and should be ended. If, on the other hand, it was merely folded into the ever-expanding appetite of the bureaucracy - the much more likely development - then Californians deserve an honest accounting of where that lottery money has gone.

It's got to be one or the other. It's sickening to be talked down to by the p.r. machine of the schools every single election season, so let's ask them directly: what happened to the windfall for schools that the lottery was supposed to provide?

One-Line summary of where we are.

2010-04-06T15:43:00.001-07:00

This blog took an extended break for an academic venture, and a lot has happened in the interim.

Rather than review it all, let's simply establish the one-line summary of the Obama administration's supporters:

"All opposition to anything Obama has done or proposes to do is racist."

You can pick it apart all you like, but this is essentially it.

Barack Obama, Hypocrite-in-Chief

2009-05-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Who is the bigger hypocrite - Barack Obama, or his fawning sycophants in the news media?

The hypocrite-in-chief has wasted no time in engaging the sort of double-talk that routinely earned his predecessor the label of "Worst president ever", but isn't it even more nauseating that the news media, the self-styled truth-to-power speaker which considers itself the conscience of the world, can't cast on Obama even one one-hundredth of the scrutiny and criticism it routinely doled out to George Bush?

Let's just try and imagine what would have happened if George Bush had engaged in just one of Obama's many shenanigans:

-Having an attorney general who labels the country as "Cowards" when it comes to "Talking about racial matters" - Of course, Eric Holder did nothing to illustrate exactly what matters he was describing, but it was merely a racial elephant in the room for everyone to ignore by unspoken agreement. Could he have been referring to the street-thug gangsta-rap ideology that pervades the culture and denounces those who read and study for "Acting White"? That would indeed be speaking truth to power, but by the shamefully absurd lack of focus, it's clear that Mr. Holder was talking about something that no reporter even felt the need to ask for details on. Is it still such a foregone conclusion in the U.S.A. that the only racial issue that matters is the notion of white hatred towards blacks? Apparently, it's easier to avoid facing the fact that reality is a good deal more complex than this simplistic scapegoat, but as always, it's easier to blame the white race for all social ills. But the differentiation appears to be the mere fact that Mr. Holder himself is black - sure, a white Attorney General would never say such a thing - but why is a black man given a pass for such a thing, where a white man would be hounded to obscurity? The mentality that allows such double-standards is precisely what allows the national racial-angst monologue to continue.

-Expanding our debt by trillions, then denouncing the same debt, then pretending that projected reductions would be "Savings" (and let's not even discuss what usually happens to such projected reductions). Generally, doublespeak about money is uncool. This time around, Obama's "Trust me, I'm really cool" message appears to be pegged to a currency of its own, which circulates for as long as everyone accepts it - but what happens when people lose their faith in it, and want real cash?

-Saying that we "Need to look forward" regarding actions taken by the past administrations, but then quietly sending out the lawyers to see if "Truth Commissions", prosecutions, lawsuits, and indictments can be obtained at the same exact time.

-Taking boatloads of campaign money from a company, and then using his power as president to force the company into government receivership, effectively taking it over.

-Indulging in the most expensive inauguration ever - particularly at a time when the rest of the economy is reeling from contraction. Oh, well, it's different, everyone thinks; it's an "Historic" occasion, the inauguration of the first black president, so it's okay. If you bought into this line, you've patronized millions of Americans with your shallow airs. Apparently, you've invested so much into the notion that America is the Great Satan of the world, you've forgotten how many lives America has sacrificed to emancipate blacks from slavery (leading the rest of the world way behind in the rearview mirror), rescue untold millions from dictatorships and fascists around the world during the twentieth century, and the millions upon millions of dollars transferred from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers every year into the bank accounts of other nations, even those who pocket such largesse while at the same time uttering drearily predictable rants about how evil the U.S. is. Hypocrisy? Set your watch to it; it's Obama time!

-Pretending that every one of his tax-cheating cabinet appointments were absolutely crucial to the survival of the nation, and that their tax offenses were something to be explained away - or simply ignored.

-Making "Calls" for "Bipartisanship", then denouncing those who don't buy into it once it becomes clear that "Bipartisanship" to the president means that everybody on the other side gives him what he wants, while he gives nothing in return.

-Claiming that he'd have no lobbyists, then bringing in a whole bunch of them.

-Claiming the budget had no pork, and then adding a mountain of pork.

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So much of this see-no-evil approach has to do with Mr. Obama's purported personal charm, and I say "Purported" specifically because too many have made huge concessions about the one's "Oratorical Gifts", and "Cool Demeanor", and such, but I'm sorry to report that I see little evidence of it. Sure, he's not wearing a sideways baseball cap, and saying "Yo, 'Sup" at press conferences - instead, he adopts the tones of a smooth salesman, and talks in exceptionally bland platitudes - this is supposed to be evidence of an amazing personality? It's just snake oil all over again. Bush's line about the "Soft bigotry of low expectations" once again proves far more visionary than anyone could ever have expected. So Obama can go on and on about stuff that sounds good in the abstract, and avoids details when turning on his charm offensive. That's statesmanship? It's just the same old malarkey, and everyone who thought we were getting a new and better spin on the presidency is having the wool pulled over their eyes at the same time the rug is being pulled out from under them.

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However, there are of course many actions taken by Obama that are not hypocritical in the sense that he'd be praised for them, where Bush would have been damned, but that's because Bush would never have done them:

-Kissing up to Hugo Chavez, and even accepting a book from him, which was, of course, a diatribe about how all of South America's problems are the fault of the U.S.A.
-Kissing up to Daniel Ortega
-Apologizing for America (just as though it were necessary)
-Releasing CIA information to further demonize the former administration, while giving no consideration to whether such information affects America's safety.
-Turning up the thermostat in the Oval Office to 80, while burning absurd amounts of jet fuel on "Earth Day" for photo opportunities, and at the same time denouncing coal as an industry, and buying into the notion of a cap-and-trade bureacracy of dubious nature and need, which is all but guaranteed to act as an albatross around the neck of the country.
-Targeting celebrities, such as Jim Cramer and Rush Limbaugh in an attempt to deflect criticism and scrutiny of his own agenda.
-Returning the Bust of Winston Churchill to England - what many would consider to have been a treasured gift from a staunch ally - then allowing his staff to tell the British that they shouldn't consider themselves any different from anyone else, nor expect special treatment.

No, Bush would have been far more classy - but you can be sure, that whatever Bush did that's "Bad", is now "Good", just as long as Barack Obama is the one doing it. Since that's the only rule that anyone needs to know, being a fan of Obama is possibly the easiest, most default position to take - but, as always, thinking for yourself takes a backseat to such group-think. So carry on, emperor Obama, and your adulatory bootlickers in your press corps - because they do work for you; never forget that. You earned them, and they're yours - sure, they are still ostensibly owned by private companies, and their own steep declines in readership, circulation, and shareholder values have taken a concurrent plummet - but that has nothing to do with you. In fact, they might be eligible for a bailout, no? Pull the AIG trick again, and they're all yours, in deed as well as fact!

Stark Raving Deficits

2009-03-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

I don't give my regional, rodeo-clown representative, Pete Stark, a hard time as often as I should for the dismal job he does, but today I had to dash off a quick note, since his office is constantly sending out news items on his latest boondoggles: his latest is more public spending to subsidize employer leave, which earned him this response from me:

Dear Mr. Stark: with regard to HR 1723: You've got to be kidding. In "These tough economic times", as you yourself referred to them, the last thing we need is further bankruptcy of our bloated public sector.
That seven dollars a month for the employee AND employer you cited as the approximate cost - and we all know what tends to happen to such "initial" estimates - would be better left in the hands of employers and employees alike. Not all of us favor the process of transferring power to the government for everything that sounds desirable; making laws that demand certain results is an inappropriate use of public policy.
As you and your colleagues scramble to spend ever more public money, you are merely adding to already-absurd deficits - which you also denounced under Bush, but apparently praise under Obama.
Please stop throwing other people's money on this pyre.
Sincerely,

Registered and regular voter

How are those campaign pledges coming along?

2009-03-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

What were the reasons for the serial hatred of George W. Bush? Few of the charges against him held up under scrutiny, and still fewer can now be found that haven't been brazenly embraced by Barack Obama himself, as we shall see:

-Embrace of war over "Diplomacy"
-Shredding the constitution
-Wrecking the economy

If you voted for Obama in the heat of the moment, thinking, "Eh, let's try some change", this instinct can be understood - but if you were of the die-hard Obama supporter contingent, fully believing that this man actually knew what to do to "Fix" America and unite us as a nation, then you were a total sucker.

To wit: True to form, Obama now plays down the Iraq war while upping the ante on the Afghanistan war, the "Ball" that we supposedly "Took our eye off". As for Bush's gleeful stomping on the bill of rights, Obama has simply renamed the "Enemy Combatants" at Guantanamo, and has maintained the authority to detain such folks - whatever flavor-of-the-week labeling they're slapped with - in addition to reserving his prerogative for renditions, and most of the other stuff that the Civil Liberties watchdogs were foaming at the mouth over during Bush's time.

Beyond that, Obama's campaign blasted McCain for the notion of removing tax-free status of medical insurance, but now allows that it's not such a bad idea, after all.

Irresponsible spending? Obama blamed Bush with this one, in line with fiscal conservatives, but now triples down with his trillions-plus budget boondoggle. Awhile ago he blamed Bush for using fear as a way of enacting his personal agenda, but his chief of staff publicly boasts of "Never letting a crisis go to waste" - cynical even in the best of times, one can only imagine the deafening outcry had Bush uttered such a thing.

"No Earmarks" - remember that one? Gone, crushed under the weight of the thousands of these very same once-derided items that are now present in his monstrous budget.

Cabinet appointments? Don't make me laugh - after swearing that not a single man, woman, or child in the U.S. of A. was qualified to head the treasury save for the now-acceptably tax-dodging Geithner, whose subsequent Kerry-esque "We have a plan" nonsense spooked the markets even more than they were already, we've seen withdrawal upon withdrawal (who knew so many otherwise-qualified top Democrats were also tax cheats? Is it possible that they themselves don't like paying all those taxes they keep insisting are patriotic for the rest of us to swallow?), Boatloads of lobbyists (where we told before that there would be - how many? Oh,right: None!), and total roadkill where we heard, only a month or so ago, boasts of "The smoothest presidential transition in history" - oh, and also "The most ethical administration in history" - though in fairness, no one gets elected without making this nakedly fatuous pitch.

It's understandable to root for your guy in partisan politics, but the bipolar hatred of Bush juxtaposed against the worshipful rhetoric directed towards Obama is a new low in hypocrisy. If any political activity is accessible as long as the perpetrator is a Democrat, then fine, but let's admit it as such; stop pretending that an action taken by Bush is by definition bad, while the same action taken by Obama is "Prudent" or "Necessary" or the result of a "Tough Decision" or any other such euphemism employed to cover up your double standards.

So now that the scorecard has evened up, which is it? Is Obama in fact the healer-in-chief you thought you were getting, or is he just another politician?

Hope you're happy, Obamamericans

2009-02-06T09:39:00.000-08:00

So what did you get in exchange for your "Hope and Change" vote? An end to the old, divisive politics, and the ushering in of a new era of bipartisanship, coupled with fiscal restraint while at the same time magically bestowing care and largess on the downtrodden of society? Did you imagine for even one minute that your "Historical" presidency would be immediately bloated with the same-old career lobbyists, tax cheats, and pork-trough scavengers? Could you not have foreseen the renewed dedication to huge tax increases and massive expansion of a government that is both broke and broken?

What is a "Stimulus", especially considering that Mr. Obama has hardly worked for private enterprise in his life, much less run a business? Not all leadership is predicated on this quality, but it is rather distressing how many in the Democrat "Leadership" are career bureaucrats, who have had minimal exposure to the intricacies of either running a business or living paycheck-to-paycheck. Rahm Emanuel's childlike enthusiasm for not letting a crisis "Go to waste" demonstrates, more clearly than anything else could, the extent to which government careerists wish to don laboratory coats and turn the economy into a testing environment for their grandiose schemes. To some extent, this is all to be expected, as we elect our leaders with the understanding that they will be dealing with things on a daily basis which we have neither the time nor the inclincation for - but there is a breaking point which these opportunists love to go beyond, from which they may dictate newer and ever-more bizarre ways to spend our tax dollars.

Listen to Nancy Pelosi attempting to explain how throwing millions of dollars at contraception and family planning somehow helps the economy. Listen to Harry Reid dismissing Republican objections to the kazillion-dollar "Stimulus" - which, when you look at it, amounts to little more than printing money, in the old banana-republic style. And listen to Obama himself, attempting to spin resistance to this plan as "Irresponsible" - lecturing and hectoring like that takes guts, but when you're Obama, and the newspapers will echo your every move while putting an angelic halo over your head, you begin to taste what is known as hubris - and your appetite for it expands exponentially, while your fawning supporters eagerly dish out whatever explanation of reality you care to come up with. Listen, once again, to how "Bipartisanship" is claimed to mean Republicans shedding their points of view, as though any opposition is somehow undemocratic.

Remember how somberly we were lectured that "Dissent is Patriotic" when many of us criticized the head-in-the-sand approach to terrorism and Iraq? Incredible how quickly the winds shift when your own guy is in power. Nowadays, those who question our dear leader's mortgaging of the future of America are told to "Give him a chance" - this is the chance they actually wanted? To bankrupt the government and hamstring the private sector while being told that the "Right Thing" is being done?

If you loathe business and love the concept of socialism, then great, you're probably in a very happy place right about now - and the accusation of "Socialism" is very real - you may dismiss such talk, and tell yourself that "It can't happen here", but how sure of that are you? We are told, by administration personnel, that stimulus money should not go to "White construction workers", and no one even objects to such naked racism. Sure, it's all understood to be somehow correct and proper, in some incredibly twisted logic - but is this at all close to the grand new society you thought Obama was going to bring?

You who supported Obama while struggling to overlook some very real concerns about him - his far-left views, his openly racist pastor of twenty years, his role as a cog in the Chicago machine - you, who joined in with the newspapers, who tripped over themselves explaining away anything even remotely negative about the man - you, who continue to think that Obama's skin color has little to do with how he got where he is, as opposed to serving as a convenient vehicle for getting support from the press, the elites, and the intellgentsia - you, who bought into the notion that ACORN is a non-partisan group that merely helps out with the always-questionable concept of "Community Organizing" - you, who went mad with rage at Bush's razor-thin margin of votes in 2000, but now dismiss the significance of Obama's first election win by getting votes invalidated, and his subsquent quashing of opponents by the mysterious leaking of divorce records - you, who thought that a John Kerry-like, more "Sensitive" war on terror was a wonderful idea, and applauded Obama's speech that appeared to kowtow to Islam while ignoring America's tremendous contributions of the well-being of such Muslims all around the world (and please, put aside the notion that Israel is the primary cause of religious violence) - you, who have been swaddled in the notion that the government should provide all things to all people, and Obama is just the man to do it - you are a hypocrite.

Hope you enjoy the country's misery; you've certainly earned it.

Doubling Down

2008-12-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

The hits just keep on coming, courtesy of the double-standards jukebox:

1. "President-elect" Barack Obama, fresh on the heels of inventing his own nifty new pre-presidential title, is glorified in the media for his intense dedication to fitness and exercise. The description of his "Pecs" belongs in a titillation novel - and yet, George Bush was villified for his similarly focused efforts, which were dubbed "Creepy". What could the difference be?

2. Sarah Palin was roundly denounced as insufficiently sophisticated for the Vice-Presidency, while Joe Biden was given a pass for the outrageously incorrect statement that "President Roosevelt went on the television". And yet, Caroline Kennedy is now taken seriously as a contender for the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, with commentators tying themselves into knots attempting to spin Ms. Kennedy's total lack of experience and qualifications into its exact opposite. Her family name is offered up as a perfectly sufficient reason to give her the job, while Ms. Palin continues to be denounced as a lightweight.

3. Civilian neighborhoods in Israel are bombed, and yet when Israel returns fire, it is denounced as the aggressor by worldwide media and the Arab world. While the international elites pay lip service to Israel's right to exist, they completely ignore the Hamas charter, which declares the exact opposite, even going so far as to cite the phony "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". So Israel is portrayed as the instigator, while Hamas, which fired first, has world leaders lining up to defend it.

4. An Iraqi journalist throws his shoes at George Bush, and is instantly proclaimed a heroic dissenter. Never mind that he couldn't have gotten away with doing so in any other country in the region without being ruthlessly tortured and then killed, and the irony was apparently lost on him and all his admirers.

Is there still any wonder why the oldstream media is heading down the toilet?

America elects its 2nd black president!

2008-11-06T11:40:00.000-08:00

Not to take anything away from Mr. Obama, but remember, Bill Clinton was the first "Black president" - or has everyone managed to forget that?

Forgive me if I'm not quite ready to worship at the altar of Obama. The race was not supposed to be about race, remember? The entire point of the civil-rights struggle was to get past the era of thinking of people primarily by their skin color, to ensure that the rights and guarantees of the constitution apply equally to everyone. Lest you think otherwise, take a look at the primacy of the rule of law in our country, and if you still want to declare America a "racist" nation, do a simple comparison between America and everywhere else. There is a reason that people all over the world flock to America to realize their dreams, and they do so because they know that the institutions we have and the freedom and upward mobility we offer are to be found in similar degree nowhere else on the planet.

All that has been cast aside in an orgy of new racialism, the notion that people are to be viewed according to however much people distantly related to them suffered at the hands of another group. This is the same thinking that allowed us to define the "Us" and "Them" that we have been hearing denunciations of for as long as we've been alive - and yet now, it's not only okay, it's fashionable.

Was there absolutely no suspicion that something had gone wrong at the notion that blacks would be almost homogeneously voting for Obama? In all the approving commentary, self-congratulation, and non-stop analyses of voting patterns, did no one point out that blacks voting in lockstep for Obama was no different from whites voting en masse for McCain? A Jamie Foxx can state that in a choice between a black man and a white man that he'll be voting for "The brother" - what if a white man of any stature had publicly stated that he'd vote for a white guy over a black simply because of race? The firestorm of denunciations would be deafening.

A small group of pundits, celebrities, and others wondered aloud at the fact that Obama's color had no doubt helped his meteoric rise, and when they did, they were quickly shouted down; apparently, some truths are still too much to bear. Thus we are stuck with a conumdrum: The election was not about race - except when it was: it was about race in that it demonstrated how far America has come in its struggle for equality, but it was not about race when Obama promoted his post-racial bona fides, dismissed any notions of his skin color being related to his ascendancy in any way, and merely demonstrated how hungry Americans were for hope and change, no matter how vague such change would be.

By contrast, the election was about race when black voters loudly proclaimed their support for Obama, and their overwhelming unity of opinion on this matter. The election was about race when it came to America's "Downright meanness", and how "They" kept "Raising the bar" to keep Obama from power, according to Michelle Obama. The election was about race when Obama pointed out that he didn't "Look like all the other presidents on the dollar bills", and warned early supporters about what his opponents would say - "...and did I mention he's black?"

