The Election in a Nutshell. . .
Stolen from Rational Passion.
Month: September 2008
California Statehood!
Do you know what happened this week back in 1850, 158 years ago?
California became a state!
The State had no electricity.
The State had no money.
Almost everyone spoke Spanish.
There were gunfights in the streets.
So basically, it was just like it is today, except the women had real breasts and the men didn’t hold hands.
(Via email, but I had to post it!)
Listen to This
Listen to This
All the way to the end, specifically where Dan Perrin describes Barack National Health Care Obama’s plan.
Dan Perrin on America’s Health Care Crisis Solved
I’d never heard it described that way before.
It’s chilling.
Militias, 2008
Militias, 2008
Back in 2005 I wrote a piece, Militias, that illustrated just why an armed society was desired by our Founders. Via Kim this morning comes another example: Bayou Renaissance Man, A recipe for neighborhood peace and quiet.
Excerpt:
We’ve had the usual crop of wannabe looters, thieves, fake “contractors” out to do quick – and very shady – business, and so on. The “contractors” are the main problem. They’re typically unqualified to do anything, unlicensed, not bonded or insured, and usually out to steal what they can and then run for it. They particularly look for confused or elderly residents, who can be “hustled” into signing a contract and/or providing a large cash payment up front. Of course, as soon as they’re paid, the “contractors” disappear, never to be seen again. Another tactic is to move into a yard and start cleaning up hurricane debris without so much as a “by-your-leave”. When the homeowner comes out and objects, he/she is told that they “owe” money for the work already done, and if they don’t pay, there’ll be “trouble”.
Around here, those tactics don’t work. We’ve distributed our telephone numbers to all nearby, and asked them to call us if there’s any indication of trouble. We also patrol our area at night, taking it in shifts, keeping an eye on houses whose occupants have evacuated, or who are on duty with law enforcement, medical services, fire brigades and other essential services. Of course, we’ve informed our local cops about our activities, and they’re very happy about it. It means they can deploy their limited resources to areas where they’re most needed, and leave us to handle things here.
RTWT.
Them’s Fightin’ Words!
Margaret Soltan, author of the blog University Diaries is a professor of English at George Washington University, and a contributor at Inside Higher Ed. I first became aware of Professor Soltan when she began a (currently) 10-part series about learning about, for want of a better term, America’s love affair with the gun. I think Dave Hardy was the original link. Professor Soltan is, insofar as I can tell, not a particularly atypical academic, but her willingness to explore one of America’s gun cultures is unusual, and I was (and still am) supportive of that effort.
However, her most recent two posts at Inside Higher Ed have punched my buttons. The first, Charles Murray on Elites is an example of the kind of thinking that, IMHO, typifies the “liberal elite,” and I told her so. Checking back today to see if there had been a response to my initial comment (there had) I also noted that she had put up a new post, Palin Fire. That one really lit me off.
Instead of posting something long here today, I penned two more comments; one for the Charles Murray piece, and another, briefer one for the Palin piece.
I am endeavoring to remain civil, but this example of blind, blithering elitism by a member of the academic intelligentsia, one of Thomas Sowell’s “Anointed,” really yanks my chain.
If the exchange continues, it should get interesting.
Another Female’s Take
Another Female’s Take
More linkery:
I have no interest whatsoever in being a citizen of the world. The world actually sucks. In the world, having indoor plumbing and electricity are signs of disproportionate wealth. Never mind personally owned vehicular travel that is not mammal powered.
It drives me crazy when the “for the people, but not of the people” folks get their Atkins full bellies out of their Eames chairs, put down their iPhones, and take a stand from within the palatial air conditioned splendor of their fucking vacation homes.
Wealth in this country is general. The lowest common denominator has a plasma t.v. and a vehicle. Or at least knows someone closely who has one or both. Electricity is taken for granted, and it is considered suffering if one has it turned off temporarily. If the indoor plumbing is faulty, lawsuits follow. If you go anywhere else in the world, that’s not the case. Unless you hit an upside down imperialism, guilt-ridden, welfare (dhimmi tax) paradise like the U.K..
In most places in the world, there’s a trench in which everyone goes, or perhaps, more creatively, a platform off of which one can perform. Even in Europe you’re as likely to find a hole in the ground as a throne. It was about 50/50 last time I was in France. Yes, even in quite a bit of Paris.
And when the sun goes down the light is gone. Dinner is likely gruel cooked over dung. And may have included insects, on purpose. Women are stuck at home when they bleed, are quite probably beaten, even just a little as needed, and babies come too often and die almost as much. Charms are medicine, hope is a luxury, and exploitation is a step above the starvation alternative. Disease is rife, 40 is old, political unrest is daily a clear and present danger, and the idea that we put our plastic organic yogurt containers in the dishwasher before we send them to be recycled is so inconceivably wasteful of resources it cannot even be explained. – Valiens, A Brain Like Mine: Diary of a Feminist Housewife, “Palin, World, War & Kissing Girls”
Another one that’s worth your time.
