Category: Politics

Obama the Feckless

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Having demonstrated his domestic incompetence, Obama is now showing us his fecklessness in matters foreign.  Is it 1979 all over again?  As a certain American philosopher of Spanish extraction is supposed to have said . . . .

One can hope that Romney will play Reagan to Obama's Carter.  For the good of all of us, those who understand these matters, and the liberal fools who don't.

 

The Constructive Curmudgeon

I don't know whether he is an antediluvian and a bibliomaniac, but Douglas Groothuis is a self-professed curmudgeon, albeit of a constructive stripe. I am not persuaded by his case for Biblical inerrancy, but I find his political observations astute, as in this list of reasons not to vote for Obama.  Read the list!

By the way, my opening sentence illustrates the principle that the antecedent of a pronoun need not come before  (in the order of reading) the pronoun of which it is the antecedent despite the following bit of schoolmarmishness from Grammar Girl:

Our second antecedent problem is what’s called “anticipatory reference,” which Bryan Garner calls “the vice of referring to something that is yet to be mentioned (5)," meaning that the writer puts the pronoun before the antecedent—a no no.

I say to hell with that.  I opened with a beautiful classy sentence.  Grammar Girl needs a good spanking not only for endorsing this stupid rule of the dumbed-down and inattentive but also for her use of 'no no' baby talk.

I should rant more fully on pronouns, their antecedents, with an application to Obama's "You didn't build that."

I do have a fine rant here on baby talk and first-grade English.

Too Many Lawyers in Government, Not Enough Doctors

Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government — and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

Lawyers are especially overrepresented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."

Eastwood on His ‘Empty Chair’ Performance at the Republican National Convention

Clint-obama-chairHere is my take on Eastwood's unscripted talk.  Here is Eastwood's. 

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Pine Cone this week. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.”

Empty Chair, Empty Suit, Empty Speech

Empty-suit2And the speech was indeed empty.  But that is par for the course for Dems.  Bare of content, full of bromides, vacuity piled upon vacuity. Gaseous, nebulous, nugatory.

But the mendacity of it all is that behind the flatulent phrases is a hard Left agenda that they will not avow but that comes out  when their guard is down.

"You didn't build that!"

"Government is the only thing we all belong to."

If that isn't a totalitarian formula completely at odds with traditional American values, what would be?

And there you have the modern Democrat Party: totalitarianism wrapped in bullshit.

 

 

Dems: “Government is the Only Thing We All Belong To”

Some say that there is no real difference between the two major parties in the USA, the Republicans and the Democrats.  The claim is breathtakingly false for so many reasons.  The latest example of difference is provided by   this DNC video.   John Hayward's response is spot on:

Even this benign-sounding apologia for “government is the only thing we all belong to” is incredibly wrong-headed.  We most certainly do not belong to the government.  We are all members of the electorate, which is a very different thing.  Each of us lives beneath several distinct governments – federal, state, city – empowered to protect our rights, not act as the almighty executor of some “collective will” that exists only in the totalitarian fantasies of liberals.  There are very few areas of government action that command anything like overwhelming majority support from Americans, let alone nearly unanimous approval.

To which I add:

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have."

The government is not us as liberals like to say. It is an entity over against most of us run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry scoundrels, for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and  extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government.  To do so is not anti-government.  Too many leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government.  It is a lie and they know it.  They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).

Living in the Past: Is That Why You are Still a Dem?

To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is an impression that lasts through life and functions as a sort of benchmark for the evaluation of what comes after, but also as a distorting lense that makes it difficult to see what is happening now. 



The foregoing insight may help us understand why people remain in the Democrat Party. People born in the 'twenties are many of them still living in the 'forties. For them the Democrat Party is the party of FDR. They haven't noticed the changes, or haven't wanted to notice the changes. They haven't noticed that their interests are no longer served by the party of this name. Or perhaps they are just attached to the label, or in the grip of misplaced piety: they are attached to a family tradition. "My pappy was a Democrat and my grandpappy afore him was a Democrat; we McCoy's have always been Democrats, and we don't see no reason to change now."