But then, once more, the election was not about race when the news media tried to force itself to name Obama's accomplishments, and suddenly he was a man who had "Transcended" race, whose calls for harmony and unity were heard by men, women, and child of all backgrounds, orgins, and ethnicities. The election was not about race regarding Obama's faithfulness to Trinity Church, with its fire-breathing pastor Wright - here was a man who denounced "White" America, who proumulgated the old myth about the government inventing AIDS to oppress blacks, and who called on God himself to "Damn" America. But the philosophy adopted by this "Church" was easily and breezily declared irrelevant by Obama, who told us that such goings-on might seem "Jarring to the untrained ear", as though Wright were not even speaking in English. No, nothing about race here; move along, said the news media, offering up tortured rationalizations to support Obama's careful distancing.

What did "The Issues", in fact, have to do with the race? Very, very little, it would seem, though Obama and his supporters always delighted in stating that such matters were in fact the epicenter of the campaign, especially when shady characters such as Wright, Fleger, Ayers, Khalidi, and others threated to cast a pall on the party. All the expected sober and judicial analysis of Obama's unbelievably expansive and expensive plans was nowhere to be found in the old media, cast aside in the wake of a feel-good vote for "Hope and change": National health care? Obama's got a plan. International affairs? Obama will call for "Talks", and "Reach out to our allies". (Why did no one think of that before?) But no, none of this mattered, because Obama's personal charm and ability to run a presidential campaign were all we needed to know to elevate him to leader of the free world. Gargantuan tax increases? Nope, no waste in the federal government that needs to be eliminated beforehand - we'll figure that all out later.

Clearly, policy was the least of anyone's concerns, which takes us back to what the election was about. If you listen to his supporters, it was about race only when it was detrimental to Obama, and not about race when it favored him.

So which is it, now that the one has been anointed as our savior? Was it about race, or was it not? If it was about race, then now that America has redeemed itself, will the "Oppression Studies" be wound down, and will Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson concede that their "work" is now totally irrelevant? Will the news media stop trying to discover new Ku Klux Klans, and taint the rest of us with whatever shrapnels of 19th-century thought it can find? Or will the left continue to try and have it both ways? That's a "Race" you can bet on with full confidence.

p.s. - don't forget to check your pay stub after the inauguration; you'll see two new federal withholding items: The "Hope" tax, and the "Change" tax.

Last call for sanity

2008-11-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

It's almost time to vote, and before you enter that booth, you ought to have asked yourself a few questions, such as:
-Do you believe that America is broken, and needs repair?
-Do you believe that wealth can be created by government?
-Do you believe that you have been given a generally fair look at your choices?

If you can answer these questions honestly, then you should have no problem selecting the lesser of the inherently undesirable choices, and for the presidency, that would be John McCain.

Why not Barack Obama? Because he doesn't pass the most basic tests. He has, over the course of his incredibly minimalist career of getting elected to higher positions than whatever he currently occupied, joined the chorus of anti-American voices from around the world, promised the impossible, and contorted himself into more positions than a Kama Sutra manual about his past statements, associations, writings, and practices.

He has childish views on diplomacy, he makes vapid statements regarding his policies that either collapse or simply make no sense under any level of scrutiny, and he employs, enables, and empowers those who believe that America should be torn down and rebuilt in the fashion of some quasi-European socialist-aspiring worker's paradise.

The paper trail of these declarations is substantial and voluminous, and yet, in a display of hubris and arrogance that would make George Bush's supposed "squandering of the goodwill of the world" look like child's play (if it were true, which it ain't), the news media, despite its internet-empowered, 24/7 prognostication, has steadfastedly averted its gaze from anything and everything that might even hint of a less-than-godlike view of Barack Obama. William Ayers? Jeremiah Wright? Steven Pfleger? Tony Rezko? Khalidi whatsisname? Non-entities, according to the news, and you should be ashamed of yourself for even wondering if there's anything with these associations worth thinking about. No, the news media, which pounces on even the slightest mispronunciation of a word by a Republican, could not be bothered to conclude that Obama was lying about either his church attendance or the content of its sermons, and its bizarre gyrations in rationalizing such developments would be shameful, that is, if anyone in mainstream news were capable of feeling shame.

But you might say, "Well, that's mostly in the past; what matters right now are the issues", and conclude that Obama leads the way in painting a vision for America - but if you were to actually look at his proposals, rather than skim whatever reassurances the New York Times has managed to brew up today, you might just be a little apprehensive at the constantly changing definition of "The Rich", who will be taxed more, or the billions of new Federal dollars for a smorgasbord of government programs that try to spend money even faster than the old programs which do the exact same thing, or the massive new giveaways to foreign countries, as though the current hundreds of millions were just not quite enough, even as they are sent to highly questionable and undesirable regimes.

So you might say, "Well, at least Obama will project a better image of America abroad", in the hopes that having a black man would make everyone "Respect" America again, just as though their earlier lack of respect was in any way warranted. In this area, you would once again be disappointed - if you really believe that Guantanamo Bay is filled with peaceful goat herders who were wrongly captured by a tentacled, growling George Bush, and you would like to see such people simply released into America, along with complimentary citizenship, welfare payments, and "Affordable Housing", then you might want to ask the 9/11 hijackers if it made any difference to them which president was in office as they made their sickening plans. Since they're dead, we can't really ask them, but if you believe in your heart of hearts that such people would have thought better of their intended actions if only a more soothing and reassuring president of the U.S. was in charge, then of course, Obama's your guy. And since President Obama would get us out of Iraq, withdraw from Afghanistan, and just generally fold down the American military presence abroad, then we will enjoy peace and prosperity at home and abroad, and there will be no terrorist attacks, just like during Bill Clinton's reign. Oh, except of course, for U.S. embassies in Africa, the first world trade center bombing, Khobar Towers, etc....

And if you truly belive that Sarah Palin is some sort of pro-life, gun-toting hick who's dumber than a post, just take a look at Joe Biden, with his president-Roosevelt-got-on-tv-and-spoke-to-America-during-the-crash-of-'29 bit, and ask yourself if the news coverage has been as fair as you've convinced yourself it has.

Make sure to answer those three questions fully and honestly before you pull that lever.

Good luck, America - you may really need it.

The price tag of political correctness: $700 billion

2008-09-29T16:57:00.001-07:00

Would you like to blame, as Nancy Pelosi puts it, "The failed economic policies of the Bush administration" for this financial situation? How about Wall Street fatcats, and their deregulatory enablers back in Washington?

These are convenient targets, but they exist primarily in the minds of journalists. To see how we got into this situation, look no further than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - take a look at their hideously huge campaign contributions to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, along with many others, and indeed, on both sides of the aisle.

And before you seal the envelope of the letter blaming capitalism for this folly, take a look behind the scenes, at Chris Dodd's shameful defense of Fannie and Freddie back when the likes of - suprise, surprise - John McCain was trying to pull the reins on these mortgage behemoths via legislation that would have strengthened oversight and accountability procedures - Chris Dodd, who now points the finger everywhere but at himself, as managers for Fannie and Freddie who took the last train out of town after pocketing their hefty bonuses for - what, exactly?

For years, the pressure was on mortgage lenders to open up their lending practices in the goal of increasing home ownership among - yep, everyone's favorite recipients of taxpayer largesse - "Minorities" and "The Poor". Imagine that you owned a business that had to make decisions on whom and whom not to lend money to. Now imagine that a government flunky walks in and tells you that you have to start making loans to customers with the worst possible credit ratings, or even with no credit ratings at all, and that if you don't, you are "Redlining", "Racist", or some combination of the two. You've now traveled from one end of the race-spectrum to the other, arriving at the point where not lending to a minority - no matter what job or credit history he or she has - is a "Racial" action. Why not just legislate that you have to pay the mortgage of anyone who walks in the door, as long as it's not a white guy? What's the difference?

That's what went on, and the danger was hidden as long as home prices kept rising - which, of course, everyone likes to imagine will never end. When the party ends, as it must, who is left picking up the tab for those mortgages gone sour? The Government, meaning the taxpayers, meaning you. So what if these loans were extended to those who had no means to pay if the market didn't rise? It's your responsibility to cover their losses, according to the government. You might ask, "Why were these practices allowed to go on for so long that they wound up requiring my money?", and the answer would be an attempt to ignore all lending practices, and tell you that it doesn't matter, but that now that it has come this far, it's such a dire crisis that we absolutely have to use your money.

So you can blame the "Fat Cats" if you wish, but be very clear on who they are, because the only difference between this meltdown and that of Enron is that no one in the media is calling for the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's leaders, who have already pocketed their gigantic bonus payoffs, and ridden off into the sunset. Why they are not being taken directly to task has a lot more to do with the mindset of journalists, for whom it's much easier to write stories blaming the situation on vague and greedy capitalists, rather than questioning their own fervid devotion to the Democrat party.

Update: Since the current bailout plan failed, the race is already on to blame Republicans, but take careful note of the fact that Democrats could have passed the bill by themselves due to their majority status, but couldn't even convince enough of their own to go along with it.

Hypocrisy, meet willful blindness

2008-09-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

It took about ten seconds for the "News" media to open fire on Sarah Palin, John McCain's pick for Vice-Presidential candidate.
Yahoo!, a reliably left-wing feed of left-wing AP stories, displayed a story called "Presidential Scholars question Palin credentials", in all seriousness. Of course, Ms. Palin's governance of an entire state is to be somehow dismissed, at least from this perspective.

So now we are not only meant not to question anything at all about Barack Obama's plans or person, but this established career woman is entirely suspect. Forget completely Obama's vagueness about his policy proposals, and focus instead on how Ms. Palin's down syndrome baby needs mommy to be at home. Forget all the shining praise heaped on Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Michelle Obama - if Ms. Palin were a member of the Democrat party, we would be hearing encomiums on her accomplishments, her gutsy battles against entrenched and corrupt political machinery, and her shattering of the glass ceiling - odd, isn't it, how the usual voices are entirely silent on these points?

Remember the Reagan days? Remember how he was dismissed as an "Actor", a lightweight, all style, no substance? If such a criticism has any validity at all, how could it possibly not be applied to Barack Obama? Oh, well, it's different, you see, because....(fill in the blank with your own on-the-spot excuse) - e.j. Dionne apparently had no embarrassment in claiming that Obama has been "Put through the journalistic wringer" - as illegitimate claims go, that's a howler: take a random major media news story about Barack Obama, and you can pick from a list of approved, positive buzz-phrases - everything from his "Community Organizing" to his "Coalition Building", to his "Organizational effectiveness", his "Quick mastery of complex policy questions", and on and on and on - wringer? It's more like his own personal p.r. machine.

And now Ms. Palin enters the picture, and the media is spinning madly, trying to figure out how to diss her without opening the door for the exact same attacks to be (more accurately) directed at Obama.

Feminists pan and sneer, while trying to push the view that Ms. Palin is somehow out of the mainstream, when it is they themselves who condescendingly dismissed the middle class decades ago. Blacks regularly support Obama in lockstep, which is supposed to be just fine, until, that is, whites support a white candidate in lockstep, or Ms. Palin appears to take the women's vote, at which point we are supposed to be troubled. Troubled by what, they cannot articulate, which is just as well, because the moment they do, they have finally revealed themselves as the frauds that they truly are.

It will be annoying as hell, but very enlightening, to see the contortions that the traditional news media engages in to trash Sarah Palin. The same blinders that allow these "Analysts" to accept Mr. Obama's contentions that he'll engage in line-item vetoes to eliminate waste while simultaneously raising every tax in sight are the ones they'll use to tell the American Public that Ms. Palin is "Untested", "Inexperienced", "Questionable", and every other conceivable crticism. The problem is, those same labels far better describe their anointed candidate, Barack Obama.

Whatever else you may think of John McCain, you can't dismiss this act of tactical brilliance.

Spare change we can believe in

2008-07-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

I really didn't think it was possible to out-Kerry John Kerry, but then again, Barack Obama has consistently surprised everyone - his supporters, with his lofty Utopianism; his detractors, with his vapid vision and cloaked quasi-socialism.

So now we have the spectacle of Mr. Obama presenting his savior image to the audience he most wants to impress, the Europeans, leaving us all with the predictable jokes about what country's presidency he's actually running for. But behind such obvious quips lies a disturbing reality, which is the notion that Europe, with its anemic economic growth, its unassimilated and hostile Muslim communities, and its artificial sense of security generated by decades of American military protection, somehow knows better than the U.S. what's best for the U.S.

The soaring popularity of Mr. Obama, which seems to move in inverse proportion to the level of specifics in his speeches - e.g., healing the sick, forcing the oceans to stop rising, etc. - has induced an even more brain-dead adulation in the minds of the supposedly sophisticated Europeans, who seem to believe that their cozy infrastructure grew up around them, as though by a spontaneous act of nature, with no assistance at all from the U.S. military, either during World War II, or every decade that has followed.

And Mr. Obama provided exactly what they wanted to hear: the moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Berlin era ("Both sides, blah, blah"), the self-deprecating American view that appears to take the blame for all the evils in the world while ignoring America's role in supporting what peace and prosperity exists today (especially in Europe), and the sneering implications of his appearance illustrating everyone's mutual consent that America remains a country bound by racism by whites towards blacks.

American supporters of Obama have displayed a rather substantial naivete about the reasons behind the fervid devotion they have for their candidate, but the swoon of the Europeans leaves everyone else in the dust. Can anyone point to a specific thing they like about Obama besides his appearance, with its implicit notion that electing a black guy - no matter who he is, or what he believes - is somehow the "right" or "best" thing to do? This question was baffling enough before, but now that the circus has gone overseas in an apparent bid to line up the world's support before even winning the actual election at home, it's even more maddeningly neglected.

So the internationalist, "Global Test" Mr. Kerry, with his equally shallow pronouncements of American humility, his deference to the opinions of leaders of countries which are NOT America, and his actual boasting that such overseas leaders wanted him to win the election, has actually been outdone by the rock-star Obama. Wonders - just like "Hope" and "Change", it seems - never cease.

A Double-Helping of Double-Standards

2008-06-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

Ideals are delicate and vulnerable creatures; they can be easily killed in a variety of ways, and even as they live, they are under constant threat.

Take "Free Speech" - here is one of the West's greatest accomplishments, and yet its fundamental mission has been quietly abandoned by its most prominent beneficiaries - with the sole exception of the United States of America. In Canada, human rights "Tribunals" have the power to make connections between accusations and circumstantial evidence, while Europe, with the approval of the New York Times, makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust.

Much of the right to free speech is woefully misunderstood; for example, we do not have the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, or to engage in libel or slander, whose definitions take into consideration the type of person responding to the speech - whether he or she is a "Public Figure" or not, which affects the standard by which speech may be considered libelous.

Those who believe freedom of speech to be somehow "Too" free would be well-served by studying the ramifications of libel law before making such pronouncements.

But the bigger picture now involves the freshly-reanimated calls for curbs on free speech in the name of - what else? - avoding "Offense". If a society believes that hurt feelings are more dangerous than self-expression, it is within that society's power to legislate such - but before we toss away our constitutional freedoms in the name of this purported "Good", we should be very clear on what to expect.

And what better places to observe this process than societies with no protection of free speech? Just look at the protection of Muslim sensibilities that pervades countries in the Middle East, where Christians and Jews enjoy no protection of their religion.

Back here in the West, while phony victimhood groups such as CAIR ask us to voluntarily give up our right to free speech, consider the glee with which "Art" such as "Piss Christ" is welcomed, and it becomes painfully clear that an egregious double-standard has emerged.

Dutch cartoonists and German opera producers are now expected to "Self-Censor", with the prodding and approval of Muslim agitators. If they mock Christ, the Torah, Buddha, or anyone else, it is immediately understood that no one will demand suppression of such works - but woe betide those who dare to poke fun at anything Islam, for an actual death threat will accomplish the goal immediately, as others further the work of enacting laws designed to suppress criticism.

Will the writers at the New York Times and such outlets agitate as feverishly to protect the speech and religious freedoms of Christians and Jews as they now do for Muslims? Or will Muslims strike their own anti-homosexual rhetoric? One instinctively knows not to hold one's breath.

Bummed Out

2008-05-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

San Francisco, that heaven-on-earth for those who want nothing more than a lifestyle free of all obligations, ought to be the recipient of some kind of naivete award. It has not only a gigantic population of bums - sorry, "Homeless" - but an absurdly huge bureaucracy to go along with it. Now, you may think that the use of the term "Bum" constitutes an inability to sympathize with the plight of those less fortunate, or the mentally ill, or the addict-victim, which would fit well with the notion that such people are to be pitied, and supported, which in turn allows you to go on with your life while stepping around unconscious people on the sidewalk with their accompanying detritus and/or feces, avoiding the non-stop flood of requests for spare change. You can endure this because you will also have accepted that millions and millions of city tax dollars are being spent on "Services" for these people, which you can interpret as the cost of dealing with the situation.

And yet, if you spend any extended period of time in the city, you might start to wonder why Market Street becomes ever more crowded with such people, while you are told that the city has yet another budget crisis (indeed, when does it not have a budget crisis?), and the amount of money spent on those mysterious "Services" for the bums - ahem, homeless - appears to rise in direct proportion with that ever-expanding street population. There's just a bit of a chicken-and-egg syndrome here, and San Francisco appears to have embraced a permanent role as the guardian of anyone who wishes to make a sidewalk their home.

There is little talk anymore of actually solving the "problem" of "homelessness", in the sense that it is even acknowledged as a "problem" - it is shrugged off as the price of being the most lovely city in the region, and that's the end of it. Meanwhile, the amusingly named "Homeless Advocates" are cited and quoted ad infinitum in every single S.F. Chronicle story about the situation, and their dialectic remains the same as it ever was: More government services are needed to get homeless people off the streets, and into productive lives.

Even this proposition would provide a worthwhile starting point in the process of tackling an actual strategy, but it quickly becomes apparent that the goals of the various parties are not the same. The "Homeless Advocates" are there not to convert bums into yuppies, but to agitate for more government money. Does that sound too glib and simplistic? If so, when have you heard them recommend otherwise? Sure, they'll all acknowledge that we've been spending zillions of dollars only to see the problem expand, but then in the next breath, the solution is always the same: spend more, or at its most enlightened, spend differently.

So the first step is to spend taxpayer money on housing for such people. The other side of this wooden-nickel coin is "Jobs", and especially "Job Training". Be forewarned that hearing defenders of the bums touting capitalism as a part of the solution will induce uncontrollable laughter on your part. Since when has San Francisco had any attitude other than anathema to business? Just last week, San Francisco's oh-so-enlightened board of supervisors managed to prevent yet another chain store from moving in; does no one see a connection between such provincial protectionism and an environment which discourages commerce and enterprise? The taxpayer dollars will continue to subsidize on-the-street toilets until the end of time, apparently.

Your daily rag dishes the dirt

2008-04-22T12:16:00.001-07:00

What absurdities exist in your daily paper? Grab the San Francisco paper, and watch the tide:

"Carter says Hamas willing to be Israel's neighbor" - forget for a moment the absurdity of Carter appointing himself to the position of diplomat to Palestine; since when has Hamas ever wished for anything short of Israel's destruction?

