Politics of the Peril

And here's the problem, right here

2010-11-26T12:24:00.001-08:00

As the pleasingly pompously named Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports:

The great question is at what point Germany concludes that it cannot bear the mounting burden any longer. "I am worried that Germany's authorities are slowly losing sight of the European common good," said Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of Eurogroup finance ministers.

Um...M. Juncker, the problem is precisely that there is no European common good. What is good for some parts of Europe, is very very bad for others.

Now, there are certain goods that are indeed common to all Europeans -- but those are precisely the "goods" that the E.U. and its ruling nitwits (such as M. Juncker) are at greatest pains to eradicate. It is good when men and women are left free to enjoy the good consequences of their decisions -- and held responsible for enduring the bad consequences (except insofar as others choose to help them of their own free will). It is good for men and women to be Christians, as long as they are so not only in word but also in deed. It is good for men and women to be safe from the depradations of extortionate taxation, and unburdened by stifling bureaucratic regulation. It is good for men and women who wish to be taken care of in their old age by a younger generation, to go to the trouble and cost of producing, and raising to be virtuous, children (or at least to involve themselves self-sacrificially and personally in the lives of other people's children, preferably the unfortunate children of irresponsible parents). It is good for adults to be made to feel the responsiblity to work hard and husband their time and money and effort wisely, in order to ensure that their own needs and their children's are met at their expense, rather than allowing them to feel that they can live parasitically off the labor of others. On the other hand, it is good for the fortunate and hard-working who have put by more than they need, to become personally involved in helping the poor and unfortunate, rather than telling themselves that that's somebody else's job.

It is, in short, good for men and women to be Christian, virtuous, and free -- but the ruling classes of Europe have spent the last half-century attacking traditional Christianity, traditional virtue, and "bourgeois" individual liberties.

Oh, by the way, M. Juncker...good luck with that fiat currency the manipulation of which is supposed to proceed by consensus among vicious post-Christian politicians each seeking to maintain his own personal power by any means necessary. Oh, wait, Professor Hankel has something to say:

You cannot find a bank safe deposit box in Germany because every single one has already been taken and stuffed with gold and silver.

Why, it's almost as if the ordinary man and woman know the difference between real money and the last-one-left-holding-it-loses Ponzi-esque scheme that is Keynesian fiat currency.

Line of the day

2010-11-16T16:36:00.000-08:00

A comment (quoting David Warren) that I pretty much 100% agree with, ends thusly:

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

Now that's some skillful snark.

Couldn't have put it better myself

2010-11-15T17:37:00.000-08:00

From a pretty good Telegraph article by Toby Harnden:

Looking at the 43rd and 44th American presidents right now, it is worth reflecting that it was only the unpopularity of Bush and all he represented that enabled someone as inexperienced and unproven as Obama to ascend to power.

By the same token, perhaps only a performance in office as myopic, self-absorbed and hubristic as that of Obama could have brought about a Bush rehabilitation so swiftly.

Hey, whaddaya know, it's not like I'm the only person in the world singularly unimpressed with either of 'em.

An example of the well-founded principle that the use of the passive in political discourse generally signals childish incoherency of thought

2010-04-09T17:56:00.000-07:00

Take the following sentence:

"It has been crystal clear for more than a century that modern technology makes war so overwhelmingly destructive that it should no longer be allowed."

Um...by whom?

An obvious question, one would think. (Along with the question, "And your alternative is...what, exactly?) Equally obviously, a question the author of the blog post in question would probably go to any lengths to avoid having to face straightforwardly like a man. (My guess is that he would say, "The United Nations" and then plead a just-remember prior engagement as an excuse to avoid being cross-examined on the UN's record of past accomplishments.)

But the point of my post is simply this: try rewriting that sentence without using the passive voice.

"It has been crystal clear for more than a century that modern technology makes war so overwhelmingly destructive that..."

What's the subject of that dependent clause going to be?

See, if you can't take your political proposals and cast them entirely in the active voice, then you don't have political proposals at all. You're just flattering yourself with the illusion of having engaged in political thought.

A note to Rich Lowry

2010-04-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Rich,

It doesn’t matter what Romney does or says. From the day he managed to get that Romneycare abomination passed, I swore I’d never vote for him for anything at all. If he ever for a moment thought that any consequences would follow other than the disastrous ones that have in fact ensued, then he is too stupid to be entrusted with so much as the maintenance of my neighbor’s backyard pool. If he knew what was going to happen and cynically did it anyway because he saw some sort of personal political advantage to him, then he can go someplace where he’ll never need ice skates.

But either way, there’s absolutely nothing that can possibly excuse Romneycare, or induce me to put a checkmark next to that fool’s name in any election under the sun. I held my nose and voted for McCain, but I’d’ve sat it out rather than voting for Romney. The passage of – indeed, the very proposal of – Romneycare should have meant the instant and permanent end of Romney’s career as an electable official under the Republican Party flag. The fact that it did not, goes a long way to explain why I’ve never bothered to register as a Republican and why I see the GOP as the weakest of weak reeds in the defense of the American common good.

Yours sincerely,

Ken Pierce

Just ordered up this bumper sticker...

2010-03-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

...from makestickers.com (the design, which I just created based on an idea I ran across on some blog earlier today, is #100322200401).

Fisking SOTU

2010-02-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

Madam Speaker, Vice President Biden, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Our Constitution declares that from time to time, the president shall give to Congress information about the state of our union. For 220 years, our leaders have fulfilled this duty. They've done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility. And they've done so in the midst of war and depression, at moments of great strife and great struggle.

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable — that America was always destined to succeed. Really? I don't remember ever hearing anybody say that. Well, let's put this down to "standard-grade pompous and meaningless puffery that everybody expects at the beginning of a Big Solemn Speech anyway." But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run, and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the market crashed on Black Tuesday, and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain. These were the times that tested the courage of our convictions and the strength of our union. And despite all our divisions and disagreements, our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people.

Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history's call. Hmm, decent rhetoric, I guess, but that's the sort of phrase that immediately should set off alarm bells when uttered by a politician -- "answer history's call" is almost always a way to say "see to it that everybody in the country does what I want them to do" when it's a politician saying it, politicians being in general highly prone to confusing their own desires and agenda with the Voice of History. Good rhetoric, though, insofar as his target audience is his base; progressivists (as you can tell from the very word they choose for self-identification) are far more susceptible than most people to the folly of thinking that they have figured out Where History Is Going Next. And since only the very skeptical (such as myself) are on the lookout for giveaway phrases such as this one, this line should make the base happy without upsetting most independents.

One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse and a government deeply in debt. Experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act, we might face a second depression. So we acted — immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.

Well, he doesn't explicitly mention Bush. On the other hand, since Barack has spent the last year trying to say, "My problems aren't my fault, I inherited them," there's little doubt that most of the audience will take this to be Barack's intended implication. So let's take this point by point:

"...amid two wars..." Well, if it had been up to Barack, who declaimed his furious certainty that the Surge would never work, we wouldn't have still been in the Iraq War, that much is true. Because, um, we would have already given up and come home in defeat, leaving Islamofascists everywhere convinced that you can always beat America if you just hang in there, and leaving the conventional wisdom that "democracy can't work in the Middle East" intact. So, all in all, I think I'd prefer being in the Iraq War and in the last stages of winning it, to being out of Iraq War because we decided we preferred defeat.