People born in the early 'forties are many of them still living in the early 'sixties, those heady days of Camelot when the young and vigorous Jack Kennedy and his charming wife occupied the White House, and society was all in a ferment with necessary reforms being made or about to be made. They thrilled to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" and other anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Those worthy battles were fought, and they were won, and progress was made.  But soon enough the rot set in: the legitimate struggle for civil rights gave way to affirmative action as we now know it, which involves  reverse discrimination, race-norming, preferential hiring, minority set-asides.  The noble Martin Luther King, Jr. was soon followed by such race-hustlers as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who cleverly cashed in on white liberal guilt.    People were precisely not judged by "the content of their character" but by the color of their skin.  Equality of opportunity was confused with equality of outcome; the quota mentality replaced the concern for justice.  Justice gave way to the unconcept 'social justice' which either means nothing or is code for socialism.

In the '60s , Democrats were progressive and liberal in respectable senses of these terms. But it is no longer the 'sixties, and if JFK were alive today and held the views he held then, he would be classed with conservatives. If you are living in the past, however, fixated on the glory days of youth, you may have missed the changes. You may not have noticed the difference between Jack and Teddy, the difference a brother can make.

So if you are still a Dem, you need to ask yourself: Are you living in the past?  Watching Pat Cadell on the Glenn Beck show a while back I had to scratch my head.  He was agreeing with Beck, and yet he remains a Dem. Is he just attached to the name?  When the Dems become indistinguishable from the CPUSA will he still call himself a Dem?

You superannuated  farts who are still Dems — tune into the Democratic National Convention going on this week in Charlotte.  Listen carefully to the proceedings.  Is that the stuff you believe in?

The Incompatibility of a Market Economy and a Socialist Welfare State

Janet Daly of The Telegraph has written a penetrating article. Excerpts (emphasis added)

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

[. . .]

Mitt Romney had been hinting, in an oblique, undeveloped way, at this line of argument as he moved tentatively toward finding a real message. Then he took the startling step of appointing Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, and the earth moved. If Romney was the embodiment of the spirit of a free market, Ryan was its prophet. His speech at the convention was so dangerous to the Obama
Democrats, with their aspirations toward European-style democratic socialism, that they unleashed their “fact checkers” to find mistakes (“lies”) in it. (Remember the old Yes Minister joke: “You can always accuse them of errors of detail, sir. There are always some errors of detail”.) When Romney and Ryan offer their arguments to the American people, they are, of course, at an advantage over almost any British or European politician. Contrary to what many know-nothing British observers seem to think, the message coming out of Tampa was not Tea Party extremism. It was just a reassertion of the basic values of American political culture: self-determination, individual aspiration and genuine community, as opposed to belief in the state as the fount of all social
virtue.

[. . .]

So it would be deeply misleading to imply that this campaign will be a contest between what Britain likes to call “progressive” politics and some atavistic longing for a return to frontier America where everybody made a success of his own life with no help from anybody but his kith and kin. In the midst of the impassioned and often nasty debate about the future of health care, in which Ryan was depicted as a granny-killer, there has been some serious Republican thinking about the universal provision of medical care for pensioners (or “seniors” as they are called in the US). Because, you see, the debate over there has gone way beyond welfare reform: the need to restrict benefit dependency among the underclass is an argument that has been won. What is at issue now is much more politically contentious: universal entitlements such as comprehensive Medicare and social security are known to be unaffordable in their present form. Ryan, the radical economic thinker, suggests a solution for Medicare in the form of a voucher system. Patients could choose from competing health providers, with a ceiling on the cost of procedures and treatments, instead of simply being given blanket no-choice care. Thus, the government would get better value for money, and individuals would have more say in their own treatment. Now why doesn’t anybody here think of applying that mechanism to the NHS? Oh, yes, some people have – but nobody in power will listen to them.

Clint Eastwood Speaks Truth to Power at the RNC

There were some fabulous but conventional speeches at the Republican National Convention.  The best were by Condoleeza Rice, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.  But the performance that may prove to be the most effective in securing votes, not to mention rankling liberals, was that of Clint Eastwood.

Here is this  aging superstar who introduces himself self-deprecatingly as a "movie tradesman" with hair slightly out of place sporting what the late Paul Fussell referred to in his hilarious 1983 Class as a "prole gap," a class indicator often displayed by working class types on the rare and uncomfortable occasions when they don a suit. (“Here, the collar of the jacket separates itself from the collar of the shirt and backs off and up an inch or so:  the effect is that of a man coming apart.") Eastwood looked like he had blown in from a session with cronies  at a bar and grill.

He then launches into a 'conversation' with a chair whose absent occupant is none other than Barack Obama.  The dialogue is rambling and in places incoherent, but funny as hell.  Here it is in full, for your enjoyment.

An actor in an ill-fitting suit addresses an empty suit, a man as vacant as the chair he does not occupy.