Letter to the editor: "Taxes on 'The Rich'" - here's a howler; the writer claims that George Bush's tax cuts "Resulted" in "The worst (job growth) performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945", according to that oh-so-unbiased source, The New York Times. Talk about "Cherry-Picking the intelligence"; did no one bother to ask which particular cycle this was? Is it over George Bush's entire eight years, or a single quarter? Makes a difference, doesn't it? Next comes this bizarre claim: "In contrast, Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hike on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers led to an unprecedented economic expansion" - The claim is clearly that the tax hike resulted in a larger economy, a connection which is spurious at best, and ground-breakingly ignorant at worst.

But the final insult comes right after these two Olympic-size stretches: "If the Republicans were talking about corporate taxes, they might have a point. But their admonishments against 'Soaking the Rich' are utterly refuted by simple logic and historical fact." - Presenting disconnected data and claiming a connection is an old tactic, and it's best used with the footnote that what has just been presented is "Simple Logic" and "Historical Fact", when neither contention passes any of the basic tests of analysis.

Bill Clinton's tax hike did not "Lead to" economic expansion any more than George Bush's tax cut "Resulted" in poor job growth. There are far more factors that influence economic activity than are addressed by these two points, but the basic proposition - that lower rates of taxation generally result in higher levels of growth - remains sound by any test (excluding, of course, that of the letter-writer's "Simple Logic").

And note again the contention that taxes represent money that is owned by the state first, and then the individual - this presumption has taken root like some kind of hideous cancer - fortunately, there have been great advances in treating such conditions, but they need a lot more publicity.

Earth Day is not a holiday

2008-04-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

Hate to break it to you, but the word "Holiday" comes from the idea of a "Holy Day" - and "Earth Day" is not holy. In fact, it's the best measure yet of how far people will go in their desire to turn naturalism into a religion - by turning away from the perceived dogma and mindless conformity of organized religion, proud secularists can turn the Earth into their God, and Earth Day into their Christmas.

Of course, while there is no shortage of media buzz identifying, labeling, and denouncing the "Fringe" elements of mainstream religion (with the exception of radical Islam, which no leftist dares to oppose aloud, for some bizarre reason, given Islam's loathing of feminism and gay rights), there is little mention of the Malthusian ideology that drives earth-worship and "Animal Rights", which is hatred of the human race. They won't talk about it in the 'Mainstream Media', which is busily displaying its earthin'-up creds with flashy web logos, power-off events, and lists of things that "You can do to help", but at the heart of this movement lies a worldview that disdains humans and sees them as some sort of malignant tumor.

Such people would like nothing better than China-style limits on children, sterilization services, and a general consensus that Earth's population should be reduced, for the good of.....well, the Earth. Ted Turner himself made some noise about limiting families to two children, which begged the question as to which three of his own five children he would be prepared to repeat this recommendation in front of.

This is the same mindset that blocks any and all development for things like new housing, new power plants...new anything, really, which just drives up the cost of living for everyone else. How often are the cries for "Affordable Housing" reconciled with the "People last, Earth first!" mentality that prevails among hard-core environmentalism?

Ponder that one as you turn off extra lights in solidarity with "The Movement".

Do you hate money? If so, you've got plenty of company.

2008-04-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

It's absolutely hilarious to hear wannabe-socialists suddenly proclaiming themselves capitalists. It plays out the minute economic growth slows down or contracts: suddenly, "The Economy" is the laser-beam focus of every candidate, pundit, and journalist of the left. Not for a moment is there the slightest question of what makes an economy sound over the long term; there simply materializes an ogre of monstrous dimensions who threatens every job, contract, and - best of all for commentators - "Working Family".

Leftists hate capitalism, and they will even say so outright. They have still not come up with any better way to reduce poverty and raise living standards for all, but this doesn't inhibit the ferocity of their denunciations. To them, the culprits are private property and profits.

Remember the trend of anti-trade rioting that emerged just as Bill Clinton was taking credit for the surge in growth that accompanied his presidency? Here was the modern face of anticapitalism; its goals were perfectly summarized by the banner, "Overthrow Capitalism and Replace it with something nice" - nothing could better explain the willful ignorance of those seduced by fantasies of workers' paradises, and tales of revenge against evil CEOs, landlords, and anyone else who had the audacity to pursue financial enrichment.

Lest you should express sympathy for such misguided folk - or worse, be one yourself - I urge you to consider some of the basics:

-If you feel a pang of recognition when some pundit denounces tax cuts as being a gift to "The Rich", go look at your latest pay stub, and tell yourself honestly just how worthwhile you believe all those deductions to be.
The reason you agree that tax cuts are to be denounced is that you have bought into the notion that people's money belongs to society first, and the individual second. You've got to get past the notion that the government is the sole arbiter of what's in the best interests of "The People".

-If you believe that individual achievement should be encouraged and rewarded, then you are at heart a capitalist. Does that cause you a little shame? Don't worry; it will pass.
Money is used as a way of quantifying goods and services; it is a tool that reflects achievement. Is that too heartless for you? If so, you probably sincerely believe that the concept of private property should be abolished.

-Are you in the United States? If so, take a look around you: even in the worst inner-city slum, you're still looking at a society so wealthy that the elite of even the most comparably-developed countries would gladly trade places with you. Why is this so? Because America's environment allows and encourages individuals to acquire wealth. The sneering disdain that looks down on this arrangement tends to come from those in countries whose endless attempts to make human behavior fit their idealistic schemes have fallen flat - and their economies, and thus societies, can't get up.

-Do you counter these fundamentals by pointing at the aforementioned slums, broken inner-city schools, incarceration rates, and other grievances that can apparently be traced back to America's heartless obsession with the pursuit of wealth? Well, you've been suckered again: America, unlike so many other societies, gives the individual the freest reign on the planet to do as he or she wishes; this means that with so much choice, we can choose ourselves right into crime, drugs, and whatever else tickles our fancy - but no criminal enters prison without having made the choice to be there. Blighted ghettos? What's the illegitimacy rate in the area? Does no one even dare to mention anymore that having children out of wedlock is a bad idea? Is this simply too old-fashioned and moralistic? Again, everyone has a choice. If the schools are as horrible as we are told, then why are we not allowed to use vouchers to promote school choice in areas where the existing institutions have crumbled? Because that's giving up on the public school system? Well, ask the teachers unions: they'll tell you it's because the schools don't have enough money. But they have more money now than they've had at any other point in time, so why isn't it enough? Don't confuse economics with sociology; it's a dangerous game.

-"Smart Growth"? This is environmentalist trickery at its best; by limiting development in any direction, they support policies that make life much more expensive for everyone in the region. Don't be fooled.

-Overpaid CEOs? Don't buy their stock. Markets have an amazing ability to reward what works, and punish what doesn't.

-Finally, a cursed phrase: Privatize Social Security. Why does this notion strike terror into the hearts of so many Americans? Because it's been slickly packaged as a boogeyman. Take another look at that pay stub and ask yourself, "Who do I trust more to manage my money - the government, or myself?"

And the next time you hear a closet socialist complaining about "The Economy", take a moment to ask yourself whether this supposedly enlightened commentator gave a damn about the economy when growth was solid, and unemployment was low - like during George W. Bush's time in office.

The Kid Gloves Come Off

2008-03-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

Well, it was a great ride, having Mr. Obama as the uniter-not-divider, painless "Change" agent, and racial-healer-in-chief, but it's over now.

With the mainstream media's revelations about Jim Wright and his position in the life of Barack Obama, the mask is off, and the squeaky-clean candidate is now exposed as a man whose spiritual mentor has a fire-and-brimstone message of the indictment of America on racial grounds.

Read the transcripts of "Pastor" Wright's speeches, and despite the tone and delivery, the words could have been written by Osama Bin Laden himself.

The double standard is especially delicious; can we imagine the press showing any kind of deference to a candidate whose spiritual advisor was a white supremacist? Just look at the blows delivered to those who associate with the comparatively benign Pat Buchanan or Jerry Falwell. The bloggers at DailyKos are falling all over themselves to praise Obama's almost hyperactive twisting and spinning in his speech today - where he sort-of-renounces-but-really-doesn't - Mr. Wright's contentions that the CIA invented AIDS, and the government crack, specifically to harm black people, or that America "deserved" 9/11. Well, the chickens have indeed come "home to roost", but not in the way Mr. Obama wanted.

Try to imagine what the rank-and-file union-style Democrats in the rust belt and such places will think of this montrosity in the form of Mr. Wright, and Mr. Obama's blithe attempts to shoo away this controversy, as though he were swatting a mere fly.

Mr. Obama may have salvaged his campaign today, at least among those weepy DailyKos types and the usual gaggle of confused youths and college students, but adults don't care for this type of crap, and they will not elect someone president who reserves the possibility of not only entertaining views such as Mr. Wright's, but flat-out embracing them.

Shelby Steele has written eloquently of the process of whites' trading in their guilt for redemption from blacks, who in turn demand symbolic offerings, such as preferential college admissions. It is difficult to imagine the Obama campaign as representing anything more to mainstream America; from reading the policy positions on Mr. Obama's site, there is scarcely anything that differentiates it from that of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, so the unique promise of the Obama campaign is that it offers some mystical and symbolic racial healing - although no one ever seems to come out and say so directly; it's almost always attributed to some vague and mysterious - yet huge - bloc of American voters. Thus it shall be with the Obama campaign.

Not long ago, an article was forwarded to me called "Don't beLIEve racism will end by politics", by a fellow called Tim Wise. It put forth the unremarkable contention that electing Barack Obama as president would do nothing to end racism or racial friction. The article itself was mostly boilerplate pointing a vague finger at white people's ongoing position as the oppressor of America's black population, and was attempting to serve as a warning that electing Obama would do nothing to help this situation.

What was so interesting about this experience was that I couldn't have agreed more with the author's conclusion - that Mr. Obama's ascension to the presidency would have no effect on race relations at all - but the avenues we traveled to arrive at this conclusion couldn't have been more different. Mr. Wise briefly cites such questionable evidence as black incarceration rates, crime, poverty, and disease to paint a picture of white America perpetually oppressing blacks.

It never occurs to Mr. White nor any of his star-struck Obama fans that the highly visible suffering of many of today's black people may just have something to do with the decades of policies put in place by the black community's self-appointed "Leaders" - the totally lame "Great Society", the pointless lowering of college admission standards, and the Democrat/teacher unions' iron lock on school resources that allow well-placed and well-heeled members of the machine to enjoy comfortable jobs with tenure, while actual learning and content are dumbed down in favor of self-esteem and historical revisionism, while armed gangs continue to attract new members as Federal money is plowed into ridiculous schemes that would be laughed out of any serious budget - but the bargaining that Shelby Steele has described is powerful enough to make even the most determined and committed bureacrat look the other way while academic performance and the encouragement of high levels of achievement are swept away in favor of feel-good tokenism.

Does Barack Obama actually transcend race, the way he's been only too happy to allow us to believe? Or are the man's views better illustrated by Mr. Wright's call to "God DAMN America"?

Obama will continue to distance himself from Mr. Wright, but most people with an ounce of common sense will recognize that a person who sits in the pew of a particular pastor for twenty years, donates thousands of dollars to that pastor's church, is married to his wife by that pastor, and has his children baptized by that pastor, will have bought into those viewpoints - at least to some degree - and it's highly insulting to our intelligence for him to compare Mr. Wright to a slightly nutty old uncle - the analogy holds no water at all.

It's the end of the free ride for candidate Obama, and not a moment too soon. It was difficult to imagine anything more horrifying than eight more years of the Clinton machine, but between her and Mr. Obama - now and forever associated with the America-hating, white-people-loathing views of Mr. Wright, which do you think most grown-ups would choose?

The country that gave us Orwell is striving mightily to realize his vision

2008-01-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

The reversal of logic is nearly complete: Six years after the 9/11 attacks, the UK government is confusing the most basic definitions of words in a political indoctrination attempt.

Their newest approach is to redefine the term "Terrorism" into something they've dubbed "Anti-Islamic" activity. (While it's tempting to describe this phrase itself as "Tortured", we must remember that this concept, too, must be eliminated, lest it raise concepts that may be interpreted as harfmul or offensive to anyone who might even imagine it).

Forget for a moment the absolute absurdity of a government attempting to engage in such propaganda; what's of immediate concern is the twisted logic behind it. Here's how they're explaining this move: "Security officials believe that directly linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory, and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion."

In the last few decades we've seen the emergence of religious violence being carried out - in the vast majority - by people who claim that their deeds are performed in the name of Islam. But for some reason, they are now not the ones to be blamed for creating this impression. This is the heart of propaganda, telling you that you are not seeing something that you in fact are, or vice versa. If Muslims are not responsible for the linking of terrorism to Islam, then what explains the attacks of 9/11, the attacks on the khobar towers, U.S. embassies abroad, the first attack on the world trade center, a nightclub in Bali, a train station in Spain, and of course, on the U.K.'s own turf, the tube bombings. That's not to even mention the foiled plans, nor is this list anywhere near complete.

But somehow, with all these examples, the perpetrators are beyond blame for the assocation they've created, and the good people of the United Kingdom are being told that they themselves must reject what they've witnessed, and adopt a reverse-logic way of thinking. Orwell would of course not have been surprised by one bit of this, but he would surely have been as nauseated as anyone else.

Denying the Islamic presence behind terrorist acts changes nothing, but leave it to governments to try and find a way to weasel out of a confrontation with those who want to kill them.

Woe betide our voters

2008-01-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

Our primary process is gathering steam, and we will soon be graced with the names of the two people who will face off in our upcoming presidential election. As usual, the Democrat party provides the standard-issue team of America-lasters who will try to outdo each other in blaming America for the world's ills, buying into every conceivable global-warming climate change baloney, and simultaneously kowtowing to our enemies and alienating our real allies.

The rock star Obama provides hope with a halo, except that those who favor his candidacy tend to be those who renounce such iconography as halos - we are being asked to ignore his total naivete on matters fiscal and international, and instead buy into the idea that electing a black guy as president will provide some sort of "racial healing" to the nation, as well as demonstrate to the world that, look, see we're not all Southern hick rednecks, and we can be accepted back into the international elite that drips with disdain for America's generosity, while stuffing its pockets with international "Aid" supplied, just in case anyone's forgotten, by the American taxpayer.

The once-rational Economist, continuing in its journey as a New York-times wannabe which embarasses its sober history a bit more with each issue, says with a straight face that "His achievements are undoubted", and also recites the usual dreariness about how the election of Mr. Obama would somehow make "Amends with America's racist past", although this view is attributed to "white voters" in early primaries, to take the focus off the editors' own giddy glow.

The rush to embrace a black candidate - and it is definitely an improvement that he is not a flagrant race hustler, a la the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton machine, whom the press long ago anointed as the official spokespersons for all matters African-American - is approaching Beatlemania levels of excitement. The desire to gush over the fact that we can have a black candidate for president obscures the very real erosion of racial division in America that those on the left are so eager to avoid acknowledging. Instead, they make judicious-sounding pronouncements about how wonderful it is, not realizing that they've tipped their hand just as badly as Joe Biden did when he described Obama as "Clean, bright, and articulate". As usual, those who diagnose racism as the source of all friction have no problem talking up Obama's supposed ability to govern in a vain attempt to convince themselves that they are not indulging in racial profiling, when there really is no other description for their behavior.

And if Obama does indeed become the candidate (and the value of finally vanquishing the Clinton machine from high office must not be underestimated), but then loses the general election, what do you think will be the response from the self-proclaimedly "Objective" media, the ivory-tower elites, the campus radicals, and those who see nothing wrong with victimizing whites in retribution for past history? This is proof positive of America's fundamental racism, they will scream. Even leaders of other countries will sneer, while their own treatment of immigrants, non-natives, and other minorities is far closer to the Jim Crow society that the modern left so loves to claim discovery of everywhere they look.

Never mind that Obama has made every indication of wanting America to apologize to the world for being America in the style of every major candidate on the left; never mind that he wants to talk unconditionally with Ahmadinejad of Iran while at the same time stating that the U.S. might have to unilaterally enter Pakistan to restore order, should its own situation worsen; never mind that Obama's vapid declarations of huge new bureaucracies and higher taxes carry no indication of being viable, successful, or worthwhile, and his sprawling and lofty yet totally meaningless goals of "investing" in American industry/American Workers/Renewable energy/the latest new-age notions of economic development which bear no relation to anything that actually works, and the socialism-inspired mechanisms he proposes which should send everyone scrambling to secure their wallets - never mind all of this; the elites will demand blood for America's not having the wisdom to elect a black figurehead in a misguided attempt to demonstrate their own racial bona fides, and anything less - especially the result of another Rebpublican presidency - will be immediately dismissed as a Diebold/Halliburton-engineered theft of another election, perpetrated by the one "Race" that it's now completely acceptable to hate, the white male.

As those on the left work themselves into a frenzy regardless of the actual outcome of the election, there will at least be some educational value afoot - if Obama wins over the majority of voters, expect to see a momentary break in the general gloominess of the left, accompanied by an inverse-proportion market dive, an economy worsening in preparation for the ferocious tidal wave of new taxation and regulation that will surely follow, and the "International Community" breathing a sigh of relief that America will have now returned to its Jimmy Carter-like era of apology, deference to Islamic crazies, and hammering more nails into the coffin of America's will to survive.

Don't Forget

2008-01-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

Happy new year, and oh, don't forget: There are crazy people who want to kill you, and they do so in the name of Islam. Does that sound like "Hate Speech", or some other politically correct label? If so, welcome to the Useful-Idiot club.

Lest you think I'm merely calling you names, try to imagine what the world would be like if the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by crazed white men claiming to act in the name of Christianity? It's nearly impossible to imagine, of course, because we just don't see Christians of any sort committing such acts.

If you have pledged your allegiance to the Rosie O' Donnell club, and you claim to 'fear' such mythical Christians as much or more than you fear Osama Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda, you have not achieved some more-enlightened state of sensitivity; you have merely been played for a sucker by Radical Islam's apologists.

And just in case you have bought into the notion that George W. Bush is personally responsible for "Radicalizing" muslim youths and delivering them into the arms of Al-Qaeda, try to remember all the attacks and 9/11 preparation that went on during the reign of that beloved "Moderate", Bill Clinton. Palestinians have been killing civilians since long before George W. came on the scene.

And before you trot out that "Israeli Aggression" horse - which turns out to have been flogged to death by a suicide bomber, ask yourself: which side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict openly calls for the destruction of the other group, and which systematically targets civilians, even using children to deliver its bombs?

These activities and more, of course, are committed with the tacit approval of those in charge of Palestinian affairs, to whom the U.S. and Europe blindly give millions of dollars, which in turn finance more such atrocities. Such U.S. taxpayer-supplied money is meant to accomplish what, exactly? And has been how successful?

So quit deceiving yourself - madmen really and truly want to cut your throat, if they are given a chance. You have turned a blind eye to this wish, and now, by buying into the notion that such people are somehow the victims, you have become their primary enablers. Nice work.

Do not forget 9/11, and do not make excuses for it. Try to retain some common sense when you enter the voting booths.

Admit it - Saddam Hussein had to go.

2007-09-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

"You failed; just admit it!" - this is the sentiment that all too often passes for analysis of America's involvement in Iraq. It is a mindset that nurtures and rewards mindless repetition of talking points which are at best debatable - but few really wish to debate, as a total disregard for the process of evaluation, analysis, and conclusion is the preferred course of action.

