The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
That the most awesome plane ride in the world is the one that takes you OUT of Iraq. We’re not back on American soil yet, but I’ve now checked off the second tour where I got out of that country with all MY fingers and toes, and all my Joes are healthy and riding the plane home with me.
Ladies and gentlemen, THAT is a win.
Abby is coming home! Welcome back!
I received this email this morning:
Kevin,
I’ve commented occasionally on your blog, under the name Splodge Of Doom.
I have been reading TSM regularly for nigh-on three years now, starting when I was seventeen. I was pretty new to politics and the like, and started out very easily swayed by whoever I last listened to on any particular issue.
You and the regulars on your blog have taught me a lot over the time I have been reading (although it is perhaps more fair to say I have learned from Markadelphia, rather than him teaching me anything) and I have grown quite a bit since I started reading.
I do not always agree with you, but I pay attention when you speak. This critical thinking stuff is harder than it looks!
This note is just to say thank-you, and I appreciate the lengths you go to to write TSM and reach the fence-sitters.
Yours respectfully,
(Splodge Of Doom)
And this also why I’ll never ban Markadelphia. He’s too perfect an example of the Left in this country not to let him illuminate their failings.
Damn, that made my week.
The 6/23/09 QotD:
Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.
American Thinker, 9/28/08 – Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis by James Simpson
My 6/11/09 QotD:
Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So which is it — stupidity, ignorance or insanity — that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?
According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress’ approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you’ll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? “Government ought to do something!” When people call for government to do something, it is as if they’ve been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It’s the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.
Walter E. Williams, Americans Love Government
Now, Thomas Sowell from August of 2007:
It is not just in Iraq that the political left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise.
The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest.
Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.
One wonders what they would do in heaven.
—
They have shown no such interest in how tens of millions of people in China and tens of millions of people in India have risen out of poverty within the past generation.
Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left’s denunciations of society.
When the poor stop being poor, they lose the attention of the left. What actions on the part of the poor, or what changes in the economy, have led to drastic reductions in poverty seldom arouse much curiosity, much less celebration.
This is not a new development in our times. Back in the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented his vision of the impoverished working class rising to attack and destroy capitalism, he was disappointed when the workers grew less revolutionary over time, as their standards of living improved.
At one point, Marx wrote to his disciples: “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”
Think about that. Millions of human beings mattered to him only in so far as they could serve as cannon fodder in his jihad against the existing society.
If they refused to be pawns in his ideological game, then they were “nothing.”
Now, three quotes from my perennial “progressive” commenter Markadelphia:
Show me Nancy Pelosi calling for violence and cheering when a comment is made about lynching. I don’t doubt that she is corrupt–mostly everyone is up there–but fervent and psychotic? No. – 08/10/09
—
I have spent my entire life (41 years) studying history and have no problem admitting that, on the whole, Democrats have been more criminal and racist then Republicans. – 10/31/08
—
Correct me if I am wrong. You believe that government is corrupt and would make the health care situation worse. I too believe that government is corrupt but that’s because we elect nincompoops to office. If we elected people who were skilled and intelligent rather than someone you can have a barbeque chicken sandwhich with, then I believe government can work. – 09/08/07
We’ve established that Markadelphia (and by extension, I would hope, most on the Left) understands and admits that “mostly everyone” on Capitol Hill is corrupt, and that, “on the whole” Democrats have been more criminal than Republicans (not that that distinction matters a great deal, other than the fact that they are in complete control of the legislative and executive branches of government at the moment.)
After the 2008 election, I have to ask: Did we get rid of the “nincompoops”? Or did we just swap out a few?
And, given that “mostly everyone” on Capitol Hill is still corrupt, why on EARTH should we assume that “Cap & Trade,” “Health Care Reform,” “The Stimulus Plan,” or any other piece of massive legislation being proposed is anything OTHER than another DELIBERATE “Investment in Failure”? Another power grab by the corrupt and criminal class already seated in the halls of power?
Which is it – ignorance, stupidity, or insanity? I really want to know.
UPDATE: Original JSKit/Echo comment thread is available here, thanks to John Hardin.
Immortal Quote of the Day
“In actual shootings, citizens do far better than law enforcement on hit potential,” said (Cole County, Missouri Sheriff Greg) White. “They hit their targets and they don’t hit other people. I wish I could say the same for cops. We train more, they do better.”
h/t to Robb at Sharp as a Marble for that shocker. We’ve known it for a long time. Nice to see a Law Enforcement official admit it in a public forum, and the media repeat it.
Back to John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education:
I lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.
Discipline was the daily watchword on school corridors. A network of discipline referrals, graded into an elaborate catalogue of well-calibrated offenses, was etched into the classroom heart. At bottom, hard as it is to believe in today’s school climate, there was a common dedication to the intellectual part of the enterprise. I remember screaming (pompously) at an administrator who marked on my plan book that he would like to see evidence I was teaching “the whole child,” that I didn’t teach children at all, I taught the discipline of the English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude not uncommon among teachers who grew up in the 1940s and before. Even with much slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family relationship. About schooling at least. Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.