"...an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse..." Both of which, as it happens, have a great deal more to do with the Democratic Congress's constant interference in the "affordable" housing market, and with the refusal of the Democratic Congress (including Senator Obama) to cooperate with President Bush in reigning in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, than they have to do with anything President Bush did. Of course, I would criticize the Bush bailouts and stimulus plans...but Obama wouldn't, because he went way more over-the-top in the bailout-and-stimulus world than Bush did. How's that working out, by the way?

"...and a government deeply in debt..." ??????? Obama can actually say that with a straight face???? For God's sake, isn't there anybody on his speechwriting team that can tell him, "Uh, Barack, we should probably try very hard not to remind anybody of how much debt you've added to the backs of future generations"??? I mean, he’s just begging for somebody to post a deficit chart like, say, this one:

And about that bit about how "the worst of the storm has passed"...um, got any evidence for that one?

But the devastation remains. One in 10 Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. So there's at least one silver lining: the housing bubble has burst and housing prices are returning to their true values. So at least some good has come out of this, at least as long as the federal government has learned its lesson and isn't planning to reinflate the bubble and recreate the whole disaster all over again bigger and better. Oh, wait... Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. And for those who'd already known poverty, life has become that much harder.

This recession has also compounded the burdens that America's families have been dealing with for decades — the burden of working harder and longer for less, of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.

So, let's see: throwing a big wad of money at a Democratic wish list of special-interest spending, while simultaneously threatening to raise taxes and impose massive new costs and regulatory burdens on private businesses across the board, and also introducing the tremendous uncertainty on the part of business owners about what consequences will actually follow from the reworking by government fiat of a sixth of the nation's economy, said government fiat having been designed by the trustworthy members of the United States Congress all of whom openly admit to having no intention of actually reading the bill...that didn't cause private business across the land to decide it was time to invest capital and ramp up payrolls? Wow. Shocker. But, hey, since we've had a year to see how well that works...you think maybe it might be time to try something different?

Then, too, there’s the fact that if you create massive deficits from which the only escape is hyperinflation, that doesn’t exactly make it easier to save enough to retire or help kids with college or even, you know, pay for that $250 pack of gum next to the register…

But, hey, on the bright side, we're seven paragraphs in and he's only said "I" once. Can he keep it up?

So I know the anxieties that are out there right now. They're not new. These struggles are the reason I ran for president. These struggles are what I've witnessed for years in places like Elkhart, Ind., Galesburg, Ill. I hear about them in the letters that I read each night. The toughest to read are those written by children — asking why they have to move from their home, asking when their mom or dad will be able to go back to work.

Ummmm...nope.

For these Americans and so many others, change has not come fast enough. An invocation of the old reliable "change..." except that I'm not sure that's a good idea, as the base is furious with Obama precisely because they think he's reneged on most of the "change" they understood him to have promised. Besides, since most Americans have disapproved of the changes Obama has tried to bring, I'm not sure most Americans would agree with him that he’s taking too long to make these changes they don’t want. Now, I understand that he would say that that's not the "change" he's talking about, and that he just means "recovery;" but Obama mantracized the words "hope" and "change" and they are no longer available for his personal use in any situation in which he doesn't want to remind people of Obama The Campaigner. And at this point in his administration I don't think that's a great idea. Some are frustrated; some are angry. Especially the Tea Partiers, who somehow find it frustrating that the President and Congress refuse to listen to the extremely plain message being sent to them by the American people, and who are angry about the grotesque irresponsibity displayed by any administration that proposes budget deficits of a trillion dollars a year for as far out as the administrations projections reach. Oh, wait, that's not the "some" you're talking about? I guess you're talking about the "some" who voted Scott Brown into office because they were so happy with the job you're doing. They don't understand why it seems like bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded, but hard work on Main Street isn't; or why Washington has been unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems. Actually, we don't have much difficulty figuring out why bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded...speaking of which, Mr. President, since you threw such a hissy fit demanding that AIG executives return their bonuses, I assume you've returned the money AIG gave you as well? We also don't have any trouble understanding why taxpayer money was used to hand over GM to your buddies at the UAW, even those of us who don't know the exact breakdown of UAW dollars donated to political candidates ($7,189,729 to Democrats, $30,500 to Republicans in 2006, for example). As for Washington's failure to solve our problems...well, a whole bunch of us would be thrilled if you fools would just stop causing them. Do us a favor -- stop helping. They're tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness. They know we can't afford it. Not now. So I apologize for the way everybody who has disagreed with me for the past year has been accused of racism and/or unAmericanism; I regret the fact that millions of honest and intelligent and virtuous Americans have been ceaselessly insulted with the profane and belittling sex-slur title of "teabagger"; I apologize for the fact that I didn't bother to meet with Republican Congressmen about the health care bill until after it was already introduced into the House; I apologize for the fact that no Republican ideas were included in the health care legislation; I deeply regret that members of my party have publicly said things like, 'We won the election. We wrote the bill.' And I apologize most of all for my attempt to end-run Senate rules and the Republican Party by bribing organized labor to support the reconciliation process in order to secure passage of a bill that I know perfectly well two-thirds of America doesn't want to see passed, rather than sitting down with Republicans and find a middle ground that addresses at least some of the concerns of all those Americans who find themselves somewhere to the right of the Daily Kos. Clearly the people of America do not agree with my health care agenda. I have been wrong to pursue it so uncompromisingly -- wrong in my methods, to be sure, but far more seriously wrong in my unwillingness to hear the voices of those who do not share my vision, in my unwillingness to meet them somewhere in the middle ground between my vision and their concerns. Oh, sorry, apparently that last bit wasn't actually in the speech. Too bad. His approval ratings would have jumped twenty points just for that bit all by itself.

So we face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope — what they deserve — is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences, to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. That would certainly be nice. Since we’re talking about Barack, Harry and Nancy, I’ll believe it when I see it. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds, different stories, different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared: a job that pays the bills, a chance to get ahead, most of all, the ability to give their children a better life.

Now that last bit is bullshit. It is true that there are some anxieties that are shared on both sides of the political divide, though not on both sides of the economic divide. And it is true that there are some aspirations that are common to both ends of the political spectrum. But there are very great differences between the anxieties and aspirations of the President's base and those of the Tea Partiers; and even where the anxieties and aspirations are the same, we have very different opinions about what government politices are most likely to confirm our fears or to open the doors of opportunity.