A publication such as The New York Times can adopt as its mission the total denunciation of the war in Iraq, and can turn its foregone "conclusion" into accepted fact among its self-appointed cognoscenti by publishing articles every day that quote individuals critical of the effort, or "analyses" that quibble with and pick apart everything from the number of humvees deployed to the thickness of troops' body armor.

Peace "Activists", about as capable of rational thought as the one-dimensional bumper stickers that appear on their cars, lecture America that by "beating the drums of war" we have "radicallized" young muslims, "alienated" our allies, and any other unfortunate conclusion you care to hang around the war's neck.

(There are even those who rail against the war on the pretense that the violence and death resulting from war are unacceptable, no matter the cost or purpose - it would be interesting to know how many of these people support a woman's right to an abortion on demand, but that's a different battlefield.)

For most of us, our conclusions about the war are summaries gleaned from a cursory survey of television images, newspaper articles, and the endless stream of supposedly sophisticated mass media commentary that tells us, in a million different ways, that "War is bad".

This is hardly an honest evaluation of a huge conflict that has a zillion factors at its core, but we don't much care for matters of complexity; it's much easier to conclude that George Bush is "Stupid", and that Iraq is a "Debacle" - that last point comes to us courtesy of The Economist, from its most recent issue, despite the succeses in Anbar and elsewhere, thanks to General Petraeus's "Surge" strategy.

The fact that so many people are incapable of seeing any progress in Iraq - or for that matter, any reason to have invaded in the first place - is a sign of our times: once again, analysis and reason have fallen prey to feelings and emotions, which are much easier to process.

So let's take a look, once again, at the reality, and not the sentiment: Saddam Hussein had to be taken out, and the entire world agreed - that is, until it came to time to actually put up its dukes, at which time it hemmed, hawed, and found endless excuses to avoid getting the job done. France and Russia, in particular, displayed a grotesque contempt of civilization by trying desperately to leave Saddam's regime in place, either because of the business deals it wanted to continue, the oil-for-food personal enrichment scheme sponsored by the incestuous U.N., or both.

The U.S., finally having had enough of the U.N.'s dithering, laid out the case for action against Saddam, and all the current nay-sayers, such as John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and an endless parade of other chameleons, signed off on it, only to turn sharply into armchair generals the moment the hard work of rebuilding began.

Let's be clear: Saddam Hussein left behind every conceivable indication that he was developing and stockpiling chemical weapons, pursuing nuclear weapons, while simultaneously engaging in the slaughter of his own people - in addition to such unlucky groups as the Kurds, let's not forget the torture of Olympic athletes who failed to win a sufficient number of gold medals, or the rape rooms operated by his own children.

He also directly paid off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, a practice that everyone in the world seems to want to avert their gaze from, regardless of their fervent denunciations of the war.

Everyone is free to vote for whomever he or she wants, but if people are planning to base their votes on vague memories of stories from the New York Times, or t.v. news stories that count only civilian deaths, rather than the number of schools reopened or terrorists killed, they do themselves and our country a disservice.

To the "You failed; just admit it!" crowd, then, I pose the question: What would you have preferred?

Would you have preferred a never-ending babbling brook of diplomats, U.N. bureaucrats, "Moderate" muslim "Leaders", pressure groups such as CAIR, the ACLU, and whoever else lives off flowery speeches to endlessly try to "engage" Saddam Hussein, as the crimes against his own people continued, the terrorist training camps persisted without interruption, the payoffs to relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers flowed unabated, the possibility of chemical and/or nuclear weapons growing a little more every day, and the ongoing spectacle of a dictator being allowed to siphon off millions of dollars from his citizenry with the approval and partnership of corrupt oil-for-food adminstrators?

Does the military might of the U.S. so reflexively turn you off that you can never, ever admit the possibility that it may very well be needed, and in fact, might be the only hope of a civilization that has thrown up its hands in capitulation to Middle Eastern dictators and radical Islamic terrorists?

Does pacifism and the notion of "Peace" drain you of all desire to combat evil? Or are you one of those relativists who has cast aside the notion that there is any such thing as "Evil", and congratulated yourself on your more-evolved mindset?

I like to think that most people, even the elites, acknowledge the concept of evil - the disturbing flip side to this coin is that when pressed, they seem capable only of identifying evil in selected places, and in their misguided quest for sympathy with the downtrodden, they will assign victimhood status to whichever group's "Oppression" garb is the most convincing. With this mindset, evil is completely in the eye of the beholder, and the objective becomes the subjective.

So the anti-war crowd, in alliance with the aplogists-for-Saddam camp, continues its foregone conclusion that America has "Lost" the war in Iraq. Irresponsible loudmouths like Harry Reid add fuel to their fire by taking every anti-American position that he can find. Their position seems to be that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq because it meant waging war, but again, pressing for details as to how this can be true in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is like pulling teeth with toothpicks. War is bad, so we shouldn't have invaded. George Bush is evil, and he shouldn't have invaded. Rebuilding Iraq has cost zillions of dollars in blood and treasure, so we shouldn't have invaded.

And I still haven't heard a clear and convincing strategy for what America "Should" have done instead.

Bow to the will of France and Germany, whose own unassimilated muslim communities call for the blood of their hosts?

Bow to the will of Russia, whose appetite for subterfuge in pursuit of wealth and influence is a hangover from the Soviet era that has become its new political identity under Putin?

Bow to the will of politically-correct Canada, whose own tranquility and resulting prosperity is largely a result of its unique location right next door to the United States?

Bow to the will of China, whose hatred of American military intervention anywhere in the world betrays a grudge left behind by U.S. backing of the Kuomintang, a conflict which ended half a century ago?

Bow to the will of America's stew of grievance groups, who have turned imaginary oppression into a national industry, and elevated "Offense" to a level of criminality only surpassed by murder itself?

Or, best of all - sat on its hands and waited for another incubator of evil to issue forth a new generation of maniacs desperate to destroy and/or absorb the rest of the world?

No, Iraq has a ways to go, but every day, America is winning. Just admit it.

Great utterances of hypocrisy in the 20th century: "They just don't get it"

2007-07-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

Follow me back in time, if you dare:

In the late '80's and early '90's, there was a huge backlash against the newly-defined concept of "sexual harassment", neatly summarized by the comment about men made during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which was that Men "just don't get it" when it comes to issues of sexual harassment in the workplace. There were endless newspaper and magazine articles, campus and workplace "Sexual Harassment" speech and behavior codes, new legislation, and a national dialogue denouncing all forms of unwanted and/or inapprorpriate advances.

Being at a majority-female college at the time, I heard about these developments constantly, as newly-empowered feminists indicted the male race, tried it, found it guilty, and sentenced it to a purgatory of "awareness" campaigns, seminars, trainings, pamphlets, and everything else. As this national frenzy crested its crescendo, Bill Clinton was elected president.

Now you can probably see where I'm going with this: Clinton subsequently gets nasty with an intern, is indicted for perjury, and the rest is history - but what was the national response to Bill Sleazy's actions? Suddenly, any and all disgust or even disapproval of this dalliance was itself denounced as simply too uptight, a hangover from the Victorian era, a byproduct of a culture hung up about sexuality, the Europeans were way cooler than us on extramarital matters, and on and on and on - in direct contradiction with the new commandments of the self-appointed feminist police.

In short, the "Sexual Harassment" movement/hysteria went deathly quiet the minute Mr. Bill's womanizing became common knowledge. Fascinating stuff, isn't it?

Al Gore Rhythms

2007-07-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

So Al Gore wants us all to take a pledge, consisting of seven points of commitment, in the name of saving the Earth. Even the most generous interpretation of these pledge points bodes major and substantial shutdown of energy usage and industry, and only a fool could believe that these ideas are realistic, practical, and likely to be followed by the majority of Earth's population. So what the heck is Gore playing at?

Those who have likened the modern environmental movement to a new religion have hit the nail on the head; a generation of confused and mechanically rebellious people - imbued since their teens with the notion that capitalism and industry are evil and should be overthrown - have nowhere to turn in their quest for inner peace, having rejected "organized" religion as some sort of cult. Without any awareness of the irony of their position, they worship at the altar of "organizing" when it comes to protests against anything that veers away from the course of socialism, or the oppressed minority du jour. (Remember when that oppressed minority was the Jews? Now that they've managed to create a homeland, they are the new oppressors!) Of course, the legacy of broken homes and broken families created by the enablers of self-righteous indulgence during the sixties has a major role in this, but that's an analysis for a different essay.

Such lost souls can find comfort and solace in radical environmentalism, as it pits them squarely against their arch-enemies - capitalism and industry. By indulging an image of American Indians as spiritual guides who lived in an earthly paradise until the arrival of the European settlers - completely ignoring the realities of tribal warfare and a scorched-Earth hunting and gathering existence - modern youth can imagine themselves as righteous saviors in a mystical battle between mother earth and evil businessmen. This feeds the spirituality need, while simultaneously giving an axe to grind against modern life in general.

Furthermore, there is an undercurrent of support for the notion that humans in general are bad for the planet, and economic development is an enemy, rather than a mechanism for alleviating poverty. For all the concern about "the poor" that we are lectured on, few seem to understand that progress by itself doesn't cause pollution.

So now we have the spectacle of Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - presiding over a congress with approval ratings LOWER than those of much-maligned President Bush - excitedly signing to Gore's pledge. What will they tell their blue-collar supporters, union members, and industrial laborers when those people are thrown out of their jobs in coal and other newly-condemned industries? It's another of life's great mysteries how the Democrat party continues to enjoy voter loyalty from this group while jamming government-sized screws directly in their behinds.

Cold Cuts

2007-07-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

Outstanding topics of our times:

Terrorism: The U.K.'s leadership is tying itself into knots trying to deny that the latest Muslim terrorism plots had anything to do with Muslim terrorists. Apparently, unless the perpetrators have sworn affidavits from Osama Bin Laden himself which state: "I am Osama Bin Laden, and I personally approve of this act of terrorism", Islam cannot be in any way connected.

The New York Times dutifully echoes this doublethink by referring to the would-be martyrs as "Disenfranchised South Asians" - just as the term "Illegal immigration" has apparently been pronounced illegal by the media, the word "Disenfranchised" is now deployed in a manner having nothing to do with its actual definition.

It will be amusing - up to a point, then dangerous - to watch the Times try and describe the nature of this "disenfranchisement" - and answer questions such as, "What does this 'disenfranchisement' consist of?", and "How did these people come to be so 'disenfranchised'?" - good luck finding 'root causes' with people who are fiercely determined to avoid seeing what is right in front of their faces.

********************************************

Abortion: Nothing has changed in the debates regarding this touchy subject, which is generally a good sign that most theoretical avenues have been explored already. Bereft of new strategies, abortion proponents must appeal to people's fears by claiming to speak in the interests of "Protecting" women, keeping the government "Out of people's bedrooms", and so forth.

First of all, how does abortion "Protect" women if half the aborted babies are themselves 'women'? Well, you say they're not 'really' women, since 'life' hasn't yet begun? This is the essence of the debate, which is that a fetus may or may not be a living thing. However, it's not difficult to settle this particular debate. If you think there is some merit to the consideration of when life "begins", then we need to consider what life is.

One way of defining something is to look at its opposite, so the question becomes, "What is the opposite of life?", and it's a pretty simple answer. Of course, fans of "nuance" claim this is too simple a definition, but attempting to complicate, and thus obfuscate matters, is a favored tactic of propagandists the world over. So yes, the opposite of life is indeed death, which means that a fetus, from the time of conception, is "Alive" according to any basic definition of "Life" - it has living cells, circulating blood, and mechanisms for feeding. Those who want to deny the obvious have to really stretch to accommodate their preordained conclusions.

Second, the phrase "Keeping the government out of the bedroom" is a catchphrase, and not a meaningful characterization of any actual debate. Using phrases that evoke stirring imagery while their assumptions are left vague is another useful propaganda tool, which appears to settle matters of logic and reason while doing nothing of the kind. If a murder takes place in "the bedroom", does that make it any less worthy of government intervention? If that argument can't be taken seriously, then neither can the whole "government out of the bedroom" construct.

*********************************

Race-based admissions policies and affirmative action: Social engineers continue to believe that tinkering with the makeup of entire communities is a worthwhile goal. Yes, it appears that some people really have nothing better to do. Let's forget for a moment the absurdity of encouraging "Minority-only" groups, causes, and cliques while screaming bloody murder at even the appearance of a "Whites-only" body - do social engineers really and truly wish to see an absolutely even makeup of the races in every crowd?

If this is so, then in order for the actual concept of "representation" to work in the way they seem to want, then we'll need to fire a substantial number of black basketball players, so that whites and other races can be brought in for the desired "balance" - since the black population is roughly 10% of the population, this will be a substantial number of blacks taken off the courts. In another example, we have been told over and over - usually with no data to support the contention - that blacks are "underrepresnted" in television and movies. I suppose some serious study will have to be undertaken to validate this claim so we can start firing the appropriate number of white producers, directors, actors, and cameramen - but I will be very surprised if the number of t.v. shows featuring black characters is far away from that 10% figure.

Besides, what about the Spanish-language channels? Since they are here in America, shouldn't they be required to display 10% black characters, as well? How come no one at "La Raza" is agreeing with this?

The "Representationism" movement is one of the most morally bankrupt of our time, and yet it continues to be taken seriously by otherwise intelligent adults, which is truly sad.

A Question

2007-06-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

If we accept what we are told about jobs that Americans "Won't do", then we accept that we "need" a guest-worker program, specifically so that we may legalize the millions of Mexican nationals who are already here.

The problem with this is that the democrat-controlled congress recently passed a minimum-wage hike.

So the question is this: Why do we need both a guest-worker program and a raise to the minimum wage?

The two are mutually incompatible, but don't expect to hear any answers from our "Leaders" pushing for both items; they would rather you didn't ask such questions.

And yes, this goes for George W. Bush, as well - he's shown exceptional resolve in dealing with terrorism and security threats around the world, but has crumbled like a cookie on the amnesty concept. For shame!

The next defense for terrorism: "Discrimination!"

2007-05-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

The P.R. machine of Islam continues to play its game of murderous deception by hosting a conference at which it is claimed that "Islamophobia is the worst form of terrorism" - this statement would be laughable if it didn't have innocent blood on its hands; the doublethink proclaims, with a totally straight face, that there is a "Rising tide of intolerance and discrimination against Muslims".

It's beyond disgusting to see apologists for terrorism play the media like a fiddle, but they have steadily gained confidence after watching Western elites roll over, kowtow, and fold like laundry in the face of even the slightest insinuations of "insensitivity".

Here's the bottom line, since the loss of common sense has turned into an international disease: There are people who bomb, torture, behead, and otherwise kill and cripple fellow human beings, and every single time, it is a Muslim, who claims, via one channel or another, that he is acting in the interests of Islam. And don't bother bringing up John Walker Lindh or Richard Reid as a refutation of this, as they were stand-ins for the same cause.

When people who commit such acts claim to speak in the name if Islam, whose fault is it for accepting that impression? Well, this is not a trick question, but the apologists are hard at work trying to convince you that it's YOUR fault for even thinking such a thing.

We don't hear of perpetual bombings, beheadings, and kidnap-torture-murders regarding land disputes in areas where Muslims are not involved. How is it a "Phobia" to deduce from this that Muslims are the connecting thread among such incidents? It is a sophisticated mind game that attempts to convince the observer that his senses are telling him the opposite of what he sees.

If only these Muslim "Leaders" could put half that energy into persuading their radical brethren to abandon their medieval ways, and join the family of man - but as the newly-empowered Muslim grievance industry takes its cues from the likes of Al Sharpton, this type of reverse logic will continue to be employed, and even more disturbingly, accepted, lapped up, and swallowed whole by those in the West who are afflicted with a virulent strain of Stockholm Syndrome without even knowing it.

To those who would blame us for their own community's incitements to murder, we are not fooled by your claims that you are the "victims", and we are not cowed. We are not terrified of being accused of "racism" in your perverse notions of good and evil, so why not drop the act? Either side with the seventh-century aspirants who wish to behead the rest of us, or start acting like the modern and civilized people you claim to be.

Hoodwinkery, thy name is Sharpton

2007-04-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

If ever there were a teflon don or a comeback kid, you'd think it would be Al Sharpton, except that he doesn't even come under the kind of scrutiny that generates such terms. You have to have survived some sort of scandal to earn these kinds of titles, and one of the greatest mysteries of modern life is how Al Sharpton does the things he does and yet appears to face no accountability whatsoever for his actions. Forget for a moment about Don Imus groveling to Sharpton for absolution of his supposed transgressions; ever since the time of the Tawana Brawley hoax, with Sharpton leading the way and destroying the lives of men unustly accused, he has had a free pass to repeat the process at his whim.

His incitments to riot are merely the culmination of his regular output of lies, fabrications, and fantasy - his rhetoric is a screeching indictment of a society that he carefully cultivates in his own imagination and those of others, a land where the average, ordinary white man is engaged in a conspiracy of oppression towards the average, ordinary black man. Sharpton rallied his mob against that Jewish-owned store in Harlem, citing their very presence as a reason to get rid of them.

Does it strike no one as absurd that he would make such a statement, and be given a free pass as well? Last I checked, we live in a country where people are free to do business where they please - does no one consider the ramification of what Sharpton is claiming, which is that races should have their own separate areas of shopping?

Sharpton's fantasy world has been roundly denounced by better men, and yet the press and the media still seem to consider him the preeminent spokesperson for black affairs, a nauseating development for all who subscribe to the concepts of decency and common sense.

Is Sharpton allowed to remain where he is because people somehow think he still performs some sort of public service by agitating for what he interprets as the interests of black people? If that is the case, it is the symptom of yet another illness, and an even more tragic one, for the audience that Sharpton believes he is performing for is paying no attention to him at all.

Even with all these grotesque episodes, the biggest insult was yet to come, which was Sharpton's Presidential candidacy in '04, and his appearance at the debates leading up to the Democractic party's primary election. Far from the pariah he should long ago have become, this man was actually accepted and welcomed at these debates, with the moderators actually addressing him as "Reverend" - I really and truly don't know how anyone can take the Democrat party seriously when it engages in such shenanigans. Indeed, how to take anyone associated with this charade seriously?

The press continues to prop Sharpton up as some sort of "Civil Rights Leader" and actually presents him as a serious presidential candidate, but then wonders why Americans are so turned off to politics - and they actually don't see any connection at all.

Aren't people in media and news-related businesses supposed to possess some type of insight or acumen regarding their profession? Not only is it no longer a requirement, it seems not even to be a practice of any kind.

Social(ism) Justice

2007-03-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

According to "The Economist", a once-respectable publication regarding the application of economics and free markets, George Bush is now reduced to genuflecting to the liquid concept of "Social Justice" while touring parts of South America.
While Mr. Bush no doubt feels the need to try and tap into more 'populist' thinking south of the border, it's very disappointing to hear him speak of infantile fantasies rather than espousing the market and government reforms that would do so much more to help those areas lift themselves out of poverty.

