Category: Politics

National Public Radio and Big Bird Need Your Support!

Big bird

This is something I wrote 10 March 2011.  The points still hold and the piece is relevant because of Governor Romney's 'attack' on Big Bird in his first debate with President Obama.  Lefties have a hard time understanding why we mean-spirited conservatives would want to deny such a loveable critter Federal bird seed.  Maybe this will help.

……….

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of  it, write them a check!  Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support.  At least not now.  We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made.  If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made?  Think about it.  If these small allocations cannot be zeroed out or placed on moratorium, how are we going to tackle entitlement reform?

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship.  But that is stupidity pure and simple and duly refuted here.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support.  And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.  Now that should be obvious to anyone who has been following current events, including the firing of Juan Williams, the exposure and sacking of the two Schillers, etc.  If you deny the Leftward tilt of NPR in its present incarnation, then you are delusional and not worth talking to.  So let's assume that you are sane and admit the bias.  The next question is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that most of us in this conservative land find objectionable.  I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty.  But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR. 

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons.  I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad).  I leave that question open for the space of this post.  I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something we ought to do. 

I love Garrison Keillor and his "Prarie Home Companion" and tune in whenever I can.  "Guy Noir" is one of my favorite bits.  So I hope NPR stays on the air — on its own fiscal steam.  Hell, if they wean themselves from the  mammaries of massive Mama Obama Government I may even send them a check myself!  And the same goes for PBS. 

Obama, the Imaginary Man

Outstanding analysis by Andrew Klavan. Excerpts:

The mystery Obama—the hollow receptacle of out-sized fantasies left and right—is not a creation of his own making, political chameleon though he may well be. It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

It is the nature of the Left to conflate the world with the world as leftists want it to be.  Whereas the conservative stands on the terra firma of antecedent reality, the leftist trades in nebulous hopes and dreams, many of them impossible.  (it comes as no surprise that the late Edward Kennedy's favorite song was "Impossible Dream.")

Theirs are largely passive lies and lies of omission. The active frauds—NBC’s dishonest editing of videos to reflect a leftist worldview, ABC’s allowing Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos to masquerade as a newsman, the Los Angeles Times’ suppressing even the transcript of the video in their possession that shows candidate Barack Obama at a meeting with a PLO-supporting sheik—these are only egregious salients of the more consistent, underlying dishonesty. The real steady-state corruption is revealed in the way Obama scandals like Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate, and the repeated breaking of federal campaign laws have been wildly underplayed, while George W. Bush’s non-scandals, like the naming of Valerie Plame and the firings of several U.S. attorneys at the start of his second term, were blown out of all proportion.

And it is revealed in Obama’s blankness, his make-believe greatness, and the suppression, ridicule, and dismissal of any evidence that he is not the man this powerful media faction once wanted so badly for him to be. No other modern president could have associated so intimately with lowlifes like Wright and Ayers and the now-imprisoned Tony Rezko and not had those associations exposed in every detail. No other president could have made the radical remarks he’s made—about wealth redistribution, religion, and the federal government’s alleged ill-treatment of blacks—and not had them headlined all over for weeks. No other could have presided over such a crippled economy and such universal failures at war and in foreign policy and escaped almost without mainstream blame.

The Delusional Left and ‘Voter Suppression’

Here is a TNR piece that proves once again that lberals live on a different planet.  I call it the planet Unsinn and I sometimes speak of the 'planetary' difference between left and right.  The difference is between nonsense and sense.  The author asks why principled conservatives won't denounce 'voter suppression.'

'Voter suppression' is leftist code for 'photo ID.'  Here's the short answer:  we won't condemn it because common sense demands it.  Longer answer and arguments here.  It shows how far we've fallen that this needs to be argued at all.

I am of course against voter suppression while being all for 'voter suppression.'

I am also against voter fraud, unlike liberals.  They welcome it knowing that it can only redound to their benefit.  That is the plain motive behind their opposition to photo ID.  If voter fraud worked to the benefit of conservatives and libertarians, leftists would be screaming in protest.