The President's base aspires to the creation of a world in which all sorts of services and goods are considered "rights," even though those services and goods have to be provided by the labor and sacrifice of other people, and even though the establishment of these "rights" can only mean an enormous increase both in the cost of government and in its freedom to interfere more or less constantly in the life of any America who declines to go along, of his own free will, with the progressive vision. The Tea Partiers' overmastering anxiety, at the moment, is precisely that the President and his base will achieve their aspiration. The President’s base is deathly afraid that if health care doesn’t pass now, they’ll never be able to nationalize it; the Tea Partiers are deathly afraid that once the President and his henchmen manage to get the government’s foot in the health care door, the liberty thus lost will never be regained. The conservative part of the country is afraid that innocent Americans will be attacked and killed by Islamic terrorists; the far Left is afraid that the government might someday admit publicly that there’s, you know, a sort of correlation between Willingness To Commit Terror on the one hand, and Being Named Mohammed on the other. Speaking personally, if President Obama’s base were ever to achieve its political aspirations, the America I love will have pretty much ceased to exist. That’s my own anxiety. I can guarantee that President Obama’s union buddies don’t share it.

In short, the truth is not, “The anxieties they face are the same; the aspirations they hold are shared.” It is that, “Some of the anxieties they face are the same; some of the aspirations they hold are shared; but when it comes to the federal government…well, the things that the people who elected Nancy Pelosi sent her to make happen, are pretty much exactly the things that the people who elected John Cornyn sent him to stop.”

You know what else they share? They share a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity. After one of the most difficult years in our history, -- hey, wait a minute. I don’t think President Way-Smarter-Than-You really knows all that much about our history. The Civil War – that was a tough few years. The War of 1812, and the Revolutionary War…not that easy. 1939, when after two terms of FDR’s saving the day unemployment was still twice as high as it is now…pretty tough. World War I probably qualifies as “difficult,” and World War II was no walk in the park. I don’t think 1968 worked out all that well, and I’m old enough (even if Barack, apparently, isn’t) to remember how much life sucked under Jimmy Carter (you know a President is incompetent if economists have to invent a whole new word, in his case “stagflation,” to describe a whole new way he’s invented for an economy to be in the crapper). And you are or were black, then 2009 has been better than every year from 1607 up through the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Well, maybe by “one of the” he means “in the 90th percentile or so, or the 80th for sure, for white people, that is.” So I guess we’ll let him by with this one -- they remain busy building cars and teaching kids, starting businesses and going back to school. They're coaching Little League and helping their neighbors. One woman wrote to me and said, "We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged."

It's because of this spirit — this great decency and great strength — that I have never been more hopeful about America's future than I am tonight. Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit. In this new decade, it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency, that embodies their strength.

I was fine with that, right up until we got to the part about the government that “embodies their strength.” Here is the fundamental divide between progressives, whose political vision is a government that is too strong for individuals to resist, and libertarians, whose political vision is a government that is kept weak enough that individuals can stand up and tell it where to get off. I don’t want a strong government. I want a strong military, but I don’t want a strong government. The dominant preoccupation of the Founding Fathers was simply, “How can we get a government that is strong enough to defend us, without getting a government that is strong enough to dominate us?” What are the dominant concerns of the Tea Partiers? First, that Obama is spending us into bankruptcy at about Mach 1000; and second, that the government has gotten far too strong. I don’t think Obama is ignoring the latter concern – I think that Barack has spent his entire life in such a far-Left liberal cocoon that he can’t even conceptualize that concern.

And tonight, tonight I'd like to talk about how together we can deliver on that promise.

It begins with our economy.

Our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis. It was not easy to do. And if there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, and everybody in between, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal. “The same banks that helped cause this crisis…” You mean the banks that gave more money to you than to any candidate other than Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (soon to be retired)? You mean Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, who were acting at the direct behest of you and Barney Frank and your friends in the Black Congressional Caucus, and whom you and your friends protected from Dubya’s attempts to reign them in? Those banks?

But when I ran for president, I promised I wouldn't just do what was popular — I would do what was necessary. That is why I have called for very stringent limits on how much risk Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae can take on, and why I have called for an end to all attempts by Congress to use the power of the government to pressure banks, in the name of “affordable housing,” to lend to high-risk borrowers at inadequate levels of collateral and interest. Oops, sorry, that part’s not in there. Probably because in point of fact Obama has arranged for a compliant Congress to remove all lending limits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and has run around complaining not that banks are lending money unwisely, but instead that they are being too conservative in their lending. And if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today. More businesses would certainly have closed. More homes would have surely been lost. Which would certainly have been painful and unpopular, but would also have had the effect of purging out of the system most of the malinvestment generated by Ben Bernanke’s soft-money policies (that actually was something that was Bush’s fault – but then Obama went and nominated Bernanke for a second term his own self and therefore can’t convincingly bash Dubya over it) and by the affordable-housing policies of the Democratic Congress. Okay, so we didn’t want to go cold turkey; I can understand that. So what have you done to get rid of those perverse incentives and clear the malinvestment? [sound of crickets]

By the way, Gentle Reader, if you haven’t read the SIGTARP’s Quarterly Report to Congress, January 30, 2010 -- that is, the report to Congress from the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program – then I would advise you to do so. Here, for example, we have a passage from page 8:

It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.
To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.

To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.

To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses — and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions — the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.

To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices — as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report — risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

Any comment, there, Barry me boy? [Damn, those crickets are annoying!]

So I supported the last administration's efforts to create the financial rescue program. Hey – that comes pretty close to praising Dubya! Time for some very sincere, not-at-all-tongue-in-cheek praise: well done, Mr. President! Well done indeed! I mean, I think the last administration’s efforts to create the financial rescue program were very dubious, but I’m delighted to hear you give Bush some credit. Well done, I say again. And when we took that program over, we made it more transparent and more accountable. And as a result, the markets are now stabilized, and we've recovered most of the money we spent on the banks~~, which we and Congress all agree should be used for no purpose other than to reduce the deficit, as called for by the original TARP legislation~~. Or, rather, we’ve decided to take that money and use it to help pay for some of these trillion-dollar budget-busting big-government programs we keep trying to enact. As for recovering the money…what was it SIGTARP was saying a moment ago? “The race appears to be on for TARP
recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions” – that was it. Most but not all.

To recover the rest, I've proposed a fee on the biggest banks. Now, I know Wall Street isn't keen on this idea. But if these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need. And besides, that fee will only be levied against the banks who got themselves into trouble and had to be rescued by the taxpayers. After all, there were many banks that managed their business well and wisely and conservatively, and who had nothing to do with this crisis – certainly less to do with it then, say, Christ Dodd or Barney Frank did. And it wouldn’t be even remotely fair to punish those banks for the misdeeds of their competitors. Furthermore, it would be foolish in the extreme, as this would simply send the message that the American people do not care to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible businessmen – making it less likely that businessmen in the future would take the trouble to behave responsibly. Besides, the banks that didn’t need to be bailed out are the banks we have to depend on for the lending that will get us out of this depression, and we’d be idiots to stifle that lending by confiscating chunks of the bank’s capital with our fees. Oops, sorry, Barry’s gonna tax the hell out of the good banks the same as the bad; he’s just trusting to his audience to say, with caveman-level intelligence, “Banks Bad, Bank Taxes Good.” I think he is severely underestimating the savvy of the American people – as he has, throughout his first year in office, been prone to do.

