Politics – Page 47 – Maverick Philosopher

But What if I Want a ‘Crappy’ Health Plan and by Which Standard is it ‘Crappy’?

For liberal scumbaggery and dumbassery, it is hard to beat Ed Schultz. This is the guy who called the sweet and loveable and ladylike Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut." Now he is saying that the health plans that Obamacare will outlaw are 'crappy.'

If so, there must be some one standard relative to which they are adjudged 'crappy.' But what is that standard, and who sets it? Is maternity care built into the standard? But maternity is not in my future, or in my past for that matter. And if you are a woman past a certain age, or a nun of any age, maternity is not in your future either.

Primary care physicians advise their patients to have colonoscopies starting at the age of 50. Suppose you are a healthy 27-year-old runner who thrives on a fiber-rich diet. You and Sir Thomas Crapper are on most excellent terms. Your policy does not cover colonoscopies, let us assume. Does that make it 'crappy'? Not at all. It makes it reasonable. Why buy what you don't need?

So what would be a crappy plan for one person might not be for another. It depends on age, sex, and other factors.

Who is to decide? Obviously, the person in question or the person's parent or guardian. Not the government.

So here is the nub of the issue. The government has no right to force you to buy health care or health insurance (not the same, by the way), or anything else. Whether you buy and what you buy is your business. Or do you think that the citizen-state relation is or is closely analogous to the child-parent relation?

The various mandates (individual, employer, HHS) are egregious assaults upon individual liberty and upon the mediating structures of civil society such as private enterprises, clubs, fraternal associations, and churches. (In a later post I plan to talk about contraceptives and abortifacients and the assault on religious liberty.)

So do you value liberty? Or do you want an Obama-style "fundamental transformation" of our country in the direction of a collectivist nanny-state? We are well on the way to it already. How far do you want to go?

Let us understand what is fundamentally at issue here. Let's not get hung up on details such as those pertaining to the inasupicious 'rollout' of ObamaCare. We need clarity as to the "conflict of visions" ( T. Sowell) of Right and Left.

But we can't have clarity as long as Obama and his defenders lie and bullshit and prevaricate. The latter include Feinstein, Pelosi, and Wasserman-Schultz.

So, Mr President, please tell us forthrightly what your vision for America is. Don't lie to us, or try to trick or fool us or try achieve your ends by stealth.

Then and only then can we have the 'conversation' — to use a nice squishy bien-pensant liberal word — we need to have about the direction of the country.

But please, no more lies, and no more lies about your lies.

The Wages of Presidential Deception

Barack Obama does not have proprietary rights in presidential mendacity: he has many illustrious predecessors. But Obama has pushed the arts of deception, prevarication, and empty bluster to new heights. Unfortunately for him, the economy is bad, which fact will make it difficult for him to get away with his lies, bullshit, and Orwellian abuses of the English language.

I'll give the guy this much: it takes balls of brass and chutzpah on stilts to lie brazenly about what can be easily checked. Was he ever a used car salesman? Of course, he would have spoken of 'pre-owned vehicles.'

So much for my little summary of VDH's latest.

Who are the Extremists? Contemporary ‘Liberals’

Steven F. Hayward:

But the sound and fury against the Tea Party is a sideshow. The second aspect of the current partisan divide reveals the real extremism in politics today, and it isn’t to be found among Tea Partiers. The complaint against the supposed “extremism” of the Tea Party is nowadays followed by a much more risible lament: that the very design of our government is to blame for “gridlock” and the increasing conflict between the two parties in Washington. Supposedly serious people have written in the last couple weeks that Tea Partiers should be arrested and charged with treason or sedition for causing the government shutdown. More frequent are the calls for abolishing the Senate because of its equal representation of small states and out of frustration with the filibuster. A couple of liberal pundits, like the usually more sober-minded Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest, have suggested abolishing Congress altogether. And New York Times columnist Thomas “China-Is-Awesome” Friedman periodically recycles his fantasy that we could be “China for a day” so that his favorite authoritarian wish list could be imposed without our democratic consent.

This is not a brand new phenomenon. Starting with Woodrow Wilson, “progressives” (to use a name more accurate than “liberal”) have complained that our various mechanisms of “checks and balances” prevent government from being more “effective.” This is just code for the liberal desire that its opposition should simply shut up, surrender, and submit to their rule unquestioned. It is a liberalism that has grown too lazy to argue with—or even tolerate—opposition, which is what happens when you come to believe that you embody “the side of history.” This display of contempt for the institutions of democratic deliberation reveals today’s progressives to be highly undemocratic—and illiberal, too. With their will to power checked as intended by our founders, the Left is letting out a primal scream.

Orwellian Bullshit

The POMO prez, Barack Obama, said last night (emphasis added):

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't.

Obama is not just a bullshitter, but an Orwellian bullshitter.

See articles below.

