Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Politics

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

    Here 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…

  • Empty Chair, Empty Suit, Empty Speech

    And 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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: Things 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. …

  • 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…

  • Obama: One Cool Dude

    But cool is all that remains. 

  • 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:…

  • 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…

  • If the Dead and the Undocumented Voted Conservative . . .

    . . . liberals would be screaming for voter ID.

  • Obama’s Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

    Obama showed his true colors quite unmistakably in his 'You didn't build that" speech.  Yuval Steinitz has his number: The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism…

  • Did the State Make You Great?

    Krauthammer 'nails it' brilliantly (emphasis added): To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the…