Now, as we stabilized the financial system, we also took steps to get our economy growing again, save as many jobs as possible and help Americans who had become unemployed. For example, we ramped up deficits to levels never before imagined in the history of the Republic, thereby greatly increasing investors’ confidence in the future of the economy and thus stimulating a flood of new private investment…oh, wait…

That's why we extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 18 million Americans, made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families who get their coverage through COBRA and passed 25 different tax cuts.

Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.

I thought I'd get some applause on that one. Um, well, you probably would have if it hadn’t been for the fact that any attempt whatsoever to present yourself as a person who, in the general sense, has cut taxes, is ludicrous on its face. The most you can say is that you have cut some taxes, temporarily. But do you really think the American public isn’t smart enough to figure out that either you’ll have to jack taxes right back up and way higher than they’ve ever been to pay off your trillion-dollar deficits, or else that our currency will shortly be worth less than toilet paper? (And I mean worth less than toilet paper, as anybody who has ever tried to wipe his butt with a dollar bill can tell you. That’s some raspy TP, that is; for God's sake take back that green stuff and give us our Charmin.) I mean, really, Barack, how @#$!#$!@# stupid do you !@#$!@#$! well think we are???

As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas and food and other necessities, all of which helped businesses keep more workers. And we haven't raised income taxes by a single dime on a single person. Not a single dime. Thanks for that, at least. If only you could say the same thing about government spending.

Because of the steps we took, there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. Does anybody believe this? I mean, the guy is lying through his teeth. Is there a bigger joke in America right now than “jobs saved or created”? Pretty much everything the guy says about how the stimulus bill has reduced unemployment, is a bald-faced lie; so I won’t bother fisking it line by line. Two hundred thousand work in construction and clean energy, 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, first responders. And we're on track to add another one-and-a-half-million jobs to this total by the end of the year. Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t fisk it line by line, but what do almost all of the people Barry just mentioned, have in common? Yes, that’s right: either they work directly for the government, or else they work in industries heavily subsidized by the government. So what Obama is bragging about, restated in bald terms, is this: “We’ve taken a whole bunch of money that private businesses could have been using to hire people in the private sector with, and given that money to people who work for the government. And we’re on track to put another million or so people on the taxpayers’ payroll by the end of the year.” Forgive me if my applause is, shall we say, tepid.

The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act. That's right — the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus bill. Economists on the left and the right say this bill has helped save jobs and avert disaster. But you don't have to take their word for it. ~~You know I’m telling the truth, because I have Anecdotal Evidence~~ Okay, he didn’t actually say that bit out loud. Talk to the small business in Phoenix that will triple its work force because of the Recovery Act. Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created. Talk to the single teacher raising two kids who was told by her principal in the last week of school that because of the Recovery Act, she wouldn't be laid off after all. And while you’re talking to them, find out how many Recovery Act dollars we spent to save those jobs, and work out the average hit the taxpayer took for each job, and ask yourself this question: was it worth it? Because you’re certainly not going to hear Barack ask that question.

Oh, by the way, Barack: how about the jobs that weren’t created because of small business’s fears about your cap-and-trade and health-care bills? Did you back those out of that “two million” number before you pulled said number out of your ass? Just askin’.

There are stories like this all across America. And after two years of recession, the economy is growing again. Retirement funds have started to gain back some of their value. Businesses are beginning to invest again, and slowly some are starting to hire again.

Look, before we go any further with this, let’s just take a quick look at Innocent Bystanders’ invaluable chart:

Is there really anybody reading this who thinks a single person on Obama’s economic team knows what the hell they’re talking about?

But I realize that for every success story, there are other stories, of men and women who wake up with the anguish of not knowing where their next paycheck will come from, who send out resumes week after week and hear nothing in response. That is why jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010, and that's why I'm calling for a new jobs bill tonight. Let me guess: it’s going to involve spending more of the taxpayers’ money, not taking less of it (though it might involve taking less today by waiting and taking tons more sometime down the road).

Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses. But government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers. Hey, that’s a great point. You can provide a stable environment in which businesses know what’s coming; you can make it clear that the government is not going to impose massive new costs on them; you can cut capital gains taxes across the board; and you could refrain from slapping populist taxes on the banks that the businesses need to borrow money from…those would all be helpful things to do. Let’s see what you suggest.

We should start where most new jobs do — in small businesses, companies that begin when — companies that begin when an entrepreneur — when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, or a worker decides it's time she became her own boss. Through sheer grit and determination, these companies have weathered the recession, and they're ready to grow. But when you talk to small business owners in places like Allentown, Pa., or Elyria, Ohio, you find out that even though banks on Wall Street are lending again, they're mostly lending to bigger companies. Financing remains difficult for small business owners across the country, even those that are making a profit.

So tonight, I'm proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat. As opposed to doing what the TARP legislation requires you to do with it, which is apply it to the deficit. I'm also proposing a new small business tax credit — one that will go to over 1 million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages. And why not to large businesses as well? Is there any conceivable reason to restrict this to small businesses other than that (a) you're trying to buy off one of the special-interest groups you have trouble with and/or (b) your base hates Big Business rather more than they hate Islamofascist terrorists? While we're at it, let's also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment, and provide a tax incentive for all large businesses and all small businesses to invest in new plants and equipment. While we’re at it, why not just cut capital gains taxes across the board without trying to have politicians decide which form of capital investment will provide the most value for the future?

Next, we can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow. Sounds like progressive code words to me…whatcha wanna bet what comes next is “put more people on the government payroll”? From the first railroads to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been built to compete. There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products.

Tomorrow, I'll visit Tampa, Fla., where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act. Government project, paid for either by taking money that the private sector could have used on non-patronage jobs, or else by inflating the deficit. And, um, what’s the worker-to-taxpayer-dollar ratio on that one? There are projects like that all across this country that will create jobs and help move our nation's goods, services and information.

We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities (that is to say, jobs in industries that don’t provide enough value to survive unless propped up at taxpayer expense) — and give rebates to Americans who make their homes more energy-efficient, which supports clean energy jobs. And to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas, and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America. In the process dramatically raising the cost of goods for everybody who shops at Wal-Mart, most of whom are in the demographic that can least afford it. If goods are being made overseas, there’s a reason, that reason usually being, “Because we can get it to the American consumer cheaper that way.”

Now, the House has passed a jobs bill that includes some of these steps. As the first order of business this year, I urge the Senate to do the same, and I know they will. They will. And when Barack says he knows Congress is going to do something, you can take it to the bank (the fun thing about that video, by the way, is that it was produced by members of Obama's own base). People are out of work. They're hurting. They need our help. And I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay.

But the truth is, these steps won't make up for the seven million jobs that we've lost over the last two years. The only way to move to full employment is to lay a new foundation for long-term economic growth, and finally address the problems that America's families have confronted for years. So, running trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future; adding more debt to the U.S. taxpayer’s back in one year than in the previous 200-plus years all put together and doing this during peacetime…you’re doing this for the sake of long-term economic growth???? My God.

We can't afford another so-called economic "expansion" like the one from the last decade — what some call the "lost decade" — where jobs grew more slowly than during any prior expansion, where the income of the average American household declined while the cost of health care and tuition reached record highs, where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation. Instead, we want to take as our model FDR and the 1930’s, in which jobs grew…wait a minute, what was unemployment in 1939 again? But hey, at least Barack and his Democratic pals are taking care not to reinflate the housing bubble...oh, wait...