Hate
Hate
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealosies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.” – Eric Hoffer, True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.
In this, American liberals are no different from the politically committed the world over. David Cameron knew that he would never be Prime Minister until he had killed the urgent hatred of the Conservative party in liberal England. A measure of his success is that hardly anyone now is caught up by the once ubiquitous feeling that no compromise is too great if it stops the Tories regaining power. Hate can sell better than hope.
When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did. American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win the evening.
As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot between them, and Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. ‘I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,’ she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. ‘I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.’ – Nick Cohen, “When Barack’s berserkers lost the plot,” The Guardian
Quote of the Week
Quote of the Week
Forgive me, I’ve been ill. This is the first time I’ve seen this. If you haven’t, you absolutely need to read the whole thing, print it out and spread it around. Media Still Doesn’t Get It, from Ace of Spades, authored by Slublog. A masterful fisking this piece of slime by Roger Simon (no, the other Roger Simon). The quote:
You want to know why conservatives roared last night when the media was bashed and why many of us have spent the week in a simmering rage? It’s because you’re hypocrites. You claim to be objective, yet have spent the past few days absolutely smearing a woman and her family because she had the audacity to be a conservative Republican. You have expended more time and effort discussing her daughter’s sex life than you’ve spent looking into the business and political associates of the Democrat candidate for president of the United States. When you did explore Palin’s actual record, you have often done so with little regard for the truth. You and your colleagues have relinquished your right to be taken seriously as honest brokers of information.
And what this column shows me is that you know it.
I’m serious. Read the whole piece.
I can hear Bernie Goldberg saying “I told you . . .”
I wonder if anyone knows how to get in touch with Bernie. I’d bet there’s a bunch of us pajamahadeen who would like to interview him over these latest, most blatant examples of Bias and Arrogance.
And not one “legacy media” outlet that will touch him.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Bill Whittle strikes again:
Newt Gingrich’s fire-breathing army of young reform Republicans who stormed congress in 1994 grew, in about a decade, into the party of Duke Cunningham, Trent Lott, and the Bridge to Nowhere. I watched this unfold — especially after 2004 — and time and time again, the core conservative values of discipline and responsibility were betrayed, mocked, and ignored. Restraint is not an easy sell in a society this affluent — not compared with the view of government as a bottomless bag of candy. That’s why we’re supposed to be the party of adults.
Power corrupts, and I believe there is no power more intoxicating and corrosive than the ability to spend other people’s money at will. If Newt’s Army could go so far astray, you can bet the country was disillusioned, disappointed, and furious — not just ready for change, but eager for it, even change as ethereal and diffuse as what Senator Obama has been peddling. We lost the Senate and the House in 2006 because of this. We were going to lose the presidency in 2008 for it. And we deserved to lose it.
RTWT.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
From a post and comment thread chock-full of ’em:
September 2nd, 2008. The 2008 Election ended this morning as a vast cadre of liberals, progressives, Democrats and like minded journalists lifted the white flag and surrendered.
We surrendered something a whole lot more valuable than our vote. We surrendered our principles. We surrendered our core values.
We surrendered all hope. We surrendered our shared dreams that our daughters would inherit a better world, a world of promise, equality, justice, fairness and honor.
We had dreamed of a world where our 17 year old daughters wouldn’t be striped naked and raped on the front page of the New York Times, above the fold.
We dreamed of a world where a candidate, man or woman, could run for the highest office in the land and not be “swiftboated” with sexual lies and slander so vicious, so cruel, so gross and destructive that they actually wither our very soul.
I actually believed we were better than that. I actually believed “swiftboating” was the sole property of Republicans. I actually believed we wanted to debate the issues. I actually believed we wanted the real change so eloquently promised by Senator Barack Obama. I actually believed we wanted a better world for our sons and our daughters.
So I thought the extremely bizarre story, so obvious a blatant lie, that somehow appeared in The Daily Kos, claiming Governor Sarah Palin had somehow faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her wayward teenage daughter would be laughed off and quickly vanish from the Kos pages like the trash it was. It was a joke, A sad, sick joke.
But instead of the aborted fetus it should have been, it was born full grown into the waiting arms of liberal bloggers and journalists, who quickly passed out cigars and congratulated themselves as proud mamas and papas. All this in spite of the fact that absolutely everyone knew the story was an absolute lie.
The only thing we aborted was the truth. – The WIZARD, Fkap, It’s Over. We’ve Lost.
RTWT, AND the comments.
From the comments, my favorite:
The Left abandoned millions of people in Vietnam to be chopped up and destroyed.
Principles of classical liberalism were abandoned by the fake liberals, decades ago.
It is only now, now when people are paying attention to a huge influx of information, that they are starting to get the clue. Maybe with 9/11. Maybe with Afghanistan and how the Left turned against Bush’s war there to free the Afghan women. Maybe Iraq. Maybe now. – Ymarsakar
But probably not.