The money quote and standing ovation come at 8:54: "You, we, own this country."  Here, in the guise of a regular guy, Eastwood speaks truth to power, to use that darling phrase of leftists, a phrase they (absurdly) continue to deploy even when they possess power. Eastwood continued with, "Politicians are employees of ours" and "When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go."

Was the person who shouted out "Make my day!" a plant?  Plant or not, the Eastwood performance ended on an appropriate "Dirty Harry" note. Dirty Harry, after all, cut through bullshit and did not suffer punks gladly.

The ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Speech Revisited: Wieseltier Says Romney and Ryan are Lying

In His Grief and Ours: Paul Ryan's Nasty Ideal of Self-Reliance, Leon Wieseltier taxes Ryan and Mitt Romney with a simple lie (emphasis added):

It is no wonder that Ryan, and of course Romney, set out immediately to distort the president’s “you didn’t build that speech” in Roanoke, because in complicating the causes of economic achievement, and in giving a more correct picture of the conditions of entrepreneurial activity, Obama punctured the radical individualist mythology, the wild self-worship, at the heart of the conservative idea of capitalism. An honest reading of the speech shows that Romney and Ryan and their apologists are simply lying about it. The businessman builds his business, but he does not build the bridge without which he could not build his business. That is all. Is it everything? Surely it takes nothing away from the businessman, who retains his reason for his pride in his business. But it is not capitalist pride that Romney and Ryan are defending, it is capitalist pridefulness.

Here is the key passage from Obama's speech (emphasis added):

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'that' in the fifth sentence?  The general rule, one admitting of exceptions, is that the antecedent of a pronoun is the noun or noun phrase immediately preceding it in the context in question.  By that rule 'business' is the antecedent of 'that'  and Obama is saying that business owners did not build their businesses.  But since the rule allows exceptions, the context permits a   charitable reading: 'If you've got a business, you didn't build the roads and bridges and other infrastructuire without which your business would have been impossible.'

So there are two readings of Obama's words.  Both are permitted by the words themselves, but one is uncharitable and the other charitable.  On the first what he is saying is plainly false: no business person built his business.  On the second, what he is saying is trivially true and disputed by no one, namely, that no business could be built without various infrastructure already being in place. 

On either reading, there is a serious problem for Obama and his apologists.  Either Obama is is saying something that everyone, including Obama, knows is false, in which case he is lying, or he is saying something that goes without saying, something disputed by no one.  On the second reading Obama is commiting a straw man fallacy: he is portraying his opponents as holding a position that none of them holds. 

So if we are going to be charitable, then we ought to tax the president with a straw man fallacy.  But there is worse to come.  Behind the latter fallacy is a fallacy of false alternative.  Obama assumes, without justification, that if you didn't build the infrastructure without which your business could not exist, then government built it.  Or, to put it in the form of a disjunction: Either you as an individual built the the roads and bridges and tools or government built them for you.  But that is a false alternative.  Not everything that arises collectively is brought about by the government.  Obama confuses government with society.  Only some of what we achieve collectively is achieved by government agency.

Uncharitably read, Obama is lying.  Charitably read, his claim is doubly fallacious and doubly false.  It is false that conservatives maintain a rugged individualism according to which each of us creates himself ex nihilo.  And it is false that what is achieved collectively is achieved by government agency.

Now did Romney and Ryan lie about Obama's message?  No.  They interpreted his words in a way that the English language permits.  Their interpretation, of course, is uncharitable in the extreme.  After all, no one really believes that business people pull themselves up out of nothing by their own bootstraps. 

Is Wieseltier lying about Romney and Ryan? No, he is is just being stupid by failing to make an elementary distinction between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning.

Obama's gaffe will be and ought to be exploited to the hilt by the Republicans.  Politics is not dispassionate inquiry but war conducted by other means. 

Obama must be defeated.  Four more years of his collectivism  may harm the country irreparably.

I Was Forced to Show My Papers!

Voting this morning in the AZ state primary I was put in mind of an old post from a couple of years ago that bears reposting and editing:


AZThings are really getting bad here in the fascist state of Arizona.  Why just this morning I was forced to show ID when I went to vote.  I strolled into the polling place looking a fright after several hours of hiking.  I introduced myself as 'King Blog' but that cut no ice with the  old ladies who 'manned' the place.  They asked to see my driver's license! What chutzpah!  What bigotry!  A bunch of damned Nazis, if you want my opinion.  What if I forgot it, or never had one? Then the Nazi bastards would have disenfranchised me!  The very act of requesting ID is an act of

 disenfrachisement and intimidation.  Besides, it prevents me from voting twice, which I have a right to do. 