By the way, Barack, since you've seen fit to bring up the topic of "things we can't afford" -- I'd say we can't afford a spending binge in which for a decade we spend over a trillion more dollars every year than we take in. Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure I remember learning from my parents back in my allowance days, that the simplest rule for determining, "I can't afford it," is simply, "I don't have the money."

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious, such an effort would be too contentious. I've been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

Here’s a constant feature of Obama’s rhetoric: “Some would say.” “I’ve been told.” Really? Who are these “some”? By whom were you told? Were these men you were talking to…were they perhaps made of straw?

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold? How about, “Until we have a Congress that will actually read its own goddamn bills before voting on them, and until we have a President who has passed third grade math and therefore has realized that a trillion is a really really really really really big number?” How about, “Until our politicians propose something that will actually improve our future prospects rather than bankrupting us and destroying our currency?” How about, “Until we get a President and Congress who know what the hell they’re doing?” I’m good with that answer. Rule #1, Mr. President: first, do no harm.

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Um, actually, right now, the American people are telling you, Mr. President, to wait – because you’re about to make our problems immeasurably worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations — they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.

As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may become, it's time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth. The problem, Barry buddy, isn’t that you aren’t serious about fixing the problem. The problem is that your proposed solutions are vastly worse than the original problem. How about instead of getting serious, you try getting smart? That would be a nice change.

Now, one place to start is serious financial reform. Look, I am not interested in punishing banks. Even though you just pitched a bank tax by reminding everybody that the banks in question are “the same banks that helped cause this crisis” – even the banks that, strictly speaking, didn’t have a damn thing to do with causing this crisis. But you're not interested in punishing them, oh heavens no…So the point in that “helped cause this crisis” line was what, then? Just stirring up a little populist resentment against rich people, for your own political benefit, maybe? If the point wasn’t “let’s give ‘em some pain because they deserve it for behaving badly,” then what exactly was the point? And that is, after all, precisely what “punishing the banks” consists of. I'm interested in protecting our economy. A strong, healthy financial market makes it possible for businesses to access credit and create new jobs. It channels the savings of families into investments that raise incomes. But that can only happen if we guard against the same recklessness that nearly brought down our entire economy. ~~And that’s why I’m calling on Congress to stop pressuring banks to “make housing affordable…oh, wait, strike this bit.~~

We need to make sure consumers and middle-class families have the information they need to make financial decisions. We can't allow financial institutions, including those that take your deposits, to take risks that threaten the whole economy.

Now, the House has already passed financial reform with many of these changes. And the lobbyists are trying to kill it. But we cannot let them win this fight. And if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform, I will send it back until we get it right. We've got to get it right.

Just one question: how in heaven’s name would Barack Obama know what “getting it right” looks like? Why, at this point, should we have any confidence at all in the man’s grasp of economic cause and effect?

Next, we need to encourage American innovation. Um, no, you just need to get out of the way and stop allowing the engines of government to inhibit it. Tort reform would be a good place to start, and letting companies keep a bigger share of their profits would be even better. Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history — an investment that could lead to the world's cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched. I love the way Democrats refer to “taking your own personal money from you at virtual gunpoint and giving it to some other person wholly unconnected to you, without ever ever promising that we’ll ever repay a penny of it to your own personal self” as “investment.” You keep using that word; I do not think it means… Actually, this is an absolutely lovely example of what I mean when I say that the fallacy of hypostasization is rife in politics. If A loans his money to B with the expectation that B will return it later with interest, then A has invested his money. If, on the other hand, C forces A to hand over his money, which C then gives to B as a grant with no obligation to repay it, then this is not an “investment” – it’s theft. Democrats attempt to hide from themselves the reality of what they’re doing by hypostasization: “We [that is, C] are investing our [that is, A’s] money in the expectation that we [that is, B] will get a nice return on our investment.” What could be wrong with our investing our own money in hopes of seeing a nice return on the investment? Why, nothing – if that were what we were actually doing. But it isn’t. And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year's investments in clean energy — in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries, or in the California business that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels. And I ask again: how many jobs were lost in the part of the economy that was taxed so that that North Carolina company and California business could get their subsidies? How much did we the taxpayer pay for those 2,200 jobs? What could we the private sector have done with that money besides make advanced batteries or solar cells with it? These are questions that Barack Obama will never ever answer, not in a million years.

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. Two out of three I can agree with; which ain’t bad. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. Hey, he got that one right. Amen! I’m with you on this one, Mr. President. Only…what you mean is, it means removing the regulatory barriers and courtroom stalling tactics that have kept private companies from building these plants, right? You don’t mean that the taxpayers should pony up to pay the executive bonuses for whichever electric company donates the most money to the Democratic Party…right? Let’s hope not, and give you credit for getting something right. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. That’s two good points in a row. Again, kudos, Mr. President, I agree with you wholeheartedly. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. Uh-oh, that sounds like we’re back to taxpayer-funded “investment”… And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America. Oh, !#$!#, here comes cap-and-trade. Listen, jackass, the only way cap-and-trade will make clean energy “profitable” is relatively speaking – you won’t make clean energy more profitable, you’ll just make old fashioned fossil-fuel energy WAY less profitable. In other words, you’re going to jack energy prices sky-high for American consumers across the board, at a devastating cost to the economy (including massive job losses), and then point at the relatively tiny number of jobs created in your pet energy bill and say, “Look, we created jobs!” Do you really think Americans are too stupid to see through that? (The frightening thing is, I fear you might be right.)

I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year. And this year I'm eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate.

I know there have been questions about whether we can afford such changes in a tough economy. I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. [laughing delightedly] AGW was an obvious scam even before the Climategate stuff broke, and even before the IPCC admitted that the Himalayan glaciers weren’t going anywhere, etc., etc.; but Barack still doesn’t know that we’re on the down side of the tulip mania, and he’s still buyin’. But here's the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.

I love that bit. It always, at least in my experience, comes down to this with progressives and climate change. They pull out their argumentum ad auctoritatem and say, “But ALL the scientists AGREE…” Then you start asking them tough questions and they start realizing that you actually know a helluva lot more about the topic than they do, and then you know it’s coming: “Well, it doesn’t really matter whether climate change is happening or not, because even if it isn’t we ought to go green anyway, because…” followed by the same tired old reasons that don’t convince anybody but progressives because those reasons depend entirely on progressive illusions about how the world works, which illusions the rest of us do not share. And progressives don’t see anything wrong with saying, “Well, it doesn’t matter if climate change is a horseshit scam because we ought to be doing all this anyway; so it does no harm for me to appeal to climate change as a reason for us to make these changes even if climate change is a great big ol’ fraud. So there’s no reason for me to do my homework on whether it’s a fraud or not.”