Whatever the event is that I’m actually referring to—and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me—it was a nationwide phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever it was, it arrived all at once, the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.
Think of this thing for the moment as a course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school world. It constituted psychological restructuring of the institution’s mission, but traveled under the guise of a public emergency which (the public was told) dictated increasing the intellectual content of the business! Except for its nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene from farce, a swipe directly from Orwell’s 1984 and its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was being raised every time it was being lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for such a peculiar initiative; the public was not consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the makeover denied it was happening.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Nice to have that from a “Primary Source.”
Quote of the Day
As a recent convert from liberalism to conservatism, I must say… you all are so much more fun and entertaining! I truly wish I could have come to my senses sooner!
But now I find myself in this very strange place of conversion. I still hold some of my more liberal thoughts, but now find myself reviewing them from a firmer stance in reality. As my dear friend Kevin would probably phrase it, “You must have gotten tired of sniffing the Unicorn Farts!”
With this newfound light to the world, I also have a new view of where this illustrious country of ours is headed… and frankly it scares the crap out of me. I used to blind myself by saying, “We can make it better, we just need to try harder and come up with better solutions.” Something that I now have found out is very closely related to the Democratic motto when a plan of theirs goes wrong, “The philosophy can’t be wrong, the idea is sound… we just have to do it again, only harder!” Ah… to be free of the shackles of delusion.
— Mr. Bill, Rants and Reviews, “Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket?”
I’m not solely responsible, but I may have helped create a monster.
The rest of it is worth a read, too. He’s asking questions.
Quote of the Day
Another comment by reader “GrumpyOldFart” only this one’s all his:
Since Mark is making all these declarations about what the Republican base must obviously believe, let’s examine the actions of the Democrat base and see what they must obviously believe.
Let’s start with what they know. As always, the right will be held to a higher standard than the left, so I’ll limit myself to things that “I didn’t know _________!” on a given subject would be as absurd as saying, “I didn’t know professional wrestling was fake!”
1. They know that their party’s House Financial Services Committee Chairman, House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Chairman, House Speaker, Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Chairman, Senate Rules Committee Chairman, are all flat-out crooks, and make very little attempt to hide it.
2. They know that one of their primary fundraising organizations is wholly owned by a multibillionaire who makes no attempt to hide the fact that he manipulates the organization, and thus Democrat Party policy, for his own purposes.
3. They know that that one of their primary “activist” organizations is under indictment for voter registration fraud in a dozen states, and that this same organization is going to be given quite a bit of authority over the census, which determines what? Oh, just unimportant things like Congressional districting, electoral votes, stuff like that.
4. They know their party’s current leader chose someone as Attorney General who declines to prosecute people caught on video engaging in blatant voter intimidation. Whether it’s because the thugs in question were his same party or his same ethnicity is immaterial, it’s quite obvious that the AG has neither the desire nor any intention of impartially enforcing the law. They also know this same leader nominated a Supreme Court Justice who demanded a case be judged on the race of those involved rather than on its merits.
5. They know that nothing the aforementioned leader says can be taken at face value. Nothing. I was for Single Payer before I was against it, the stimulus was not intended as a stimulus, you can start blaming me for the economy right now but it’s your mess, there will be no lobbyists in my administration except for almost the entirety of my cabinet, it’s time to embrace science rather than superstition even though my “science czar” is a eugenicist, everything will be discussed on C-SPAN and there will be a full debate and five full days for the American people to see the bill cos it’s all about transparency (although the Republicans will be locked out of most of the process, I’ll refuse FOIA requests, and I’ll insist that the bills are too important to actually read them before I demand your unequivocal support), we must have a full and open debate on the issues while my senior advisor unleashes union thugs on my opponents, we have to get clear of the lies, disinformation, misinformation and distraction even though I’m pressuring the CBO to fudge their figures when they disagree with me….
…I could go on, but you see the point.
6. They know that this same leader produced more deficit in six months than every other President combined in the entire history of the Republic, all while preaching fiscal responsibility.
Okay, that’s the highlights of what the Democrat base pretty much cannot help but know. And yet what quality, more than any other single factor, defines the difference between Republicans and Democrats? It is this:
When Republicans find out one of their leaders is making no real attempt to “walk the walk” (Ted Stevens is a good example) the base calls for him to be thrown out.
When Democrats find out one of their leaders is making no real attempt to “walk the walk” (Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, Murtha, Jackson, Rangel, Waters… sheesh, pick one) the base either defends him by demonizing his/her critics or says “So what?” and ignores it.
I’ll do links if you ask, but this is already very long and 5 seconds on google will provide you all you want.