I should have adapted a line from B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Papers?  I don't need no stinkin' papers!  I'm a human being.  You just hate me because I smell like I spent the night under a bridge.  I have the right to do whatever I want, wherever I want, and vote wherever I want and as many times as I want.
You Anglo bastards are raaacists because my skin isn't lily-white like yours and because my name ends in a vowel.

I'm gettin' the hell out of this rattlesnake-infested inferno of gun-totin' yahoos, rednecked racists, and xenophobic immigrant-bashers.  I'm going where a man can be free.  I'm headed for Castro's island paradise.  "Live free or die," as I always say.

To Call it an Exaggeration Would be an Understatement

There are statements so extreme that to call them exaggerations would be an understatement.  There are plenty of examples to be found in liberal precincts.

"The photo ID requirement is voter suppression. It disenfranchises minorities, the poor, the elderly.  It is an onerous barrier to voting."

Onerous?  In Pennsylvania a photo ID can be had free of charge.  In Arizona it costs a paltry $12 and is good for 12 years.  If you are 65 or older, or on SS disability, it is free.

Are our liberal pals exaggerating?  Actually it is more like lying.  It is the willful misuse of language to win at all costs.  Linguistic hijacking.

The Voter ID Controversy Continues

It amazes me that new articles and columns in high-class venues appear almost daily concerning what really ought to be a non-issue.  Of course, I blame the Left for this.  By maintaining preternaturally absurd positions, they force sensible writers to waste time and energy opposing their nonsense.  Here is how a 15 August NY Times editorial begins:

Judge Robert Simpson of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania seems to assume that legislators have a high-minded public purpose for the laws they pass. That’s why, on Wednesday morning, he refused to grant an injunction to halt a Republican-backed voter ID law that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority state residents in November.       

One thing you have to understand about leftists is that they regularly engage in semantic distortion: they will take a word that has an established meaning and misuse it for their ideological ends.  'Disenfranchise' is a case in point.

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote.  But only some people in a given geographical area  have the right to vote.  Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens.  You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area.  Otherwise, cats and dogs and children and felons and illegal aliens would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove that I have the right another.  If I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be on a given occasion, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been disenfranchised.  For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right due to my inability to prove
my identity.

That's one point.  The author of the NYT editorial begins by egregiously misusing 'disenfranchise.'  But note also the cynicism betrayed in the opening sentence.  Third, we are asked to believe the unbelievable, that "hundreds of thousands of poor and minority state residents" will be 'disenfranchised' come November.  Hundreds of thousands? Prove it!  In Pennsylvania, photo ID is free.  So even the 'poor' can afford it.  Our editorial writer continues:

He wrote in his ruling that requiring a government-issued photo ID card to vote “is a reasonable, nondiscriminatory, nonsevere burden when viewed in the broader context of the widespread use of photo ID in daily life,” as if voting were equivalent to buying a six-pack of beer or driving a car.       

At this point I stopped reading.  The writer is committing a grotesque straw man fallacy.  No one claims that voting is "equivalent" — whatever that is supposed to mean – " to buying a six-pack of beer or driving a car."  The point is that the photo ID requirement is a minimal one in that photo ID is necessary for all sorts of transactions in everyday life that ordinary people engage in.  And again, in PA you can acquire this ID for free. Our idiot editorialist also seems not to realize this issue has nothing to do with driving a car.  A photo ID is not the same as a driver's license.  The latter is a species of the former as genus.  You don't need to own a car, and you don't even need to have a driver's license.

Now if you want to read something intelligent on this issue, besides what I have written, I recommend this WSJ piece, and this article from Commentary.

Generation Screwed May Support Ryan

Gen-Xers (those born between 1965 and 1980) are the cohort sandwiched between the Boomers  and the Millennials.  Now they have one of their own in contention for high office.  And Paul Ryan, 42, is no slacker.  Romney's pick of the man for VP was a brilliant stroke and may gin up support for the Republican ticket as Kirsten Powers argues.

She quoted a word I had never seen before, 'athazagoraphobia':

Generation X chronicler Jeff Gordiner, has written that Gen-Xers suffer from “athazagoraphobia”—“an abnormal and persistent fear of being forgotten or ignored.” Except it’s not really a phobia; it’s been reality for a long time. Maybe that is about to change.