The validity of that logic is readily tested: take exactly the same logic, but apply it to a different topic. Imagine Dubya saying, in 1991, “Well, it doesn’t matter if the WMD intelligence is a horseshit scam because we have a bunch of other perfectly good reasons to take out Saddam anyway [as we did]; so it does no harm for me to appeal to WMD’s as a reason for us to invade even if the WMD intelligence is a great big ol’ fraud. So there’s no reason for me to do my homework on whether it’s a fraud or not.” What do you guys think, Gentle Readers? Would the sort of progressive who thinks that argument is a great argument when he’s using it to defend “climate change,” consider it to be a valid justification for Dubya’s WMD claims?

By the way, Barack, that bit about how “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy” – what, exactly, is that claim based on? Did you get that from the same people who gave you your chart of “unemployment with the stimulus” versus “unemployment without the stimulus”? ‘Cause, you know, your people don’t seem very good at projecting the future three months ahead…why exactly should we trust them to know what the next ten to fifteen years are going to look like?

Third, we need to export more of our goods. Because the more products we make and sell to other countries, the more jobs we support right here in America. Um, the economic fallacies in this argument got refuted, what, fifty years ago? [sigh] So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs in America. To help meet this goal, we're launching a national export initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports, and reform export controls consistent with national security. Actually, if what you want is to increase exports, by far the most effective way to do it is to devalue your currency. Come to think of it, that appears to be exactly Barack’s plan…

We have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are. If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules. And that's why we'll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and Panama and Colombia. If the President is really going to enter into true free trade agreements, I’m all in favor of it. The devil’s in the details, of course…what exactly are those trade agreements going to say? They’d better not be treaties that try to slip in “and America will henceforth be bound to international law even where it is not compatible with the Constitution,” for one thing.

Fourth, we need to invest in the skills and education of our people. Which is why I intend to break the stranglehold that the National Education Association has on our educational system, undo the regulatory burden that diverts millions of dollars away from teachers and into bureaucrats and administrators, and radically decentralize the whole thing by returning power at the very least to the states, and ideally all the way down to the level of families and parents. Power to the People! is what I say. [sigh] The last thing we need is more federal government “investment” in education. If you really want our kids to have a world-class education, then kick the government out of the education business. Not, of course, that Obama would ever consider such a radical idea as, “The government is the problem, not the solution.”

Now, this year, we've broken through the stalemate between left and right by launching a national competition to improve our schools. And the idea here is simple: Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform — reform that raises student achievement, inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans, from rural communities to the inner city. In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education. And in this country, the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than on their potential. Barack, you need to make up your mind. If you want a nation with world-class-educated kids, then you’re going to have to accept a lot of variation in the quality of the education the kids get, one variable of which will be where they live. The only way to make sure everybody has the same education, is to make sure everybody is equally mediocre. And as far as “the best anti-poverty program around”…okay, we’ll take that as hyperbole not meant to be taken literally.

When we renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we will work with Congress to expand these reforms to all 50 states. As if that were a good thing. Still, in this economy, a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job. Actually, Barack, in your economy not even a Ph.D. guarantees a good job. That's why I urge the Senate to follow the House and pass a bill that will revitalize our community colleges, which are a career pathway to the children of so many working families.

To make college more affordable, this bill will finally end the unwarranted taxpayer subsidies that go to banks for student loans. Instead, let's take that money and give families a $10,000 tax credit for four years of college and increase Pell Grants. And let's tell another 1 million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years — and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. Why the hell not? Decisions have consequences. If you set up your educational choices in such a way that your choice to go to college results in your bankruptcy, why should the taxpayer have to bear the consequences of your folly rather than you? This is an absolutely terrible idea.

And what is up with this attempt to bribe people to go work in the government? This is a lovely indicator of how divorced from reality Barack is. Our problem isn’t that not enough people work in the government – it’s that way too many do. A person who works in the government is a person who (a) is protected from being fired for incompetence to an absolutely shameless degree unheard of in the private sector, and who (b) gets paid no matter how terrible the service he provides to the “customer,” i.e., the taxpayer, because his salary is taken from the customer by force. I disagree with the morality of what a prostitute does, but at least she provides an honest service to customers who choose to patronize her of their own free will, and if she gets repeat customers then it’s because she provided satisfactory service, not because they knew they’d go to jail if she didn’t get her government-decreed cut of their paycheck that month. I don’t have a problem with soldiers and policemen and firemen; they provide a necessary and dangerous service and risk their lives for the rest of us. Then there are a lot of jobs that are currently done by people in government where there’s no good reason for them not to be done by the private sector – teaching is a great example – but the fact that they are done by government employees makes it grotesquely difficult to get rid of even the most outrageously incompetent teachers, as New York knows only too well. And then there are the jobs that only exist because the bureaucracy never shrinks, only grows – and here we find people who are, to put it bluntly, parasites on the American people. We need to drive people out of government jobs, not recruit them into it. At least when a prostitute screws you, it’s at your own request, and you can stop getting screwed whenever you want.

And by the way, it's time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs — because they, too, have a responsibility to help solve this problem.

This whole issue of college costs is a lovely example of a big-government-caused problem for which the progressive answer is…bigger government, in order to solve the problem. Years ago the federal government decided that college cost too much. Now, if something (say, health care) costs too much, then either too many people want it, or not enough people are providing it, or both at once. Any government solution that either increases demand or else reduces supply, makes the problem worse rather than better, because both result in an explosion in price. Any real solution will either reduce demand faster than it reduces supply, or increase supply faster than it increases demand, or (ideally) reduce demand while increasing supply. So, let’s see, giving people tax credits for college tuition? That would, um, increase demand – problem worse. More Pell Grants? Increases demand – problem worse. Telling potential college students that we’ll pay back their loans if they can’t? Increases demand – problem worse. Notice a theme here? Everything thing the government has done to “solve” the higher education problem, actually is guaranteed by the law of supply and demand to make the problem worse. Which is why only a politician or somebody equally ignorant of the most basic economic laws could possibly be surprised by the following chart:

In the meantime, when you flood the market with something, you devalue it. Note that earlier in the speech, the President said, “In this economy, a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job.” That wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the federal government has for a couple of generations deliberately distorted the marketplace to artificially heighten the number of college diplomas out there competing against high school diplomas, now, would it? Surely not.

Now, the price of college tuition is just one of the burdens facing the middle class. That's why last year I asked Vice President Biden to chair a task force on middle-class families. That's why we're nearly doubling the child-care tax credit, and making it easier to save for retirement by giving access to every worker a retirement account and expanding the tax credit for those who start a nest egg. That's why we're working to lift the value of a family's single largest investment — their home. The steps we took last year to shore up the housing market have allowed millions of Americans to take out new loans and save an average of $1,500 on mortgage payments. Which is not at all the same thing as re-inflating the housing bubble that caused the 2008 crash, oh, not, not the same thing at all.

This year, we will step up refinancing so that homeowners can move into more affordable mortgages. While we’re at it, why don’t we provide them with additional taxpayer funds with which to play the tulip market? And it is precisely to relieve the burden on middle-class families that we still need health insurance reform. Yes, we do.

Before we go any further, let us remember the law of supply and demand, which we just applied to the cost of college. If middle-class families are suffering because health care costs too much, then we need to make sure that everything we do to “solve” the problem will either reduce demand faster than it reduces supply, or increase supply faster than it increases demand, or (ideally) reduce demand while increasing supply.