Oscar Berger, president of Guatemala, referring to the recent Boston-area round-up of illegals, stated that such deportations "Should stop" - this type of arrogance is beyond comprehension - one wonders how his own government deals with illegal 'migrants', as they're now so nobly referred to. Why is it assumed that America is not allowed to protect its own sovereignty? Even other members of the G-8 don't receive this type of envy-driven vitriol.
One more time, let's review: The United States takes in more legal immigrants every year than all other countries in the world combined!

The deportations should stop? I beg to differ, but they should continue until everyone gets the message that we're not going to take people in simply because their home countries can't or won't make any effort to raise their own living standards.
Does acceptance of illegal immigration rise in direct proportion with proximity to the U.S.? It would seem that way, if you listen to the hysterical diatribes of such Mexican mouthpieces as "La Raza".

The intersection of this mentality, mixed with the blind ignorance of the "Social Justice" concept is a dangerous potion, and Mr. Bush should not be playing around with such noxious chemicals. He should stick to the formula that works - promoting trade, the rule of law, property rights, and so on - rather than ambiguous notions of government-mandated "equality".

And for those of you who agree with the notion of "Social Justice", I'd like to know how, exactly, it differs from the old socialist notion of income redistribution. And don't protest that you're "Not Communists" until you've proven it.

And to the rest of South America: Our borders are every bit as legitimate as yours, so why not clean up your own messes before blaming us for not cleaning up the fallout?
The Mexican president even went so far as to state, "The U.S. has a lot to do to regain respect in Latin America" - I'm sure he's very clear about what exactly this means, but I'm sorry - this is the kind of "Respect" we do not need.

And the winner of the "Scourge of the Left" Oscar is - Israel!

2007-01-22T15:55:00.000-08:00

Is there any name in the world that inspires more hatred than "Israel"? With the possible exception of "George W. Bush", it's hard to think of any.
How can such a tiny sliver of land invite such vitriolic animosity? Well, let us count the ways.

From the perspective of an uninvolved observer, the problem is that of a land dispute; each side claims the authentic possession of the land. If one were to simply disregard the origins of the land dispute, what would remain? A tussle between two factions, each claiming the authentic right to the land. So if we suspend all other inquiry, we would still be faced with the current nature of the dispute, which characterizes itself thusly:

-One side openly brags of "Annihilating" the other, and killing all its people. The other side makes no such pledge.
-One side commits random acts of terrorism against the other side's civilian population, and rationalizes such acts as acceptable.
-One side officially indoctrinates in its children and citizens hatred for the other side in its schools and propaganda, denouncing the people of the other side as less than human, and characterizing them as "Apes", "Pigs", "Dogs", and so on.

There are, of course, no prizes for guessing which side is which, so what exactly are we to make of an elite class that lectures Israel on its supposed transgressions while giving a pass to those who strap bombs to themselves and detonate them on public buses? A land dispute is a land dispute, but since when is wanton murder of civilians acceptable? We have heard the same lyrics coming from the chorus of academics who sympathized with the perpetators of the 9/11 attacks, a depressing number of which came from our own universities, who, of all people, should know better.

Denouncing Israel as an entity has become a sort of parlor game for intellectuals of all stripes, but far less discussion is heard of what exactly Palestinian arabs should be doing differently - if the U.S. is supposed to act as the even-handed broker everyone continually wishes for, then what, exactly, is supposed to happen after all the concessions demanded by Hamas and such are given? Are such self-appointed diplomats truly under the illusion that peace would reign once Israel gives away everything being demanded of it? Time and time again, we hear from people who pontificate aloud that all these problems could have been solved at anytime, if only the U.S. had made a "Serious" effort to do so. They seem to think that the only reason such efforts haven't been made is that no one has really tried hard enough - apparently, the superhuman efforts to give away the store brokered by their hero of international relations, Bill Clinton, were somehow not quite enough, although I've heard few leftists explain exactly why.

The reason is that they probably know the answer, but don't really want to face its implications, which is that Hamas, Ahmadinejad, Bin Laden, and all those of this ilk will not be satisfied until Isreal itself has been destroyed, and its people killed. And after that, what will their next target be? Jews everywhere else.

The secular left: Afraid of the logic it purports to espouse

2007-01-03T16:13:00.000-08:00

What could be more sickening than the various frothing leftists aiming every morally bankrupt weapon in their arsenals at George Bush, while giving a free pass to those who would kill us merely for being Americans?

Not much.

Recently, I saw a makeshift sign in a car - it appeared to have been created using a large piece of cardboard and magic markers, and was big enough to cover the entire rear window, in much the same way that anti-glare devices are positioned in cars to prevent heat buildup. The sign read, "The religious right: afraid of freedom!"

This was no doubt intended to draw attention to the author's very grave and noble concern regarding oppression by Christians who vote conservative. The sign, while intended to convey the author's 'speaking truth to power' - to quote a favorite mangled philosophy - only serves to illustrate a complete lack of perspective.

How brave must this individual be, to carry around such a banner in his car in the middle of one of the most solidly leftist parts of the country? (California Congressional district 13, represented by crackpot Pete Stark, who voted against a resolution condemning the 9/11 attacks). This is like carrying a sign in Berkeley announcing support for 'the environment' or 'against war'.

And what sort of 'freedom' does the author believe that the religious right is afraid of? This is where the very definitions of certain words elude those who wield them as weapons. My guess would be that this person believes in the unfettered right to abortion on demand. Beyond that, it's hard to think of what other 'rights' such people believe that religious types want to suppress.

But beyond this logical dead end lies a much more disturbing tendency, which is the blind eye turned toward a far more insidious and freedom-suppressing ideology, namely, Sharia law.
What would this person have to say about the type of freedom feared by people who want women in burqas, escorted in public only by men, forbidden to drive cars, and on and on and on?
And would they be so bold as to display that sign in an area that wouldn't be so respectful of freedom of speech, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, et cetera?

To indulge the unique freedoms of the U.S. in an effort to denounce what is arguably the least threatening group of people on the planet while ignoring the very real threat posed by those who openly wish for a global caliphate that would eliminate freedom of assembly, speech, and press betrays a hypocrisy so profound, it boggles the mind - but I've lived here long enough, and really shouldn't be surprised any longer at such ignorance.

Diplomaidiocy

2006-12-14T14:35:00.000-08:00

So what's needed in Iraq? What's needed in the Middle East in general? Why, it's simple, according to the reasonable, sensible, and realistic pundits.

Nuance. Sensitivity. Dialogue with Syria and Iran. A "Real Solution" to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

Sorry, I really meant to get through this without using the quotation marks, but I just couldn't stand it. The James Baker-led Iraq "Report" once again trots out these horses, which echo the exact same thought enunciated by our more ambitious politicians: If we just sit down and negotiate, we can solve this.

Do you remember how badly Clinton wanted to become the man who resolved the Israel/Palestine situation? He practically tucked Arafat into bed at the White House, only to be rebuffed when - surprise! - the terms of the deal offered were deemed unsatisfactory by the Nobel-worthy, self-appointed, and thoroughly corrupt "Leader" of the Palestinian cause.

The lesson here is that so many have yearned to be that person, and the inspiration - never mind that it's doomed to fail - consists of little more than: "If I were in charge, I could make them strike a deal, and then the whole planet would love me!"

Unbeknownst to many of our would-be leaders, this is not "Let's make a deal", or any of its variants, such as "Who wants to acquire a homeland?". It has nothing to do with "Peace", and everything to do with exterminating Israel and its Jews - how many times must you be reminded of this by Ahmadinejad before you understand that he means what he says?

So, mr. aspiring peacebroker - how will you negotiate a peace with those whose sole demand - which can't be negotiated - is the death of the other party? How will you, Mr. Kucinich or Kerry - or you, Ms. Clinton - make good on your fantasy that your superior negotiation skills by themselves will resolve the essential conflict?

I hate to burst your bubble, but your pipe dream puts us all at risk.

Brain cuts for the stupid

2006-12-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

Just in case it hasn't been translated for you lately, here's the story behind the veil:

"TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH" - this concept is named this way to conceal the fact that the people who express it actually despise the notion of wealth in general. Wealth represents inequality, and as we all know, inequality must inherently mean that one person is oppressing another.
Just look at Paul Krugman's latest road show, which is that the "Super-rich" are "Screwing" America. Such outbursts are common among those who subscribe to the capitalism-is-evil script, whether consciously or not. When pressed, many of these people would allow for the fact that they still believe in the notion that there is somwhere in the realm of possibility a more "fair" system than capitalism, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Cloaked in a shroud of compassion, this disdain for free-market mechanisms represents the very serious threats imposed by communism, and the scorn and ridicule heaped on those who point out the failures of such thinking only underscores the fragility of what this country has achieved.

By giving people the freedom to pursue their own level of success, they are automatically granted the responsibility for those results. Are those who choose to ignore the system and live off the handouts of others - or turn to crime - less deserving than the rest of us, or are they simply helpless victims of an uncaring society? Well, there are people with legitimate needs - orphans, cripples, and such, and then there are people who are just plain bums. The "Homeless" in the '80's occupied the same slot as "Undocumented" people today - another euphemism, deployed by the intelligentsia to indict the 'failings' of capitalism, because of course, anyone's plight is the fault of "all of us", just as your wealth that you earned must be redistributed to others "fairly".
Yes, having wealth is unfair, as we all know, and the entire goal of society should be to move towards making people's level of wealth more similar, rather than less.

So any reduction in taxes - even one enacted at the same exact rate for every income level - favors the wealthy. How? Simply because wealth favors the wealthy. To say that the rich do not "pay their fair share" is to actually dodge the argument over what "fair" is actually supposed to be. By simply painting any amount as "not enough", the idea is easily ingrained into everyone that no matter what portion of high levels of income are taxed, the fact that there are wealthy people is by itself an injustice.

Those who place more emphasis on passion than reason generally see no connection between personal freedom and economic freedom, and that is such a terrible shame.

Racial separatism - alive and well at a University near you!

2006-10-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

You've got to read this to believe it: the California State University East Bay newspaper carries an editorial calling for more minority teachers, and includes the incredible statement that for Hispanic students, "There are some things they can learn only from Hispanic faculty, especially when it comes to advising".

Here's the link:
http://pioneer.csueastbay.edu/PioneerWeb/PioneerNews10-19-06/PioneerFrame10-19-06.html

People actually believe this stuff, and it was somewhat refreshing to at least see them describe what they really think, but I couldn't let that stand, so here's the requisite "Letter to the editor" (I'd be interested to know if anyone else even bothered to write in along the same lines):

Dear editor: regarding "The not-so-diverse side of CSUEB" – What empirical evidence, studies, or even observation support your contention that Hispanic students can learn certain things "only from Hispanic faculty"? This bizarre presumption, offered up as established fact, suggests that learning and education should be divided up along racial lines - have you even stopped to consider that your proposal is the exact same thing as the "Separate but equal" rule that was found unconstitutional?

Arguments regarding the concept of representation engage the dubious proposition that a college is best served when racial presence, expressed as a percentage, must mirror the larger society in order to be effective. If Black Americans make up about ten percent of our population, and the student body at CSU East Bay is ten percent black, but the faculty is "only" seven percent black, then you'll have to engage in racial hiring quotas to fill that three percent gap. And once you've achieved it, what then? What does this racial parity actually achieve? By advancing the notion that students can only really "learn" or feel "comfortable" with someone whose skin is the same color as theirs, you've refuted the entire concept of learning, which is to discover things you didn't already know. Such ideas might seem commonplace on today's college campuses, but they are supported neither by facts nor common sense. Can "only" Jewish people learn of the horrors of the Holocaust from Jewish professors? Can only Hispanics learn of Mexican history from other Hispanics? Don't patronize people by telling them that they are incapable of learning "certain things" from anyone other than members of their own tribe, unless you can define for the rest of us exactly what those "things" are.

And thanks for stating that your white faculty is, in fact, qualified - this is right next door to the old "Some of my best friends are black" canard. In fact, when you pursue your new racial hiring program, why not just hang out a sign saying, "Whites need not apply"? What you're arguing for is no different. Next time, try to think more specifically about what it is you're trying to achieve. By all means, let's have more people of all backgrounds on our teaching staff, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they are being brought in specifically to reach "their" people. Quality education for all should be the goal, and it's a goal we should be trying to achieve together, not broken down into tribes.

Dismiss me as a “White Male” if you must – and engage in exactly the type of racism you claim to stand against – but you still have to explain what, precisely, students can “Only” learn from their racially-similar brethren. How about a student who is half Mexican, half Caucasian? Will we need to supply both a white teacher and a Hispanic teacher, or do we need to hire a half Mexican, half Caucasian teacher? The absurdity of your logic is apparent with any degree of scrutiny.

What's on the agenda menu?

2006-10-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

It's important to give recognition to those who discuss the big picture - I can prattle on all day about the moral bankruptcy of those who hate our country while eagerly devouring the bounty it bestows on them, but that doesn't mean I've offered a positive alternative, and plenty of pundits fall into the same routine, trashing the trashers without offering sufficient specifics on what really and truly needs to be done.

In that spirit, I'd like to echo our always-informative team at National Review, whose "Corner" blog (http://corner.nationalreview.com/) linked to this article recently:
http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2006/voegeli.html
I think you'll find it a good discussion of where the 'big ideas' debate is at.

I'm still rather shocked by the vehemence of those critics who snarl endlessly about the evils of Bush and everyone who voted for him, especially when they begin to discuss what they think should actually be done - it's chilling stuff. For example, I'm still waiting for John Kerry to explain how he would have fought the war on terror with more "Sensitivity", and more importantly, how that would have been more effective.

The same applies to the larger debates:

-Do you really believe that more spending on schools would improve them? Such spending has been on the rise for decades and hasn't helped; why should it be any different now?

-Do you really want the government and society in general having more control over the way you live your life? This admittedly vague query at least forces you to think about what would be appropriate boundaries and roles of government. (Warning! For effectiveness, do not turn this question into a referendum on abortion or gay marriage; we'll have plenty of other opportunities to beat those drums.)

-Do you believe in equality? (Yes, of course, it's a trick question!) Does equality mean that if the population is 10% black, that this statistic must be reflected in any grouping of people, by force if necessary? Does equality mean that you should pay a higher percentage of your income to taxes as your income rises? If so, what formula should be used to calculate that 'fair' taxation?

-Do you believe that George Bush's foreign policy is a miserable failure? What would you have had him do differently, and how would that have been more effective? (Warning: calling for more dialogue or negotiation is often a quagmire of its own!)

Honest answers to these questions are welcome. Anyone want to try? Anyone who's actually running for office? Let's hear it.

Five years later, we still don't get it - and that's so sad.

2006-09-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

How incredibly sad to see such ignorance - when 9/11 occurred, it was at least possible to believe that everyone now understood the severity of the enemy. It's taken a few years, but it seems as though America has actually talked itself out of a state of comprehension, and back into a state of denial.
There's so much that can be said about this process, but it's all perfectly summed up in an AP news story today whose headline says, "5 years after 9/11, many angry at U.S." - the 'many' will be sort-of identified later in the article, but it can be safely assumed that such people are those on the left, which is a bit surprising, as those folks are forever warning us against "Blaming the victim", which appears to be exactly what the article is about.
In the body of the article, the very first sentence chimes in with that "Squandered the good will of the world" chorus, whose ignorance and stupidity has been dissected elsewhere in this blog, and yet it keeps coming back, like a severe bout of dysentery. It saddens me to have to point out - once again - the absurdity of this sentiment. According to the news story, it would appear that the "many" cited in the beginning of the article were thrilled with the attacks on the U.S., finally seeing a chance for their venomous hatred of America to be brought to a boil - and while they express regret at the 'loss of life' and other such purposefully distanced remarks, they are secretly delighted, and react by publicly admonishing the U.S. for having taken action against those who perpetrated the attacks.
According to them, we should have appeared penitent and contrite; we should have "worked with" the international community to "bring those responsible to justice", and furthermore, America should have multiplied its aid to poorer nations exponentially, taken no military action, engaged in a soul-searching dialogue about "Why they hate us" (rather than the other way around), and acted like a cowed bully in any way possible.
To rectify the disgusting odor left behind by that article, I will now say the words that the 'many' in the article hate to hear: Thank you, president Bush. Thank you for having the courage to do the right thing. Thank you for ignoring the cries of those at the U.N., moveon.org, George Soros, John Kerry, and that jerk who actually saw one of the planes hit the trade center building, and thought to himself, "Gee - what a great opportunity for us to make friends by not responding to this!"
Thank you, George Bush, for doing the right thing in deposing the Taliban. Thank you, George Bush, for neither flinching nor blinking at the next round, courtesy of Saddam Hussein, whose state-sponsored terrorism and plans for more went unacknowledged like a gigantic elephant-in-the-living-room everywhere else. Thank you, George Bush, for being there when the U.S. needed you most, and nevermind the squealing protests of those who refuse to believe what they've seen with their own eyes.
And a pox on you, Michael Moore, for offering sympathy to those who attacked us on that day by wondering aloud why they'd want to kill the nice Blue Democrats along with the evil Red Republicans. What a fool you revealed yourself to be. You probably win a prize for the speed at which you were able to convey to the whole world your childish ignorance.
I'd like to have closed this with something more uplifting, but sad to say, five years later, the domestic situation seems only to have become worse. The best we can hope for is that this is the "Darkest before dawn" period.
God bless America.

What do you want?

2006-09-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

The sense of passion found in criticism of the Iraq war is undeniable, misplaced as most of it is. The urgency to discredit and destroy George Bush coming from the shrill cries of mainstream Marxists has built up to pressure-cooker intensity. Dovetailing with this quest is the expansion of anathema towards Israel and the U.S.-based Jewish Lobby. Carter's fecklessness in the face of Iranian hostage-takers is not only being remembered but celebrated in the wake of a visit to America by Mr. Khatami, a former leader of Iran, a country in which being a moderate means only slightly less outrageous statements calling for the death of all jews. "May you live in interesting times", indeed - may we please not live in such interesting times?
So the enduring question is, much like that posed to the crippled soldier from Trumbo's Johnny Got his gun who eventually regains his ability to communicate after losing his vision, hearing, and limbs, "What do you want?" This question would no doubt produce a multitude of fascinating answers if asked of those who have the most vocal criticisms of the current state of things. If we were to ask a Khatami or an Ahmadinejad what they actually wanted, and not what they thought a left-leaning reporter wanted to feed to the media audience, we would most likely learn that they want Israel destroyed and its people killed. If we were to ask Hezbollah what they really wanted, the answer would most likely be about the same. If we were to ask the PLO whether it wanted peace with Israel that included land concessions or the complete annihilation of Israel, what would their answer be?
And what do you want, protesting college students? Do you Want George Bush to be impeached, arrested, and tried on charges of war crimes for cutting off the rule of Saddam Hussein, a certifiable maniac? Do you want, as John Kerry suggested, for us to "Get back to a place where terrorism is just a nuisance"? Do you want an ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand approach to people who want to kill you for the crime of being an American? No, of course you don't. You prefer to believe that all the blame for the past quarter-century of terrorism against the U.S. lies with the Republican party. You still cling to the belief that Bill Clinton was far better for America than George Bush, despite Clinton's inability or unwillingness to engage those who attacked us. Facing 9/11 with "Intelligence and Candor", one of your representatives suggested, was all that was necessary to begin the process of fixing things. But few of you understand exactly what's broken. You continue to dine on swill fed to you by failed Marxist ideology. You are convinced that America is somehow the bad boy in all global discomfort, ignoring evidence before your very eyes that America has been the greatest benefactor the world has ever seen. You still believe, despite decades of fiscal and managerial incompetence from those who run our schools, that lack of tax dollars is the source of all education woes. Who has been running the schools all this time? Primarily bureaucrats who happen to be members of the Democrat party. These are the same people whose bread and butter provides an ample opportunity to cast aspersion on capitalism in general, and an adherence to the purported principles of the Democrat party, whose results are more often than not the exact opposite of what they are stated to be. Example: Democrats claim to represent the powerless, the little guy, but this image is totally negated by their desire for high taxation mixed with generous welfare-style benefits, which only have the effect of discouraging people from improving their lot in life.
So in light of this, what do you want? Do you still believe that the war in Iraq should be abandoned, along with the war on terror in general, and that the money spent on such effort should be redirected to schools, social programs, and anything that is proclaimed to serve the cause of "Social Justice"? Do you think that if we just had someone who could make a real diplomatic effort to reign in the "Jewish influence" and then go and really negotiate, that problems would be solved? Do you still think that "Poverty is a root cause of terrorism", despite the presence of those with upper-middle class backgrounds in teams of airline bomb plotters? Have you failed to notice that the profile of actual terrorists shows a range of economic levels between poverty and great wealth, much as one finds in society in general? Does this piece of data fail to fit into your view that poor people in general have a legitimate grievance against the U.S.? Do you still feel that terrorism is an overemphasized scare tactic, deployed by an evil Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove, to keep Americans in a permanent state of fear?
So what do you want? And don't just parrot the delusions I've outlined here. Describe the specific actions that you would take to address these problems, and why they would produce different results.
And don't bother telling me; get it all worked out in your head, and then, once you have honestly answered the question to your satisfaction, share your answers with others - because if you have the answers, they need to be heard - and if your ideas turn out to be just more of the same old junk rehashed, they will be quickly recognized as such.