A Note on David Mamet

I stumbled upon a good brisk read the other day by David Mamet in the genre, How I finally saw the light and stopped being a benighted leftist. The title is The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (Sentinel, 2011). Here is a taste, from a footnote on p. 10:

*The Left and the Right, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals — the goal of the Left is a government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

In his second sentence, Mamet makes two extremely important points. The first is that leftists employ a stealth strategy. They are not open about their ultimate goals. The gun-grabbers among them, for example, will rarely state openly that one of their goals is the banning of the private ownership of handguns. They know full well that an open espousal of their totalitarian agenda would incite the opposition of the 'tea-baggers' as they derisively call Tea Party members as well as that of the rest of the rubes of fly-over country. The second point it that leftists, as adherents of a quasi-religion, are committed to its nostrums whether or not they work out in reality. Are the public schools better than they were in '65? Obviously not. So throw more money at them while harrassing homeschoolers and blocking voucher programs.

But I must quibble with Mamet's first sentence. It is simply not the case that the goal of the Right is freedom of the individual from government. That is a goal of anarchists, but conservatism is twice-removed from anarchism. For between anarchism and conservatism lies libertarianism. Conservatives are law and order types. They believe in a strong national defense. They want the nation's borders to be secure. All of this requires local, state, and Federal government.

When leftists say as they repeatedly do that conservatives are anti-government, that is a lie and they know it. It is a mistake for Mamet to give aid and comfort to this lie. Conservatives are for limited government. It takes no great logical acumen to see that if one is for limited government, then one is for government. And even a liberal should be able to understand that it is a false alternative to suppose that the choice is between no government and totalitarian government.

Addendum (10/14)

Christopher Hitchens' NYT review of Mamet begins thusly: "This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason."

And as I read more of it, I am becoming irritated myself. Consider his answers to the questions put to him in an interview. The questions are serious, but he returns frivolous answers, e.g.:

You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most?
All of them gall me the most.

Only a lunatic extremist would think every cent paid in taxes was wasted. And surely no conservative would maintain such an absurd position.

We don't need more extremists. Contemporary liberalism is a set of extreme positions. The answer, however, is not some opposite form of extremism. I believe it was Goethe who said that no one is more hostile to a position than one who once espoused it but has come to reject it. I paraphrase.

Obama as Bullshitter

While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one, when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez is at bullshitting. He is indeed a consummate bullshitter. But what is it to bullshit, exactly? When is a statement bullshit?

Now what does this have to do with Obama? As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

Message from Malcolm on the Shutdown

Here's an outstanding short item from Thomas Sowell. Perfect clarity. Thought I'd pass it along in case you haven't seen it.

Best,
Malcolm

P.S. Hope your trails aren't Barackaded…

Not yet. Let him try. My affirmative traction Jeep will find a suitable trailhead despite the machinations of our very first presidential affirmative action hire.

Norman Podhoretz on Barack Obama

It is good to see that Podhoretz the elder is still writing.

Is Obama an incompetent, way out beyond his depth? Or is he very skillfully executing the plan he had all along? N-Pod argues the latter.

The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing
statement he made in the week before being elected president: "We are five days
away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of
us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the
left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the
anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers,
not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original
"community organizer."

[. . .]

But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama
believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and
destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation
he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence. And
just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to
take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic "isolationist" label abroad.

Vero Possumus

Yes we can! (. . . lob a few cruise missiles at Syrian military installations in a futile attempt to save face after yammering about a red line.)

Obama Indicts Obama

Another brilliant analysis by VDH. Ends thusly:

So why is there such a disconnect between what Obama once declared and what he subsequently professed? There are four explanations, none of them mutually exclusive:

A. Candidate Obama had no experience in foreign policy and has always winged it, now and then recklessly sounding off when he thought he could score cheap points against George Bush. As president, he still has no idea of how foreign policy is conducted, and thus continues to make things up as he goes along, often boxing himself into a corner with serial contradictions. Trying to discern any consistency or pattern in such an undisciplined mind is a futile exercise: what Obama says or does at any given moment usually is antithetical to what he said or did on a prior occasion. He is simply lost and out of his league ^[12].

B. Candidate Obama has always been an adroit demagogue. He knew how to score political points against George Bush, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, without any intention of abiding by his own sweeping declarations. The consistency in Obama’s foreign policy is his own carefully calibrated self-interest. Bombing or not bombing, shutting down or keeping open Guantanamo Bay, going or not going to the UN or the U.S. Congress — these choices are all predicated not on principle, but only on what a canny and unprincipled Obama feels best suits his own political interests and self-image at any given moment. In a self-created jam, he flipped and now goes to Congress in hopes of pinning responsibility on them ^[13], whether we go or not, whether successful or unsuccessful if we do. He is a quite clever demagogue.

C. Obama is a well-meaning and sincere naïf, but a naïf nonetheless. He really believed the world prior to 2009 worked on the premises of the Harvard Law School lounge, Chicago organizing, and Rev. Wright’s Church — or least should have worked on such assumptions. Then when Obama took office, saw intelligence reports, and assumed the responsibilities of our highest office, he was shocked at the dangerous nature of the world! There was no more opportunity for demagoguery or buck-passing, and he had to become serious. In short, it is easy to criticize without power, hard with it to make tough decisions and bad/worse choices. He is slowly learning.