POTUS Pounded

Romney scored big against Obama  last night in the first of their three debates, as most of the pundits, left and right, agree.  When Romney came out with the "trickle-down government" line, I gave him a big 'thumbs up' to the mild amusement of my wife who, bless her heart, insisted that we watch the debate instead of a 1965 rerun  of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  (I was tempted to blow off the debate, expecting nothing but the usual bullshit.) 

But Romney should have repeated the excellent line that sums up the whole leftist approach: we take your money which, by rights does not belong to you but to the collective, and we dribble back to you such benefits as we see fit.  (Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.")  Obama 2016 provides evidence that this is the ultimate Obama agenda.

Romney should have pounded away with the "trickle-down government" line.  Repetition is necessary to get through to Joe Sixpack.  Romney is still too gentlemanly.  Politics, however, is not gentlemanly debate but war by other means.  Leftists have understood this all along.  Conservatives are slowly learning.

So while POTUS was pounded, he did not receive the plenary pounding that he needs.  Work for the next two debates.  Romney needs to slug harder while maintaining  his smiling 'nice guy' demeanor.

Obama: Fiscally Clueless

Here.

You say the Republicans are not much better?  I don't disagree.  But think of it this way. 

A jackass and an elephant are heading for a cliff, a fall from which will be fatal.  The jackass, being a jackass, is moving faster towards disaster.  The elephant is moving slower.  You must choose to ride on one or the other.  Upon which animal would you prefer to be mounted?

Obama is an utterly clueless jackass.  With a 'Ryanized' Romney there is some hope that we can avert disaster or at least postpone it.

Obama: A Prediction Come True

On 6 November 2008, I wrote into my journal:

The Irony of the Obama Victory.  The presidency was handed to him by the financial crisis.  But his policies will exacerbate it.

I was right.  I now predict that if he is re-elected, four more years of his policies will bring us to financial ruin.  Mark my words.

The man is not only incompetent and inexperienced but unserious.   Here he is on Letterman admitting that he doesn't know what the national debt is.  He obviously doesn't understand the gravity of the situation, or his own partial responsibility for it in irresponsibly pushing another entitlement, popularly known as ObamaCare, when the problem of the long-term solvency of the existing entitlements  has not been addressed.  Instead, he blames his predecessor while manically digging the hole deeper.

The Fallacy of Redistribution

Thomas Sowell:

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. [Professor Sowell is referring to the forced collectivization of the Ukraine.  If you want to inform yourself of the horrors thereof, I recommend  Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford UP, 1986.]

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

Sowell is right of course.  People typically do not allow themselves to be jerked around.  If California is not business-friendly, business people will move to states like Texas, and the once 'Golden State' will sink deeper into the mire.  (Bill Bennett in a recent speech referred to California as the "The Lindsay Lohan of states.")  If you tax me at 100% for any amount earned above $100,000, I will arrange things so that my taxable income will be less than that amount.  It is just human nature to resist being screwed.

The current debate about redistribution on shows like the O'Reilly Factor is close to moronic.  O'Reilly talks as if Obama is for redistribution while Romney is not.  But redistribution has been with us for a long time in the form of a progressive income tax code, and that is not going away any time soon.  (And I am not even convinced that it should.)  So the issue is not redistribution versus no redistribution.  The issue is is whether we are going to have more of it, or less of it, or reduce the rate of its increase. 

Under Obama we will most assuredly have more of it, a lot more.    This will depress the economy, the national debt will increase even more, and we will be on the way to financial ruin.

Anyone who votes for the fiscally irresponsible Obama is a fool  who does not understand his own long-term best self-interest.  And anyone who thinks that it doesn't matter who is in the White House is also a fool, despite the fact that Romney is a milque-toast and a wimp.

Never forget: politics is always about the lesser of evils.  Better a milque-toast and wimpy businessman who understands how the economy works than a incompetent leftist who doesn't.

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?