Blinders, the essential item for a leftist life.

2006-08-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

It's official: a substantial portion of Americans are in denial of the fact that madmen want to kill us. I could explain away a certain percentage of the self-imposed blinders after 9/11 as shock, emotional overreaction, and so forth, but what to make of people pooh-poohing the news of the latest airline bombing plot?

People really and truly don't believe that Islamic Fundementalists want to kill Westerners for no other reason than the fact that they are Westerners. They think that dialogue and diplomacy could solve everything, and that George Bush simply hasn't tried. One blog post recently lamented the fact that we hadn't faced the 9/11 situation with "Candor and intelligence" - apparently, this would have been all it took to straighten everything out with Bin Laden and his merry men. How I would love to know what this author thought "Candor and intelligence" actually meant in the real world, but of course it wasn't explained, most likely because the author had failed to ask himself precisely what these notions entailed.

But he is only one among millions, those same people whose memory of security concerns in the '90's has already gone fuzzy - those for whom the Khobar towers, the USS Cole, and American embassies in Africa are non-entities. If such an episode is remembered for some reason, it is explained away. Clinton's actions or lack thereof is neither cited nor indicted. George Bush, however, is instantly judged as having "Radicalized" young muslims for overthrowing Saddam Hussein - never mind that ordinary Muslims had the same reasons to loathe Hussein as did the rest of the world.

But just to make things easy for those who think that radical muslims would love us if only they were approached by "Candid and intelligent" diplomats, let's pretend we left the Taliban intact in Afghanistan, allowed Hussein to continue his inexorable violation of U.N. resolutions (with its preposterous "Oil-for-food" scam intact), and elected John Kerry by a landslide in 2004 - do you still believe that radical muslims would not be plotting to kill Americans at random?

They say that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. I truly hope that this definition won't be updated to say that a conservative is a liberal who's had a family member beheaded by a jihadist or blown up in a plane, but after listening to people react to the announcement of the latest terror plot with declarations that Bush and Blair cooked up the whole thing to further consolidate their power, I have very little hope left.

Jimmy Carter's dilapidated house

2006-07-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

No, not the ones he builds under the banner of charity, but the one he left behind in 1980, its facade tarnished and weakened, especially in the eyes of its enemies.
My own dear sweet Mum has for many years defended the Carter administration, and the centerpiece of his achievement in her eyes is that Carter "Kept us out of a war". One doesn't choose to debate one's own mother on such a touchy subject, but I keep wondering: When exactly does a war start? It would seem to me that if a nation's embassy employees are held hostage by a newly-installed and hostile regime, that an act of war has already been committed. Can a president simply not respond and thus be thought to have "kept us out" of a war?
Wasn't the first act of war the taking of those hostages?
What if we had pulled a Clinton on 9/11, and simply vowed to "Track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice", and done nothing further? If Bush had not sent our troops to Afghanistan and unseated the Taliban, would he have been credited with "Keeping us out of a war"?
Number one, I doubt it. Number two, staying out of a war and failing to engage in an existing one are two different things. It's hard to see how holding hostage another country's embassy employees is in any sense NOT an act of war, but the desire for "Peace" can trump all rational response, as we have seen in many, many axes of appeasement, both past and current.

The Mother of all Double Standards

2006-05-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

So a member of both the House of Representatives and the legendary Kennedy family drives erratically, and smacks into a barricade in the road. What happens next? Well, if it were you or I doing this, we'd be tested for drunk driving, and most likely spend the rest of the night in the slammer.
But when you're a highly-placed politician, apparently, you are given a ride home by the cops, without even the most cursory field testing for impairment. It's just not possible to imagine a more brazen example of a cover-up based on political favoritism.
Wondering where Mothers Against Drunk Driving might stand on this scandal, I checked their website, and was pleasantly surprised to see a statement (cycnically, I had fully expected to see no reference at all). However, closer examination revealed a complete fumble:

"Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) supports the United States Capitol Police Department’s decision to thoroughly review this incident and examine the Department’s current procedures concerning crashes where impairment due to alcohol or drug use is suspected. We have great faith that the investigation will clarify the facts and determine appropriate outcomes of this situation."

Can you imagine such a tolerant stance if the careening driver had been a Republican? The outcry would be deafening. So MADD supports a decision to "Thoroughly review" the incident? Where are the demands for procedures to be applied to everyone, regardless of political status or affiliation? Could MADD have a partisan reason to treat Patrick Kennedy with kid gloves? It certainly wouldn't be the first time, but it's sickening to see it on such brazen display in this day and age.

Way to stand up for your principles, MADD.

The Bush hatefest

2006-05-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

What is the source of the vitriolic hatred of George Bush? He can scarcely be called a conservative; witness his orgy of federal spending, and his mild-mannered accommodation of abortion, borders, and other items dear to conservatives. Sure, he went to war and took out Sadddam Hussein, but even this by itself couldn't give rise to the mantra of "Worst president ever" that is quickly gaining acceptance among the cognoscenti.

There's something deeper, and it can't be just his Christianity; both Clinton and Kerry were careful to display their churchin'-up creds, so what could it be? "Miserable failure", "Bush is worse than Hitler" (not even an acknowledgement of the word "Hyperbole", here), and others too numerous to specify have been adopted by the national discourse, no matter how many zillions of dollars Bush pledges to spend on the AIDS lobby.

Those who say there's no difference between the two parties are probably onto something a bit more substantial than those who wake up and start shaking with anger at the realization that Bush is president instead of John Kerry - but even this position is somewhat bankrupt, as it fails to acknowledge the very different voting records of the House and Senate.

A quick scan of events reveals that Bush is to blame for failing to prevent 9/11, although the Clinton administration apparently had absolutely nothing to do with the build-up of preceding events. Bush also is 'responsible' for the ravages of hurricane Katrina, and for alienating Europe, as well. To the vast majority of those on the shrill spectrum, Bush can do absolutely nothing right, and will get credit for nothing when he leaves office.

But why? Sure, he cut taxes, but not by all that much, and not even permanently. He's met scarcely any government programs he disliked enough to try to cut funding for, and can hardly be accused of putting his weight behind truly conservative causes.

The answer is most likely that the Democratic party has succeeded in defining the Republican party as "Evil", and put way more effort into indoctrinating youth with this view, such that a legion of robots has grown up repeating this lie, and believing it wholeheartedly.

Whatever happened to the "Think for yourself" movement? Free speech is a wonderful accomplishment of our constitution, but there appears to be no way to legislate free minds. Oh, well.

Undocumented Intentions

2006-03-30T14:18:00.000-08:00

At least now we understand what this so-called "Immigration" debate is about, because it's not about guest workers, the economy, driver licenses, or any such thing. It's about handing America over to those who believe it is owed to them. Think I'm exaggerating?

There's not a single credible argument to be heard by those calling for less restrictions on illegals - we all know that while prices for certain goods and services will rise if illegals weren't around, there's just no such thing as work that American's "won't" do. Allow prices to fluctuate as they would in any other free market, and they'll arrive at the exact spot they should be by mutual concensus, albeit unspoken. You don't need a degree in economics to understand this principle of market systems. It was only slightly surprising, then, to hear President Bush offering up this lie, by the way - I thought he would at least remember that a far greater number of Americans now see through such B.S., but apparently he wants to try flying under the radar one more time.

It's still not clear where the racism police are when this "Jobs that Americans won't do" phrase is thrown around just as though it were an established fact - why not just take it a step further, and state that black people "won't" do these jobs because they're too "Lazy"?

The same goes for any other argument you care to pull out of that "Undocumented Immigrant" hat, and don't even start on how illegal aliens should have driver's licenses in the name of "Safety" - it was almost funny to watch people attempt to make this argument with a straight face, just as though fewer traffic accidents were the only thing they were thinking of.

The debate, and thus the marches recently, are simple demonstrations for Brown Supremacy. Still think I exaggerate? Well, take a look at the photos from the demonstrations, and note the flags being flown - what ratio do you see of Mexican to American flags? Useful idiots who are themselves neither Mexican nor Hispanic support open borders without actually saying so because it appears to be the closest position to their holy grails of tolerance, diversity, and anti-oppression. They may even say that their positions don't necessarily support open borders, but rather are against measures taken to restrict the flow of illegal aliens - a bankrupt position that enjoys thinking about effects while ignoring results.

The debate is long since over - America has a right to enforce both its laws and its borders, and we have no inherent moral obligation to take in people whom the Mexican government either can't or won't take care of. Being adjacent to a poor neighbor does not confer protector and provider status. Why should Mexico's proximity mean that its economic migrants receive preferred status ahead of those who take the legal routes to citizenship from countries around the globe?

No, there is no debate left, just a wash of blind emotions - concern on the part of compassionate but economically clueless liberals, and advocacy from fire-breathing Spanish speakers who believe that America is "their" land that was "stolen" from them, and must be reclaimed.
Polls tell us over and over that Americans don't want automatic citizenship granted to everyone who manages to set foot over the border, and yet those who create - and supposedly enforce - our laws increasingly act in direct opposition to this wish. Nothing could be more un-American.

Headline for 2005: "Please Kill Us!!!"

2005-12-20T14:01:00.000-08:00

Does that sound like an odd thing to say? Would a sane person actually request that his life be ended at someone else's hands? One would imagine not, and yet that seems to be all we are hearing from the chattering class.

Is this a gross oversimplification? Unfortunately, no, it isn't. Here's the latest example: Bush has allowed that he authorized wiretaps on phone calls to and/or from suspected Al-Qaeda members, and the "Bush is Satan" crowd is screaming bloody murder. The wiretaps are illegal and immoral, they claim, and they are now tossing around the idea of impeachment with a gusto not seen since the time Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on that aircraft carrier.
There's a few problems with this reaction, of course, the first of which is that the wiretaps don't appear to be illegal at all. Since there's some confusion about the authority they come under, a phalanx of opportunists is spewing forth their interpretations (generally ill-informed) of the law which finds Bush guilty.

What is behind this hand-wringing? The desire to protect America's enemies. If you are among this crowd, you are now saying to yourself that you are in fact not "against" America's enemies, you are simply in favor of civil liberties and so forth, and in fact, our "enemies" are not really enemies, they are actually just people oppressed by U.S. foreign policy whose hatred is justified.

Thus the theme for this year: "Please Kill Us" - the message from the self-proclaimed civil libertarians appears to be:

"Terrorists have legitimate grievances, so they must be afforded the same rights as Americans. We must never monitor their phone conversations, spy on them, or do anything that in any way restricts their freedom to plan and carry out terrorist activities. Along these lines, we must also swear in writing that we will never use undue influence to try and get information from captives in custody, lest we should appear to be 'torturing' them, in which case, even if actual American lives could be saved from a terrorist attack by shaking down a terrorist, it is the morally superior position to let those Americans die."

"This is also true on airplanes, and any other public conveyance or gathering location - racial profiling is such a heinous and horrible thing that again, even if a terrorist attack is suspected or imminent, it shall be illegal to stop people and question them on the basis of their appearance. Better that ten Americans die than one person (American or not) be subjected to racial profiling, and possible hurt feelings."

"Furthermore, the legitimate grievances that Osama Bin Laden and his followers have means that we should reverse American policy, and stop supporting Israel. Never mind that such "Support" amounts to little more than what every other country gets in American Foreign Aid, or that jews have representation in the Government, just as American Muslims could have if they so desired - the presence of such appearances means that we must grant Palestinians a state, and thus reward them for their slaughter of civilian men, women, and children. There is no need to think this through further, or what the implications might be of the imams who call not only for the Palestinian state and the right of return, but for the destruction of Israel and the elimination of jews in general. Although we compare Bush to Hitler regularly in an apparent reference to the atrocities committed by Adolf and the Nazis, we don't challenge people who call for the exact same type of pogroms today."

"In protecting such people and giving them what they want in the hope that they will leave us alone, we also believe that if we controlled foreign policy and could redistribute America's wealth to other countries in inverse proportion with the production levels of their economies and darkness of their skin color (in an attempt to absolve our guilt over the actions of fair-skinned people of years and years ago), that all would be well, and everyone in the world would shower us with praise. After all, our dear leader Michael Moore, in his response to the 9/11 massacres, expressed confusion that liberal/democrat people were being killed along with the horrible, evil conservative/republican people. We know that since we are the true and correct people that our view would prevail, if only we could impose it on everyone. No, we haven't yet figured out how to reconcile our support of the concept of homosexual marriage with the fundamentalist Islamic view that homosexuals should be killed, but we'll err on the side of danger if it gives an opportunity to take a swipe at Bush, the great satan."

Is this what you hear coming from the presses and the talking heads? If not, good for you. Just don't be surprised when you are murdered by a terrorist who was protected by your election of Kerry/Dean/Clinton, or whoever is hailed as the embodiment of "Moderation" and "Diplomacy" after George Bush is gone.

(DISCLAIMER: The author of this article is not a jew, so for those of you just starting to type out the word "Zionist" in your responses or comments, you'll have to use the excuse that I "Sold out" to the jews or have some other dubious ties to them. I don't have any, but here's what I do have, which is a summary observation: All the madness around the world that is claimed to be a direct result of the Israel/Palestinian conflagration is a crock of shit.)

Cable-on-demand vs. Abortion-on-demand

2005-09-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

You are counter-culture. You believe in questioning authority, seeking the truth behind the issue, and social justice. You are distrustful of organized religion, establishment society, the military-industrial complex, and politicians of most stripes.
You further believe that John Kerry was the right man to vote for in the election, because Bush lied to get us into a shameful war, and besides, he's a puppet of the oil industry.
In short, you are a lackey. Despite your best efforts not to be manipulated by "the system", or "the media", and despite your deep commitment to open-mindedness and alternative, you are a patsy, and you have been played for a fool.
You have been spoon-fed a diet of manipulation - all the while being told that the very poison you drank was coming from the enemy - and it will take some time and antidote for you to recuperate.
Take the biggest issue of them all, abortion - despite your carefully-nourished concern for Minority Rights, Civil Liberties, and The Little Guy, you have agreed to deny rights to the unborn. More prominent than this is your disavowal of the issue as something worth actually debating and discussing, as you've been trained to feel that the issue has already been decided, for now and ever after, in favor of what is euphemistically referred to as "A woman's right to choose".
Is it at all possible that the issue is far more complicated and debate-worthy than you realized? Yes, but it will take you a while to internalize this. There are extremely powerful arguments on the side of those you've dismissed as "The Christian Right", and your refusal to even acknowledge their concerns demonstrates your utter lack of an open mind.
That's a big spoonful of unpleasant medicine to swallow, so you'd better let that one digest a while.

September 11th again, four years down the road.

2005-09-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are, facing another anniversary of that horrible day, and congress, through all its madness and duplicity, at least managed to issue a declaration regarding the terrorist attacks of four years ago; here's the text:

RESOLUTION
Relating to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.
Whereas on September 11, 2001, while Americans were attending to their daily routines, terrorists hijacked four civilian aircraft, crashing two of them into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and a third into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a fourth was prevented from also being used as a weapon against America by brave passengers who placed their country above their own lives;
Whereas four years later the country continues to, and shall forever, mourn the tragic loss of life at the hands of terrorist attackers;
Whereas by targeting symbols of American strength and success, these attacks clearly were intended to assail the principles, values, and freedoms of the United States and the American people, intimidate the Nation, and weaken the national resolve;
Whereas four years after September 11, 2001, the United States is fighting a Global War on Terrorism to protect America and her friends and allies;
Whereas recent deadly attacks in London, Madrid, and Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, remind all Americans that the forces of evil that attacked the Nation four years ago remain committed to terrorist attacks against free peoples;
Whereas because of the skill and bravery of the members of the United States Armed Forces and due to the constant vigilance of our Nation’s first responders, the United States homeland has not been successfully attacked by terrorist forces during the four years since September 11, 2001; and
Whereas while the passage of four years has not softened the memory of the American people, resolved their grief, or restored lost loved ones, it has shown that Americans will not bow to terrorists: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) extends again its deepest sympathies to the thousands of innocent victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, their families, friends, and loved ones;
(2) honors the heroic actions and the sacrifices of United States military and civilian personnel and their families who have sacrificed much, including their lives and health, in defense of their country in the Global War on Terrorism;
(3) honors the heroic actions of first responders, law enforcement personnel, State and local officials, volunteers, and others who aided the innocent victims and, in so doing, bravely risked their own lives and long-term health;
(4) expresses thanks and gratitude to the foreign leaders and citizens of all nations who have assisted and continue to stand in solidarity with the United States against terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks;
(5) discourages, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to confuse the Global War on Terrorism with a war on any people or any faith;
(6) reaffirms its commitment to the Global War on Terrorism and to providing the United States Armed Forces with the resources and support to wage it effectively and safely;
(7) vows that it will continue to take whatever actions necessary to identify, intercept, and disrupt terrorists and their activities; and
(8) reaffirms that the American people will never forget the sacrifices made on September 11, 2001, and will never bow to terrorist demands.