For example, malpractice tort reform, as proposed by the Republicans, would have an immediate and obvious effect of increasing supply; I think the market entry costs for doctors is a couple of hundred grand just for malpractice insurance premiums, which premiums are collected from those suffering middle-class families. Of course, trial lawyers don’t want their gravy train to end, and they donate a ton of money to the Democratic Party. So what do you think the chances are that Obama will support tort reform?

Again, in most states supply of health insurance is artificially restricted because you can’t buy health insurance from out-of-state companies, and the state health insurance regulatory agencies get lots of lobbying dollars spent on them by the entrenched companies that don’t want to have to deal with competition. So you could give middle-class Americans a big boost by just passing federal legislation to bar states from interfering with interstate commerce in health insurance. (Imagine that: using the Commerce Clause for something that actually has to do with interstate commerce. Now that would be real Change.) That’s a perfectly good Republican idea that the Democrats could easily incorporate, if they were actually serious about all this working-together-for-the-good-of-the-country, non-partisan rhetoric they spout right up until somebody else dares to disagree with them.

Again, supply is artificially restricted because the government imposes tax penalties on individuals who buy their own health care, or on people who try to form health care co-ops independently of employment. That’s easy to fix…but oddly, Barack doesn’t want that fix.

Go through everything Barack suggests in order to “solve” health care, and what you see is a federal government that is about to flood the health care system with massive amounts of new demand, while at the same time greatly increasing the burden on health care providers, many of whom will simply pack up and find something else to do (the way many hospitals are already walking away from the Medicare game). In other words, Barack’s health care solution greatly increases demand while significantly reducing supply…which, in his Leftist little mind, is somehow supposed to help the middle class by making health care cheaper.

Now, let's clear a few things up. Well, that’s not quite “let me be clear.” I’d say you can maybe lick the salt, but I’d say he deserves enough credit for avoiding his cliché that doing the full shot isn’t justified. I didn't choose to tackle this issue to get some legislative victory under my belt. And by now it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics. [laughing uproariously] Well, it’s obvious that it wasn’t good politics. Do you really expect us to think, however, that you didn’t take on health care under the illusion that it was good politics? Conventional Washington wisdom is that you and Harry and Nancy all “learned your lessons” from 1994, except that instead of learning the lesson that “Americans aren’t socialists, and they expect Presidents who campaign as moderates to introduce moderate policies, and therefore we will not repeat Clinton’s catastrophic mistake of trying to push through nationalization of health care,” you apparently came to the jaw-dropping conclusion that Clinton’s mistake was not getting it passed, and therefore that it was politically necessary to get the thing passed by any means possible. Even you, with that remarkably dense cranium of yours, appear now finally to be realizing, “Actually, this turns out to have been a bad idea politically rather than a good one,” (though Nancy still apparently has her Cloud-Cuckoo-Land green card well up to date). But to try to say now, “Oh, I knew all along it wasn’t a good idea politically to try to pass health care, but it had to be done…” Jeez, you really do think we’re a gullible bunch, doncha? I took on health care because of the stories I've heard from Americans with pre-existing conditions whose lives depend on getting coverage, patients who've been denied coverage, families — even those with insurance — who are just one illness away from financial ruin.

“Yes, folks, I, Barack Obama, have tried to impose upon the American people by any means, fair or foul, a sweeping reform of one-sixth of the American economy that makes unprecedented inroads upon Americans’ liberty, that will cost trillions more than we can afford for as far into the future as the eye can see, that by any rational application of economic law will have exactly the opposite effect of the one I claim to be attempting to produce…but, hey, you can trust that I’m doing the right thing, because I am basing my policy on good-ol’, always-infallible Anecdotal Evidence.” I bow in awe before the Blazing Brainpower of The One.

After nearly a century of trying — Democratic administrations, Republican administrations — we are closer than ever to bringing more security to the lives of so many Americans. The approach we've taken would protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry. It would give small businesses and uninsured Americans a chance to choose an affordable health care plan in a competitive market. It would require every insurance plan to cover preventive care. Econ 101, Barack. Don’t be afraid – take a course. You could learn something.

And by the way, I want to acknowledge our first lady, Michelle Obama, who this year is creating a national movement to tackle the epidemic of childhood obesity and make kids healthier. Thank you. She gets embarrassed. Hi, Michelle. I have no problem with this particular shout-out.

Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan. It would reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses. And according to the Congressional Budget Office — the independent organization that both parties have cited as the official scorekeeper for Congress — our approach would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades. Buh-buh-buh-buuuullllll-SHIT!

Still, this is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. Because it’s not that I’m wrong; it’s that the American people are really really stupid and you have to explain things with really really short words. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, "What's in it for me?" Um, no. That’s what YOU and your fellow politicians would say. The process actually left most of us saying, “These people have neither conscience nor shame.” Oh, that, and also, “So I guess all that transparency stuff Barack was spouting during the campaign – turns out that was all a lie.”

But I also know this problem is not going away. By the time I'm finished speaking tonight, more Americans will have lost their health insurance. Millions will lose it this year. Our deficit will grow. Premiums will go up. Patients will be denied the care they need. Small business owners will continue to drop coverage altogether. I will not walk away from these Americans and neither should the people in this chamber. We won’t quit until, thanks to our reforms, the deficit explodes like a nuclear bomb, and Americans whose employers had provided their health insurance lose it or else have to pay exorbitant Cadillac taxes on it, and patients stand in lines as long as the lines Canadians stand in…because, you know, making all the existing problems an order of magnitude worse is way better than Doing Nothing At All.

So, as temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we've proposed. There's a reason why many doctors, nurses and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo. But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I'm eager to see it. Well, that would be a dramatic change. Considering that the Republicans have had exactly such a plan out there for months…is the problem that you’re a slow reader, or what?

Here's what I ask Congress, though: Don't walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people. Let's get it done. Let's get it done. In spite of the fact that 70% of the people we pretend to work for, say it’s time to throw the whole thing out and either leave the whole thing alone or else start over. In case you’re having trouble with the concept, Barry, this means that you are not close – not close, that is, to anything that the American people believe in.

Now, even as health care reform would reduce our deficit, I swear he acts like he thinks we’re stupid enough to believe this… it's not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves. It's a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve, and one that's been subject to a lot of political posturing. So let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight.

I’ll finish up the fisking later on; I want to get this saved for now. So I’ll post as it is and come back later.

At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.

Now — just stating the facts. Now, if we had taken office in ordinary times, I would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficit. But we took office amid a crisis. And our efforts to prevent a second depression have added another $1 trillion to our national debt. That, too, is a fact.

I'm absolutely convinced that was the right thing to do. But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same. So tonight, I'm proposing specific steps to pay for the trillion dollars that it took to rescue the economy last year.

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will.

We will continue to go through the budget, line by line, page by page, to eliminate programs that we can't afford and don't work. We've already identified $20 billion in savings for next year. To help working families, we'll extend our middle-class tax cuts. But at a time of record deficits, we will not continue tax cuts for oil companies, for investment fund managers and for those making over $250,000 a year. We just can't afford it.