D. Obama is the first president who genuinely feels U.S. exceptionalism and power were not ethically earned and should be in an ethical sense ended. As a candidate, he consistently undermined current U.S. foreign policy at a time of two critical wars; as president, he has systematically forfeited U.S. authority and prestige. There is no inconsistency: whatever makes the traditional idea of the U.S as a superpower weaker, Obama promotes; whatever enhances our profile, he opposes. He is often quite angry at what could be called traditional America — seen often as a downright mean country ^[14] here and abroad.

All of the above, say I. But especially (A), (B), and (D).

The Role of Ridicule in Politics

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Conservatives have a tendency to try to win every debate with logic and recitations of facts which, all too often, fail to get the job done because emotions and mockery are often just as effective as reason. The good news is that liberals almost never have logic on their side; so they're incapable of rationally making the case for their policies while conservatives can become considerably more effective debaters by simply adding some emotion-based arguments and sheer scorn to their discourse. This has certainly worked on Twitter, where conservatives keep making the Obama campaign look like buffoons by taking over its hashtags.

The bolded sentence above is #5 of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The rest of the text is from John Hawthorne's 12 Ways to Use Saul Alinky's Rules for Radicals Against Liberals. I agree entirely with Hawthorne's advice. I have come to see that calm and careful argumentation, the marshalling of facts, and all the rest of what constitutes rational persuasion are simply not enough. While necessary, they are not sufficient. Not sufficient, because most people are emotion-driven, not reason-driven. This is especially true of the young. It is the cool, not the cogent, that persuades them.

The Left knows how to fight and the Right had better learn. If you doubt that politics is war conducted by other means, then consider the following from a recent Dennis Prager column:

The head of the Louisiana Democratic Party, State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, stood before her colleagues in the state Senate and announced the reason people oppose Obamacare.

"You ready?" she asked three times.

It is President Obama's color.

"It isn't about the administration, and it should not be about the administration of the state nor federal level when it comes to Obamacare," she said. "But in fact it is. And why is that? I have talked to so many members in the House and Senate and you know what it comes down to? Are you ready for this? It is not about how many federal dollars we can receive. You ready? You want to know what it's about? It's about race. Now nobody wants to talk about that. It's about the race of this African-American president. … It comes down to the race of the president of the U.S. which causes people to disconnect and step away from the substance of the bill."

What the senator said is of course egregiously false, and she must know it. But then why does she and so many other liberals say things like this? Because it is a useful lie. It is useful to the forwarding of the leftist agenda. Liberals lie and distort and smear because it works. The end justifies the means.

There are examples aplenty of this. For the Left, politics is a form of warfare. The above example, which is entirely characteristic, proves it.

Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle

Would that I could avoid this political stuff. But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife is certainly at the root of politics. Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it. What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell. Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.

Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

H. L. Mencken on the Perfection of Democracy

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron." – – H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920 (Via Bill Keezer, via Keith Burgess-Jackson)

The great and glorious day is come, my friends, and we finally have the president we deserve. God help us.

According to Snopes, the above quotation is not verbatim, but it is accurate in the main. See Snopes for context.

The Folly of “I Have Nothing to Hide”

This is an entry from the old blog, first posted 28 December 2005. It makes an important point worth repeating, especially in light of such recent scandals as the harassing by the Internal Revenue Service of individuals and groups whole political views differ from those of the current administration.

…………..

In an age of terrorism, enhanced security measures are reasonable (see Liberty and Security). But in response to increased government surveillance and the civil-libertarian objections thereto, far too many people are repeating the stock phrase, "I have nothing to hide."

What they mean is that, since they are innocent of any crime, they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and so there cannot be any reasonable objection to removing standard protections. But these people are making a false assumption. They are assuming that the agents of the state will always behave properly, an assumption that is spectacularly false.

Most of the state's agents will behave properly most of the time, but there are plenty of rogue agents who will abuse their authority for all sorts of reasons. The O'Reilly Factor has been following a case in which an elderly black gentleman sauntering down a street in New Orlean's French Quarter was set upon by cops who proceeded to use his head as a punching bag. The video clip showed the poor guy's head bouncing off a brick wall from the blows. It looked as if the thuggish cops had found an opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being under cover of law, and were taking it. And that is just one minor incident.

We conservatives are law-and-order types. One of the reasons we loathe contemporary liberals is because of their casual attitude toward criminal behavior. (We loathe them qua liberals: the cynosure of our disapprobation is the sin, not the sinner.) But our support for law and order is tempered by a healthy skepticism about the state and its agents. This is one of the reasons why we advocate limited government and Second Amendment rights.

As conservatives know, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have no illusions about human nature such as are cherished by liberals in their Rousseauean innocence. Give a man a badge and a gun and the power will go to his head. And mutatis mutandis for anyone with any kind of authority over anyone. This is the main reason why checks on government power are essential.

The trick is to avoid the absurdities of the ACLU-extremists while also avoiding the extremism of the "I have nothing to hide" types who are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of secure pottage.

Companion post: Cops: A Necessary Evil