***********************************************

Pretty straightforward, and something a reasonable American could support - but as it was pointed out on www.opinionjournal.com under the daily "Best of the Web" feature, one of the representatives who declined to sign it was 'my' very own Pete Stark, D-CA, who represents the area I live in.
Considering that he's supposed to 'represent', I had to let him know that his action was completely unconscionable, so I sent a letter through his website. A disclaimer on the site indicated that only e-mails received from residents of his district would get responses, so I made sure to indicate my full adress and so forth. Here's the text of my message:

****************************************************

Dear Mr. Stark: I'd like to know what exactly you found in Resolution 427 (Relating to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001) which was so objectionable that you felt you had to vote against it.Even if you are among those who somehow believe that America "Brought the attacks on itself" or somehow "Deserved it", it's impossible to see what you could disagree with in the text of resolution 427.With your "No" vote, you've performed a tremendous disservice to the victims of the attacks, their families, and Americans everywhere.I'll not bother with pointless invective, but please be assured that you've completely alienated me with this disgusting display. I may be only one voter, but I'll remember well how you disgraced yourself at my next opportunity to vote for whoever runs against you.You owe the American people an explanation - it's too much to wish for an apology, I suppose - of how you could descend into such infantile pandering, and what end you thought you could possibly achieve with this shameful vote.Please stop this posturing, and get over yourself - you're sending no message other than contempt and loathing for the country you supposedly serve.

Thank you for your time.

************************************************

Having placated my conscience, I gave the matter little further thought. As expected, I received no response to my message, at least not a direct one - what follows is something from his office that arrived just today, eleven days later:

************************************************

Dear Friend:
Recently, I participated in a forum on Capitol Hill to question the war in Iraq and whether it is time to end our involvement and bring our troops home.
Only a member of the Majority party can convene an official Congressional Hearing. Unfortunately, the Republican Leadership would not schedule it, so a group of Democrats held a forum of our own. We heard from a bipartisan panel made up of a retired Marine Corps general, a former U.S. Senator, the founder of the Iraqi-Americans for Peaceful Alternatives and others with expert knowledge of the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. Despite their varied backgrounds and differing political stances, they were in agreement that the best action for the Iraqis and the United States is for our withdrawal.

The hearing confirmed what I’ve suspected for quite some time: leaving Iraq is the right thing to do and should no longer be delayed. The War in Iraq has created a breeding ground for hate against the United States. It has cost this country the lives of nearly 2,000 U.S. soldiers and nearly $300 billion in emergency spending - not to mention more than 14,000 wounded American soldiers whose lives have been forever impaired. We have neither eliminated Al Qaeda, increased the security of the Iraqi people – 25,000 of whom have been killed since 2003 – or increased our security here at home. Itis time to end this quagmire in Iraq and bring our troops home – and do so now.
I did not support invading Iraq, but once President Bush chose to do so I felt it was important to wait before publicly seeking withdrawal. I hoped the change in the Iraqi government could potentially improve the lives of the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, The Administration, similar to its dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, has failed in carrying out that mission. It is time to bring our troops home.
Next week, I hope to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the Vacaville Mother who has continually been denied the opportunity to meet with President Bush to discuss why her 24 year-old son, Casey Sheehan, had to die in Iraq. She will be in Washington, D.C. with people from across the country to again push for removing our troops from Iraq. I will continue to work with my colleagues in Congress and advocates from across the country to push those in the Administration to bring our troops home and instead find diplomatic solutions to the war in Iraq.
Sincerely,
Pete Stark
Member of Congress

*****************************************

I made absolutely sure NOT to accept the "Check here to receive updates from Pete Stark!" option / solicitation on the website, specifically so that I wouldn't have to face this type of nauseating drivel, but I probably should have expected it.
So leaving Iraq is "The right thing to do", and he "Hopes to meet with Cindy Sheehan" - oh, well, at least he seems to agree that Al-Qaeda is somehow bad.
With an agenda like this, it's little wonder that he had no inclination to respond to my - or anyone else's - demand to justify his ridiculous vote on resolution #427.

Little Ward Churchills

2005-03-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

It really didn't take long for the Universities, the intelligentsia, and the elites to explain away - or even excuse - the events of September 11th, 2001. Looking back on the essays of those times, it's striking how unified Americans were, at least for that brief period of time before the excuses, rationalizations, and flat-out lies were trotted out in order to put the blame for the event squarely on the back of the United States.
It has fit in with a wider pattern of anti-Americanism that has been going on more or less since the end of the second world war, which was, oddly enough, a time when profound gratitude for America's help should have been the order of the day, and was instead a shallow thanks, which covered up the deeper feeling of resentment that would simmer and fester over the next several decades.
From criticism of America's handling of the Cold War, to U.N. chastisement of America for pretty much anything it does, to the Muslim world - fed for decades on a thin gruel which identifies worldwide Jewry as the cause of its poverty-stricken swill, the mentality of the world's elites has taken on the role of the sullen teenager, incapable of supporting himself in independence, and thus indebted to and reliant upon Mom and Dad for his warm bed, snug home, and nourishing sustenance. While digesting the largesse of his parents, he is prone to ugly thoughts of violence against them, and at the very least devotes a large portion of his daily energies to pointing out every conceivable transgression of protocol or common sense that they may have the ill fortune to execute while he plays witness. Over time, this pathology leads him to a blind hatred of Mom, Dad, School, Church, and society in general. If he is lucky, his youthful energy will allow his angst to be channeled into something resembling productivity, and if all goes well, he will continue in this manner until his coming of age, when he is finally able to get a job, take a mate, and settle into the more predictable challenges of middle age.
Unfortunately, there are times when the formula goes horribly wrong, and we encounter an Erik and Lyle Menendez, whose hatred for their parents led them to kill.
This is essentially what we saw with Bin Laden, whose own pampered upbringing appears to have only fueled his infantile outrage. What is more pathetic than a Bin Laden? The answer is found in the editorial section of your local newspaper every single day: the elites lecturing us that we not only deserved 9/11, but are directly responsible for it. They may not say it quite so plainly, but be rest assured that if you ask any nearby liberal "What caused 9/11?", the answer will come rushing out that it was because of our "Meddling" in the Middle East. Details? Unnecessary. These conclusions are almost never based on actual research; they are instead the result of listening to the choruses of little Ward Churchills spread throughout our newspapers and Universities, inventing the justifications for their bloodthirsty invective against the United States and all it stands for. This is the legacy of 9/11, and it only took a few years.
Not bad, by any standard of enhanced propaganda. The Nazis would be impressed.

Squandering the good will of Democrats

2005-02-27T13:41:00.000-08:00

Hey! I've got an idea for some fun! Let’s look at some of the basic lies repeated and essentially accepted as fact by even reasonably level-headed Americans.
Oh, sorry, I guess it won't be much fun. But it is necessary.

Regarding the post-9/11 era: “George Bush squandered the good will of the rest of the world”. Really? How did he accomplish this? That sounds like an awfully big task. If anything at all about this perception rings true, it is only because the “International Community” had very little good will towards America around that time, and after a brief period of natural sympathy upon seeing maniacs kill our civilians for no stated purpose, everyone went back to their deep-seated resentment of America, and even stepped up higher on their podiums to denounce us more vituperatively than before.
So what specifically did Bush do to “Squander” this “Good will”? Well, apparently, he responded to the terrorist attacks by unseating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, bringing an end to their reign of terror, and shutting down the safe haven they had granted Osama Bin Laden. Since this was done without the permission or blessings of the European “Community”, it was therefore suspect. This is where the contempt comes in: Europe likes to consider itself our moral and intellectual superior, and when we decided to strike back, we made them uncomfortable with our unity of purpose and our display of power.
Do you still believe Bush “Squandered” this “Good will”? Oh, well, of course the Iraq war…but that’s not what we’re discussing. This phrase was put into play long before operation Enduring Freedom became a reality. So how did it acquire such legs and longevity? By endlessly repeating it until people came to accept it as truth.
Now, of course, with the initial war well behind us, other lies are given wings by perpetual utterance:

“Iraq is a quagmire” - It’s a war, not a party, and the rebuilding of society gets nowhere near as much attention as the sporadic battles.

“Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction” - Recently discovered Sarin gas was easily denied or explained away, but the main problem is that we have no idea where Saddam Hussein put his weapons programs, and the possibility that he hid them underground or in a nearby safe haven is somehow not even worth considering.

“There’s no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda” – not only has this not been proved, but given that Al-Qaeda cells have been discovered in such famously tolerant European countries such as Germany, France, Spain, and England, just how much of these possibilities are we supposed to put up with?
Perpetuating lies in order to convince people of your point of view is a fascinating game, but horribly dangerous. Before the Boxers, Kennedys, or Gores bury us in another blizzard of hyperbole, they’d do well to explain exactly how we should be fighting terrorism, rather than pretend that Bush hasn’t been doing so.

Border Babble

2005-02-20T13:12:00.000-08:00

Let’s face it: most people appear to support the idea that we should have open borders. They’ll deny it as such (at least, the more ‘reasonable’ ones), saying that they support security and protecting America from terrorists, but in fact, what they’re after is a de facto blanket amnesty for anyone who manages to cross the border, now and forever. These people are confusing the concept of legal immigration with illegal trespassing. They will adopt platitudes about the American Dream, and say that because our ancestors emigrated from wherever they were to America, that we thus have an obligation to allow anyone to come here who wants to.
They furthermore demand that such “Immigrants” – just as though they were on the same footing with those who went through the legal immigration process – are entitled to every government service that can be imagined. From universal medical insurance (oh, sorry: the touchy-feely name is “Health Care”) to government-subsidized college tuition, these noble people who supposedly only want to work and make a contribution to the country – never mind the thousands that immediately embark upon criminal careers and end up in our jails since the Mexican government refuses to take them back – are thought to be deserving of it all. Can people who are in this country illegally get welfare?
They certainly should, argue those who have no respect for the concept of American borders, since welfare is about “helping” the “poor”. The quotation marks here are intended to call into question certain long-held definitions which have achieved the status of fact. Apparently, having little money, regardless of whose fault it is entitles one to free money given by the state – meaning taxpayers. This is the concept behind welfare, and it is assumed to be “help”.
When Clinton very reluctantly signed onto welfare reform, he unwittingly helped launch a massive turnaround in welfare use and abuse. Let’s forget for a moment how much corruption and waste pervades the welfare program (as difficult as that is), and look at what the concept of this “help” provides. If I have no money, and you give me some, then I don’t need to go earn money. Sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it? Because of basic economic principles, we can see that carrying this plan to its logical extent would bankrupt the country very quickly. Well, that’s not what we’re proposing, say the proponents of welfare. We just want to help people get on their feet, from where they can then find gainful employment. But how can that happen if we’re giving away free money? Through government-sponsored “Job Training” programs, say the advocates. If that’s the goal, then why not skip the welfare payments, and go directly to this step? The question is never even raised. And why are people who are here illegally even considered for this kind of government largesse? Again, it’s because to most people, there’s no such thing as an illegal immigrant. This is primarily because of the distortion and whitewashing perpetrated by the pro-illegal immigrant fringe, which has obfuscated the concept of law. According to this line of thought, you have no right to insist on limitation of illegals from Mexico because you are a member of a wealthy society, and therefore have an obligation to share your wealth with whoever shows up to take it. How different is this from communism? Not very, but those same folk who think that everyone in Mexico has a God-given right to come into America and take up residence are the same people who still think communism would be wonderful, and that it just hasn’t been “done right”. There’s far more of these people among us than you would think. If you have no concept of borders, law, or American jurisdiction, please do us a favor, and pursue your dream of moving to a different country. In fact, why not try Mexico? Let us know what sort of reception illegal immigrants get there.

Licking the wounds of 2004

2005-02-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

While the conspiracy theories about the outcome of last year’s elections continue even now, much of the crowd who wished John Kerry victory have retreated into a gloomy - if not hostile - anger towards their fellow Americans who returned George Bush to the highest office in the land. Most of the reaction has been predictable, although the San Francisco Chronicle once again outdid itself with a two-day, multi-page spread quoting the reflections of Bay Area artists who overwhelmingly just happened to be opposed to Bush. Their level of vitriol towards Bush and the electorate graduated to an unimaginably higher level of hyperbole, though this should surprise no one. The creator of the website punkvoter.com displayed an especially high intensity of froth with the pronouncement that anyone he hears in San Francisco who dares to speak with a Southern accent receives an exhortation from him to go back where they came from, and that they are unwelcome in the good old ultra-tolerant city by the Bay.
So much for not judging people based on outward appearances, but it’s the inward appearances that really ignite the flames of this super-blue region. Accusations presented as accepted truths by the cognoscenti such as “Iraq had no connection to Al-Qaeda”, “Bush disregarded the Geneva Conventions”, and of course, “Bush has led an assault on civil liberties” are doled out just as though they were factual statements. These assumptions masquerading as proven fact tip the scales of reality into fantasy, which is much easier for many to accept than the established numbers of voters who just said “Yes” to Bush.
It’s not difficult to understand this motivation; after all, who among us doesn’t wish for simple solutions to problems in the Middle East? The desire to elect John Kerry was to a great extent fueled by the simplistic notion that anyone who was not George Bush could, if not wave a magic wand of harmony, at least reassure the exalted leaders of Europe and the U.N. that the U.S. would from now on defer to “International opinion”, and go through a tortuous process of self-questioning before daring to make a move that might carry even the appearance of acting “Unilaterally”.
Unfortunately, we now know that the strategies undertaken by that “Centrist” darling of middle-ground liberalism, Bill Clinton, didn’t work. (What were those strategies again? Oh, right.) While America looked the other way, Bin Laden’s cult members underwent training in special terrorist camps, and carried out their initial attacks against military targets abroad in preparation for their holy grail of civilian slaughter, 9/11. This process wasn’t unknown to us, nor were the attacks completely unexpected, but trying to pin the blame on George Bush and Condoleeza Rice plays into a reassuring fantasy that leaders from the Democratic party are the morally pure ones, while Republicans openly embrace economic rape of the entire planet, “Causing” terrorism.
People, events, and history are far more complex than can ever be perceived by those who spoke admiringly of Kerry’s ability to act in a “Nuanced” manner – never mind that it was usually just incoherence - but acknowledging this reality is the hardest first step to take in finding one’s way out of the “Bush=Hitler” woods.Until the anti-Bush faction can offer better strategies than those employed by George Bush for fighting terrorism and promoting peace and stability around the globe, there will be no real reason to consider voting for their candidate. In fact, if you listen to their battle cries, they tend to employ the notion that Israel is simply a huge pain in the neck, and peace would reign if it would just go away – but that’s a therapy session most aren’t ready for yet.

Why Al-Qaeda prayed for a Kerry victory

2005-02-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

It is true that Americans can appear to have short memories - witness the national myopia regarding September 11th, 2001. Already a distant memory for many, causes of the events of that day have been spun into little more than temporary insanity. Questions about who did it and why are diluted into a harmless broth, whereby a handful of men who probably "hadn't been taking their medication" went off the deep end. The feel-good platitudes of American academia and Government have subsequently been immersed in discussions about the "Root causes of terrorism", "Why they hate us", and how to win "Arab hearts and minds". While these perspectives are primarily borne of childlike ignorance, they betray a much more grown-up propensity to danger, as they play right into the hands of those who seek not to raise questions regarding global diplomacy, but only to become martyrs to their fans.

An Osama Bin Laden, to his misled palestinian supporters, is not a hero in the way we would ordinarily think of a hero - that is, someone who triumphs against evil through the sheer force of his will - rather, he is more like a rock star - someone who emits an aura of wealth and power, but whose product is more or less imaginary. Thus we have "Solutions" such as blowing up American ships and property, and the murder of civilians as the ultimate prize. No one who was actually attempting to open a serious international dialogue or negotiate a treaty would resort to such tactics. It is all showmanship, the kind of instinct within a child to light a firecracker and then run away, lest he be discovered and held accountable. Left undeveloped, this instinct can grow and warp exponentially until the slaughter of innocent civilians can appear to be a splendid way to get one's point across.

This is the problem when it comes to strategies for dealing with Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda chorus: academic types, bureaucrats, and idealists who believe in the power of government to solve the world's problems, seem to think we should be analyzing the claims of our enemies, taking them seriously, and even (insert shudder here), attempting to comply with their demands. Our politicians praise Bin Laden for "Building day-care centers", and our institutions of higher learning offer seminars on "Fighting Terrorism with Empathy", where blame is laid with the U.S. for "The actions we take out of fear, hate, and retribution".

It should be more than a little disturbing that American responses to terrorism are viewed with more suspicion than the actions of terrorists - what in the world were the attacks of 9/11 besides actions taken "Out of fear, hate, and retribution"? The Chiracs, Schroeders, and Barbara Boxers of the world can present themselves as super-diplomats for begging "Patience" on behalf of a conniving and deceitful Saddam Hussein. (Never mind that a Chirac has a lot more to hide with regard to arms sales and oil-for-food cover-ups; it is his pose as a person who cares about "Peace" which is the most dangerous to us all.) According to this mindset, we are the ones who should be in the psychiatrist's chair for failing to empathize sufficiently with our muslim brothers and sisters; the murderers, as is so common in contemporary culture, are to be excused because of an abusive upbringing, with the U.S. cast as the dysfunctional parent.

What is more dangerous to us is the way the debates are framed: if one were to suppose, even for a moment, that the mainstream press in Europe and the U.S. were a serious representation of popular thought, one could be forgiven for thinking that Bush had already been formally pronounced the new Hitler. There isn't much time or opportunity for the common man to dig through all the rubbish, so he may well shrug his shoulders and get on the Bush-bashing bandwagon. With this development safely in hand, those in journalism who entered the field in the belief that their job was to mold public opinion toward the side of the righteous would congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Fortunately, they weren't able to deliver Kerry to the Oval Office, despite their superhuman efforts. (CBS, in particular, tipped its hand in a manner so odious and foul as to discredit its entire news organization, and yet it lumbers on in denial.) When the results were in, and it turned out that a majority of Americans had not been taken in with Kerry's frantic dance steps on every issue set before him, the media exploded with a tantrum not seen since the days of Reagan. Now we are treated to reports that Americans hoping for a Kerry win are so depressed they have sought medical attention. It must be a very disturbing time for them, as a psychosis penetrating so deeply and thoroughly will indeed be difficult to endure - but unbeknownst to them, they are in luck, as the Bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins, instead of receiving an early Christmas present in the form of a U.S. president who would have been far more accommodating to them, will have to burrow deeper and run faster.

When Albright lied, no one cried

2005-02-03T08:53:00.000-08:00

It came up again last night. "When Clinton lied, no one died" - that adorable yet vitriolic little piece of anti-Bush candy was uttered aloud, in all seriousness, just as though it had been established as incontrovertible evidence of Bush's evil. I had thought this to be the kind of quip one finds in speeches given to specially-selected audiences, but I had forgotten how easily people can adopt absurdities as war cries. So now that it has arrived in ordinary conversation, we'd better understand exactly what it means, and what's behind it.

The overwhelming supposition, presented as conclusion in this advertising jingle of the left, is that "Bush lied". "What did he lie about?" would be the logical follow-up question, but in this club, if you have to ask the price of something, it means you can't comprehend it. So in the spirit of full disclosure, here's how it goes: Bush lied about intelligence indicating the threat level of Iraq's WMD program had become sufficiently high to warrant military invasion, partly for oil, and partly to avenge his Dad's lack of success in getting rid of Saddam. It is never clear in this line of thinking whether Bush lied about the intelligence material he was given, or whether the intelligence material was wrong, which would mean that Bush didn't lie, but was misinformed. That's a key distinction, but most of those who toss around the new jingle prefer the more seductive hallucination of Bush gleefully misleading the American people for his own pernicious purposes.