What conclusions can we draw from this? There are really only two choices:
Eithera) The Democrat base fully shares the corrupt, “it’s all about my power, my perks, screw everybody who gets in the way, I don’t give a shit if it’s legal or not” mindset of the leaders they choose, or
b) The Democrat base considers ethics, honesty and the rule of law at best indifferent if not actually destructive to the process of good government.
Were there any justice in this world, that would leave a scar.
How much is it the insurance companies are paying you? Well deserved, sir! Well deserved!
Quote of the Day
Hat tip to commenter GrumpyOldFart who found it in a comment thread at HotAir
It’s darkly amusing to watch them fumble across this new, less slanted landscape, shrieking the devil words they think will scare voters out of questioning them. If you look beyond the squalid little insinuations about swastikas and un-American fifth columns, even the less hysterical challenges to the legitimacy of their opponents are revealing. The accusation that people asking questions at town hall meetings are paid operatives of the insurance companies supposes the superior virtue of politicians to private industry. When Obama’s political staff sends out marching orders to supporters, along with scripts for how to look credible and concerned while advocating state-run health care, it is considered to be noble “community organizing.” If insurance companies were to assist with any kind of organized resistance to Obama’s agenda, it would be denounced as sleazy and sinister.
To appreciate this mindset, you must embrace the central tenet of socialism: the State is caring, compassionate, and wise, far beyond the vile and money-grubbing businessmen of the private sector. The insurance industry couldn’t possibly know anything useful about insuring people, could it? Of course not. Only their greed prevents them from showering Americans with cheap, universal coverage. The same dynamic is at play when liberals sneer at the idea of allowing energy companies to have any say in energy policy. It’s also why the Left loves to extol the virtues of “working Americans,” while offering only hatred to the business owners who employ them, and arrogant contempt for the consumerist culture that purchases the products they create. On any given topic, the only legitimate voices belong to politicians and their supporters. Businessmen are expected to sit quietly in their cells and await judgment. — “Doctor Zero”
And this seems an appropriate place to repeat a couple of quotes from Jonah Goldberg’s best-seller, Liberal Fascism:
Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the right people is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent by the wrong people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action.
—
This has been the liberal enterprise ever since: to transform a democratic republic into an enormous tribal community, to give every member of society from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska, that same sense of belonging – “we’re all in it together!” – that we allegedly feel in a close-knit community. The yearning for community is deep and human and decent. But these yearnings are often misplaced when channeled through the federal government and imposed across a diverse nation with a republican constitution. This was the debate at the heart of the Constitutional Convention and one that the progressives sought to settle permanently in their favor. The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.
—
All public policy issues ultimately boil down to one thing: Locke versus Rousseau. The individual comes first, the government is merely an association protecting your interests, and it’s transactional, versus the general will, the collective, the group is more important than the individual. Everything boils down to that eventually. And the problem with “compassionate conservatism” is the same problem with social gospelism, with Progressivism and all the rest: it works on the assumption that the government can love you. The government can’t love you. The government is not your mommy and it’s not your daddy, and any system that is based on those assumptions will eventually lead to folly.
Words to Live By – QotD
I got to the “public” townhall sponsored by Rep. Kathy Castor and the SEIU an hour and a half before the doors were scheduled to open. Apparently, it would not have mattered when I arrived. We stood out in the 90 plus degree weather only to be told that that the hall had been filled through a side door and no one else would be let in.
The crowd surrounded the building. We stood in front of every door and window and chanted “just say no” and “live or die”. The crowd was well behaved but really worked up. I heard several people say that there were three thousand people outside. I can’t confirm it but I certainly don’t doubt it.
—
I am upset, like everyone else that showed up, that we were locked out of what was supposed to be a public meeting. On the other hand, I am really proud of my fellow citizens. We represented every age group, every race and ethnic group. Rep. Kathy Castor made it clear that she doesn’t represent us. That is okay. Next election, we will find someone who does.
— Carol’s Closet, The Tampa Town Hall WAS NOT Open to the Public
Throw ’em ALL out.
RTWT. It’s a pretty interesting first-hand (“Primary Source”) account of the Tampa hijinx.
(h/t: Instapundit)
Quote of the Day
AZLibertarian discusses the FedGov’s “Cash for Clunkers” program, reflecting on the experience the Arizona state government had with a similar program aimed at “alternate fuel” conversions a few years ago:
The taxpayers of Arizona bought me a third of my truck. Nice if you can get it, but the state can’t stay in business this way.
So, why is this relevant today?
Here’s why….The Cash for Clunkers program is going broke. They overstimulated. They’re having to add money to keep a program meant to last until October make it last beyond its first week.
In short, the fed.gov is doing today what the Arizona state.gov did 10 years ago. For their own reasons, they believe they’re smarter than the Invisible Hand, and it isn’t working.
Again.
— Alternative Fuel Clunkers, Twenty Miles of Bad Road
So we should obviously put them in charge of our health care.
RTWT.