The truth is much more complicated, but most people can't be bothered with such 'nuance'; Bush as demon is a much easier explanation for all the perceived failures of one's surroundings. Let's not forget that Clinton himself signed off on pronouncements of Saddam Hussein and his WMD program as highly dangerous and worthy of intervention. Let's also not forget that such tut-tutters as France agreed with the threat analyses. In fact - and this may surprise many of us, who have managed to ignore this reality since March, 2003 - the UNITED NATIONS, that paragon of international brotherhood and communication, issued resolution after resolution informing Saddam that he faced the prospect of being forcefully deposed, based on its very own findings.

In the righteous firestorm of Bush denunciations, the gyrations and contortions of the U.N. have been ignored, suppressed, repressed, willfully forgotten, never even acknowledged. John Kerry's incredibly childish description of the coalition as "Fraudulent" as well as "Bribed" and "Coerced" was willful ignorance at its most accomplished, and only further served to illustrate the ineptitude he hoped to bring to the White House. Barbara Boxer's recent attempt to indict Condoleeza Rice as a lying stooge of Bush contained a lie of its own ("WMD - period."), but it was consistent in its complete denial of reality.

Those of us who support the war in Iraq are accused of complicity in killing American military personnel; as always, the myopic view that waging peace is always better than waging war reigns supreme, no matter how compelling and disturbing the facts are. And no matter how readily everyone agrees that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, no amount of American military deployment is ever justified, according to the anti-war types, unless it is given the blessing of the U.N. and our purported 'allies'.

Those who decry our efforts in Iraq also tend to be in denial about 9/11 itself, of course. It is much easier to imagine that the attacks that day were directed towards Bush himself - never mind the fact that the 1993 bomb was intended to accomplish the exact same thing. According to this view, the peace-loving American people who would never harm a fly agree that every action ever taken by America in the Middle East has been in the name of evil, and must be atoned for. When you take this view, it is even possible to live in New York, having witnessed the attacks, and instead of blaming madmen who hijacked airplanes, blame America for having provoked it all. I could scarcely have imagined this possible, until the media began trumpeting them and their corrupted thought processes. While the first round of reporting focused on the despair and horror of the victims and their families, these stories were quickly pushed aside in favor of those who found the blame to fall with America. I thought the compassion-at-all-costs type eschewed the strategy of "Blaming the victim", but apparently, it didn't jibe with their agenda this time.

So, "When Clinton lied, no one died" - now that we understand the fantastically backwards logic of the "George Bush LIED" juggernaut, let's look at the first portion of the jingle. Clinton's lie - which, it has been well established, was in fact a lie - is now presented as a comparison. Assuming you have swallowed the story that Bush "Lied" about the need to go to war, you can now reassure yourself of your righteousness by contrasting this with Clinton's antics in sworn testimony regarding his sexual escapades. Never mind that the comparison is absurd; if military intervention is the question, why is Clinton's bombing campaign ignored? You remember the one, undertaken wholly without the U.N. and with far more "Unilateralism" than anything Bush has done.

The proponents of this fun little rhyme like the feeling that they are conveying something of deep meaning; by demonstrating that Clinton's alleged shortcomings were far less serious than those of Bush, the case appears to be closed. Never mind that comparing these two "Lies" is meaningless at best, and fraudulent to the point of psychosis at worst. Like Clinton, feeling good about yourself and your views is the most important thing - never mind the ugliness of reality. Never mind that the adolescent mindset which calls for perpetual rebellion against Mom and Dad - and by extension, society - feeds much more readily on the conclusion that America is proven to be the bad guy because of the actions of a few wayward soldiers at Abu Ghraib, and completely ignores the horrors perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and his regime on so many ordinary Iraqi citizens, not to mention the cash prizes awarded to suicide bombers in Israel.

Never mind such complicated thoughts, for a good jingle erases the need for objectivity, as any witness of advertising knows. But if a meaningful comparison combined with a catchy slogan is what you crave, a better one might be:
"Clinton talked, Bush walked"
Or perhaps:
"Clinton ignored, Bush implored"
Or maybe:
"Clinton retracted, Bush acted"

Or maybe this is the wrong approach. Could it be that truth and reality are not well served by PR ditties?

For Iraqis, a Heyday instead of an Uday.

2005-01-31T13:16:00.000-08:00

The anti-war crowd has never looked as foolish as it did yesterday. News images showed pictures of "Protesters" demonstrating against the Iraqi elections, denouncing them as "Illegal". One wonders if they have considered that the freedom which allows them to stage their views at home is precisely what drives the events in today's Iraq, thanks to the tenacity of George Bush and the coalition forces.

Furthermore, if this election is "Illegal", what is their opinion of the last "Election" that took place under Saddam Hussein's rule? You know the one: the results were either 99% or 100% for Hussein, with a plus-one-percentage point margin of error. For the anti-war crowd, these results are somehow not only more genuine than what took place in Iraq yesterday, they're also more desirable. That supposedly mature adults could hold this opinion is nothing short of frightening.

We heard much the same thing about Afghanistan: The U.S. should not have invaded, the Taliban should not have been overthrown, elections were impractical and undesirable, and finally, that the results of said election were somehow illegitimate. With stability and a sense of purpose now well-established in that once-lost country, the Afghanistan critics have suddenly fallen silent on the subject, and turned their invective towards the events in Iraq.

What if the nay-sayers were calling the shots? We came very close to a Kerry presidency; would he have had the stomach to allow and encourage the elections to move forward? It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where global criticism results in endless delays, with one half of Kerry's audience demanding an immediate exit of U.S. troops, and another half being only slightly more supportive, but still never allowing for an actual date on which Iraqis could formally decide their own future.

This would have been a disaster for all involved; after all, there's nothing the opposition terrorists would like more than extended chunks of time in which to engage in more bombings, beheadings, and the like - which would further erode the will of the people.

The U.S. and coalition forces that brought us to this moment have paid a very high price - which we are all very clear on - but the resulting fruits of democracy, as in Afghanistan, will do far more for the region than anything the anti-war crowd has ever managed to envision.

America's critics: Getting a global hard-on

2005-01-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

Doing the right thing brings an enormous risk of being unpopular - just ask George Bush. With Saddam Hussein, we had a violent dictator who not only rewarded the families of suicide bombers but allowed his sons to torture Iraqi Olympic athletes who failed to return home with sufficient awards. His invasion of Kuwait, repelled by coalition forces, only seemed to embolden him, and the economic sanctions which he and many others pronounced an unfair depredation of the Iraqi people were gleefully skated around by him and his cohorts. Meanwhile, he was allowed to pursue whatever weapons programs he pleased, with a timid and feckless group of U.N. "Weapons Inspectors" offering little more than gentle prodding of him to reveal his projects. When he kicked the inspectors out of the country - need we be reminded that this was in direct violation of an arrangement he himself agreed to? - he was then free to both develop whatever he wanted, and transfer the evidence to whatever hiding places he wanted. Do the snarling critics of America's efforts ever stop to consider what he could have been doing during those times? Hussein's subsequent and grudging "Permission" for the inspections to continue was deemed sufficient by the U.N., and even praised.

In the name of basic decency, the removal of Hussein was a wonderful thing for the world, and yet the madness that pervades those who opposed this act of good will refuses to recognize this. Following this twisted logic, America is not only to be criticized for its "Illegal invasion", it is to be arrested and put on trial by the rest of the world.

So now we have a University professor by the name of Churchill, proclaiming that the 9-11 attacks were in fact retaliation for the economic sanctions against Iraq and children that were allegedly killed in a U.S. airstrike. Leaving aside the absurdity of the slaughtered children charge, the message here is that economic sanctions shouldn't have been imposed on Iraq. According to this logic, Hussein should have been allowed to do whatever he wished in Kuwait, and presumably, wherever else he felt like it. As the sanctions were imposed under U.N. auspices, one wonders why the hijackers didn't fly the planes into the U.N. building. But to argue with the nonsensical ramblings of a jaded college professor who can only take delight in issuing indictments of institutions rather than making improvements is to miss the bigger picture and ultimately, to waste time.

These arguments are based on the notion that America itself should stand trial for its larger "crimes" against the world, a popular notion which is kicked around constantly. As Michael Moore so eloquently taught us, those nutcases who are cutting the heads off other people are actually brave and noble freedom fighters who are standing up to the oppression of the U.S. government.
With this perspective in mind, a generation of relatively well-off Americans can now denounce their own country for a litany of crimes which are simply understood to be established fact. "Meddling in the Middle East" is a common phraseology of this view, but there are plenty of others.
Can you imagine what would happen if Osama Bin Laden were captured alive and taken to the U.S. to stand trial? This would be the greatest opportunity ever for that radical 1960's mindset, whereby Western Civilization itself would be put on trial. It's horrible to picture, but there would be protesters outside the court house every single day for however long that circus of a trial would take, bearing signs proclaiming, among other things, that Bin Laden is innocent, that he was a "Freedom Fighter", that he was resisting U.S. "Hegemony", "Colonialism", "Arrogance", and a bunch of other things copied out of radical-left handbooks.

It is, of course, necessary for a free society to allow such kooks to spout their infantile revisionist history, but we must do a better job this time around of exposing them for who they are. The teachers and administrators of our colleges meekly rolled over for the self-appointed "Revolutionaries" in the '60's, and that must not happen again. Petulant youths who enjoyed an upbringing based on the freedoms that America has given them must never be allowed to take over the reins of society and tell us that they will now be cutting off the hand that fed them.

If you have bought into the line that America is an oppressive, horrible place based on persecution of minorities and the poor, it will probably take you a little while to wake up from your stupor - but do yourself a favor, and seek multiple sources when you are being encouraged to think that America "Deserved" 9-11. When the professor Churchills say that no one in the Twin Towers that day was "Innocent", ask what precisely they were guilty of; you will receive a highly emotional yet vague and incoherent statement.

It's teen rebellion towards Mom and Dad taken to a national scale.

The loneliness of the long-term voter

2005-01-26T13:35:00.000-08:00

Looking back at the introduction of this blog, it seems in need of some revision - although most people are probably insane to some degree, we saw that in our most recent election, the sides were pretty evenly split. Fortunately for us, common sense prevailed, and George Bush was returned to the White House.

This suggests that there are a lot of people out there who are doing their darndest to avoid insanity. They did not buy into John Kerry's endlessly vague proclamations of how he would make America "Stronger at home" and "Respected abroad". Even crazy people know when they're being taken for suckers, and the Democratic party, in perpetual contortions trying to re-invent itself as something to be taken seriously by Mr. and Mrs. United States of America, couldn't really define a single reason to vote for its candidate beyond the fact that he wasn't George Bush.

This was all well and good as long as you were a member of the vituperative "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" which loathed George Bush with that visceral hatred usually reserved for the likes of Nazis - but what if your concerns were somewhat less romantic, and more mundane?

What if you really did believe that terrorism was a real risk with horrifying consequences? Michael Moore, in one of his absurd diatribes which is sold as a book, downplays the terrorism threat to an infantile level, endorsing the reader to believe that "There is no terrorist threat". Although this book was supposedly written after 9-11, the myopia of the fervent left-winger apparently knows no bounds.

If you were worried about further attacks on Americans, you were told by the democratic party establishment various and often contradictory things, such as:

There is no terrorist threat (see above).
Even though there is no terrorist threat, if there were one, it would be the fault of George Bush and Condoleeza Rice.
The terrorism threat exacerbated by George Bush (even though there isn't one) was made much worse by the war in Iraq.
The much-worse terrorism threat, which is the fault of George Bush, can be solved by John Kerry, with methods left unspecified.
If you are worried about terrorist threats, you have been manipulated by the Republicans, who have turned you into a dupe and a stooge for getting so worked up about a threat that doesn't exist, although if it did, it would be entirely the fault of George Bush, and could only be fixed by John Kerry.
If you don't support gay marriage, you are a hick, redneck, hayseed, and a gun-toting, bible-thumper.

Okay, that last one isn't about terrorism, but it illustrates reasonably well the messages being sent to the electorate by the party that is supposedly about helping people. It's really just social engineering, but more on that later.

Faced with these messages, what does a voter do? It's tempting to ignore the whole thing, but with people taking outrageous stances everywhere you turn, there's a fierce urge to shut down the worst of the loudmouths. This is where common sense comes in, and it's what killed John Kerry's campaign.

Telling groups of voters that you share their everyday concerns while you have spent a tedious career in the senate while personally living the life of a multi-millionaire can seriously damage your credibility. George Bush is no up-from-the-bootstraps kind of guy; indeed, it was one of the biggest charges brought against him, but to pit Kerry against him is to completely miss the point. Kerry expressed irritation at the presence of secret service personnel while he was trying to enjoy a restful afternoon of skiing - what sort of message does that send? And could you imagine Bush doing such a thing?

According to the media establishment, many felt that George Bush was bad for America, bad for the little guy, bad for families, bad for the planet, bad for the poor, just plain evil, Satan, Hitler, the coming of the Antichrist, and other hyperbolic labels too numerous to list. Now, who said these things? Ordinary Joes, or people holding positions in the public spotlight? Once again: people know when they're being played for suckers.

Furthermore, the establishment basically told you that if you supported George Bush, that meant that you wanted to force women out of their careers and into back-alley abortions, you wanted poor people to rot in hell, you wanted to deny access to handicapped people everywhere, and you wanted to prevent racial minorities from enjoying any success in life. You wanted reductions in taxes only for "rich" people, as well as reduced medical care across the board, and you wanted to turn Social Security into a casino.

Those who bought into the line that George Bush should be thrown out of office at any cost tried their hardest, and failed. This brings us to a new point of wonder: in the endless ravings of mortified democrats and anti-Bush voters, where are the reports and interviews with people who actually voted for him? Think back on all the rivers of speculative ink that flowed about why Bush won: do you hear anything but conjecture from Democratic party establishment types, Democratic politicians, Democratic media consultants, and Democratic voters? Do you hear about news reports that say, "Here's a bunch of Bush voters telling why they voted for him"?

No, of course not. Maintaining the elitist view that they know what's good for everyone else, the ivory-tower types would rather glower and spit on those masses who voted for Bush, rather than take a look at their own agenda and attempt to repair it.

Plastic Bag Surgery Tax Disasters

2005-01-25T15:15:00.000-08:00

What is the purpose of Government? That's the holy grail of questions, because without it, how the heck do we proceed?
Apparently, we haven't ironed out a reasonable answer to this question, which is why we get stuck either debating things endlessly so that no action is taken, or undertaking actions which turn out to be completely absurd.

What winds up happening is something like the recent grocery-bag tax proposal in the People's Republic of San Francisco, whereby supermarkets are required to charge shoppers seventeen cents per grocery bag, be it paper or plastic. The eminently reasonable folks who pontificate on such matters state that since grocery bags create waste which costs the city money to deal with, consumers should be hit up to cover those costs. Those same pontificators will mention the proliferation of plastic-bag litter in China, and point out that China charges shoppers for these bags. They will then cross their arms, satisfied that their very reasonable assumptions and conclusions have won the oh-so-commonsensical debate.

This is classic punitive taxation, which is generally understood as imposing taxes against products or services that the body overseeing such things finds to be undesirable. What's never clearly laid out is what criterion are used to decide who serves on that body, and how they get to decide what's good for the rest of us.

To some extent, this process must be endured; otherwise, there really wouldn't be any government, much less a democratic one - but we should think carefully about allowing agencies such as the "San Francisco Commission on the Environment" to be submitting legislation to the board of supervisors. For one thing, why does this commission get to make such recommendations, when a voter and taxpayer can generally do no such thing?

Finally, using punitive taxation tends to turn into a kind of club drug for governments; having exhausted existing revenue streams, they scramble to find new ones, and sources that pass taxes on "Bad" things which are inevitably left as vague as possible, such as "Pollution", or smokers, or whatnot generally find that drinking salt water only exacerbates their thirst.

The next time you hear the cry for taxes to be raised - no matter what the reason - think very carefully about how such items were dealt with in the past. Before California became a vicious circle of broken budgets, crummy services, and ever-increasing taxes, it boasted the best infrastructure, schools, and just about everything else under the sun - all for less than what we pay now.

What changed? Nothing, really - if you have a business model that works, an increase in the number of consumers brings better service (or at least, the same level), but not worse. In our case, we expanded the scope of Government for no other reason than the fact that we could - or so we thought.

You may be familiar with the concept of "Tax Freedom day"; it's the point in the year where your earnings are finally yours to keep after fulfilling your tax obligations. For the last several presidencies, that period of time has moved further into the year, meanining it takes more of your time and money to meet your tax responsibilities.

Keep this concept firmly in mind the next time you hear a bureaucrat hyperventilating about how Governor Schwarzenegger is "trying to cut essential services" or that some school is "Dangerously underfunded" - That school or service got by before; why is it a crisis now? Few will answer this question honestly, because they know full well that the bureacracy did not exist before. Now that it is that person's primary job to declare that his agency doesn't have "enough" money, what would you expect him to say to the public?

So when you hear the touchy-feely arguments about how the grocery bag tax will "Help" recycling, or San Francisco's waste, or improve its quality of life, think about how much of San Francisco's problems really have to do with plastic bags floating in the streets, and be more concerned with bureaucrats whose sole purpose in life is to raise taxes in the friendliest way possible. Think of it as taxation with a "human face".

Major Headline discovered at top of news organization's website

2005-01-24T13:44:00.000-08:00

Of course, to get the real story, one has to read between the lines, or in many cases, look at the "Sub-headline" - let's take a look at today's New York Times, the venerable news publication that has eroded into a mushy stew under its next-generation leadership.

The big headline is about a car bomb in Iraq; of course, since this is a negative development in the war on terror, the times dutifully picks up the trumpet to make this the premier item in its communication agenda. The text below the headline, though, is the real news item, which is that one of the key terrorists behind the Iraqi "Insurgency" bombs has been captured. This development is far more significant than the deployment of another bomb, and yet it receives only marginal and secondary mention in the "Headline".

Let's face it: war is hell, which we all know, and yes, bombs are events worthy of news attention. However, the side that you're rooting for is what comes out of the news you run and the way you run it. While the Times makes no secret of its opposition to Bush and the Iraq war from within its editorial page, this position winds up permeating all their stories, as demonstrated in today's thinly-veiled version of "Bush is wrong, and we'll tout that point in any which way we can".

Unconvinced? Try another story: "Democrats vow to resist GOP majority in new Congress". The sub-headline text that opens the story is that "The Senate minority leader and others criticized the G.O.P. on Iraq, Social Security, healthcare, the budget, and taxes."

Okay, it's a story about the agenda facing the Democrats - fair enough, but wouldn't it be in the interests of "Balance" to add a comment or two from the Republican side which is so hugely significant in this story? Don't bother; I've read it to save you the time, and not one Republican is interviewed. By framing the debate in this way, The Times makes it clear to its audience that the Democrats are the "Good Guys", and the Republicans are the "Bad Guys" - and again, this is all well and good for purposes of partisan reporting, but a publication such as the New York Times built its reputation on being more or less even-handed in its coverage of events. Alas, in the last few years, they've all but abandoned that pretense.