Now, even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we'll still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. More importantly, the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That's why I've called for a bipartisan fiscal commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can't be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline.

Now, yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I'll issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans. And when the vote comes tomorrow, the Senate should restore the pay-as-you-go law that was a big reason for why we had record surpluses in the 1990s.

Now, I know that some in my own party will argue that we can't address the deficit or freeze government spending when so many are still hurting. And I agree — which is why this freeze won't take effect until next year — when the economy is stronger. That's how budgeting works. But understand — understand if we don't take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing and jeopardize our recovery — all of which would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes.

From some on the right, I expect we'll hear a different argument — that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away. The problem is that's what we did for eight years. That's what helped us into this crisis. It's what helped lead to these deficits. We can't do it again.

Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time to try something new. Let's invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let's meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let's try common sense. A novel concept.

To do that, we have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now. We face a deficit of trust — deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — to end the outsized influence of lobbyists, to do our work openly, to give our people the government they deserve.

That's what I came to Washington to do. That's why — for the first time in history — my administration posts on our White House visitors online. That's why we've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs, or seats on federal boards and commissions.

But we can't stop there. It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or with Congress. It's time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office.

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

I'm also calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform. Democrats and Republicans. Democrats and Republicans. You've trimmed some of this spending, you've embraced some meaningful change. But restoring the public trust demands more. For example, some members of Congress post some earmark requests online. Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single Web site before there's a vote, so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.

Of course, none of these reforms will even happen if we don't also reform how we work with one another. Now, I'm not naive. I never thought that the mere fact of my election would usher in peace and harmony — and some post-partisan era. I knew that both parties have fed divisions that are deeply entrenched. And on some issues, there are simply philosophical differences that will always cause us to part ways. These disagreements, about the role of government in our lives, about our national priorities and our national security, they've been taking place for over 200 years. They're the very essence of our democracy.

But what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We can't wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side — a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of — I'm speaking to both parties now. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants shouldn't be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators.

Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, no matter how malicious, is just part of the game. But it's precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it's sowing further division among our citizens, further distrust in our government.

So, no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics. I know it's an election year. And after last week, it's clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern.

To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills. And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let's show the American people that we can do it together.

This week, I'll be addressing a meeting of the House Republicans. I'd like to begin monthly meetings with both Democratic and Republican leadership. I know you can't wait.

Throughout our history, no issue has united this country more than our security. Sadly, some of the unity we felt after 9/11 has dissipated. We can argue all we want about who's to blame for this, but I'm not interested in relitigating the past. I know that all of us love this country. All of us are committed to its defense. So let's put aside the schoolyard taunts about who's tough. Let's reject the false choice between protecting our people and upholding our values. Let's leave behind the fear and division, and do what it takes to defend our nation and forge a more hopeful future — for America and for the world.

That's the work we began last year. Since the day I took office, we've renewed our focus on the terrorists who threaten our nation. We've made substantial investments in our homeland security and disrupted plots that threatened to take American lives. We are filling unacceptable gaps revealed by the failed Christmas attack, with better airline security and swifter action on our intelligence. We've prohibited torture and strengthened partnerships from the Pacific to South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula. And in the last year, hundreds of al-Qaida's fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008.

And in Afghanistan, we're increasing our troops and training Afghan security forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. We will reward good governance, work to reduce corruption and support the rights of all Afghans — men and women alike. We're joined by allies and partners who have increased their own commitments, and who will come together tomorrow in London to reaffirm our common purpose. There will be difficult days ahead. But I am absolutely confident we will succeed.

As we take the fight to al-Qaida, we are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president. We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August. We will support the Iraqi government — we will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and we will continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: This war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.

Tonight, all of our men and women in uniform — in Iraq, in Afghanistan and around the world — they have to know that we — that they have our respect, our gratitude, our full support. And just as they must have the resources they need in war, we all have a responsibility to support them when they come home. That's why we made the largest increase in investments for veterans in decades — last year. That's why we're building a 21st century VA. And that's why Michelle has joined with Jill Biden to forge a national commitment to support military families.

Now, even as we prosecute two wars, we're also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people — the threat of nuclear weapons. I've embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons and seeks a world without them. To reduce our stockpiles and launchers, while ensuring our deterrent, the United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades. And at April's nuclear security summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, D.C., behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Now, these diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons. That's why North Korea now faces increased isolation and stronger sanctions — sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That's why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran's leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: They, too, will face growing consequences. That is a promise.

That's the leadership that we are providing — engagement that advances the common security and prosperity of all people. We're working through the G-20 to sustain a lasting global recovery. We're working with Muslim communities around the world to promote science and education and innovation. We have gone from a bystander to a leader in the fight against climate change. We're helping developing countries to feed themselves and continuing the fight against HIV/AIDS. And we are launching a new initiative that will give us the capacity to respond faster and more effectively to bioterrorism or an infectious disease — a plan that will counter threats at home and strengthen public health abroad.

As we have for over 60 years, America takes these actions because our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores. But we also do it because it is right. That's why, as we meet here tonight, over 10,000 Americans are working with many nations to help the people of Haiti recover and rebuild. That's why we stand with the girl who yearns to go to school in Afghanistan, why we support the human rights of the women marching through the streets of Iran, why we advocate for the young man denied a job by corruption in Guinea. For America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity. Always.

Abroad, America's greatest source of strength has always been our ideals. The same is true at home. We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we're all created equal, that no matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law you should be protected by it, if you adhere to our common values you should be treated no different than anyone else.

We must continually renew this promise. My administration has a civil rights division that is once again prosecuting civil rights violations and employment discrimination. We finally strengthened our laws to protect against crimes driven by hate. This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It's the right thing to do.

We're going to crack down on violations of equal pay laws — so that women get equal pay for an equal day's work. And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system — to secure our borders and enforce our laws and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.

In the end, it's our ideals, our values that built America — values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every corner of the globe, values that drive our citizens still. Every day, Americans meet their responsibilities to their families and their employers. Time and again, they lend a hand to their neighbors and give back to their country. They take pride in their labor and are generous in spirit. These aren't Republican values or Democratic values that they're living by, business values or labor values. They're American values.

Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions — our corporations, our media, and, yes, our government — still reflect these same values. Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper. But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people's doubts grow. Each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith. The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away.

No wonder there's so much cynicism out there. No wonder there's so much disappointment.

I campaigned on the promise of change — change we can believe in, the slogan went. And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren't sure if they still believe we can change — or that I can deliver it.

But remember this — I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I could do it alone. Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That's just how it is.

Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths and pointing fingers. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation.

But I also know this: If people had made that decision 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard, to do what was needed even when success was uncertain, to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.

Our administration has had some political setbacks this year and some of them were deserved. But I wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year. And what keeps me going — what keeps me fighting — is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism, that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people, that lives on.

It lives on in the struggling small business owner who wrote to me of his company, "None of us," he said, "... are willing to consider, even slightly, that we might fail."

It lives on in the woman who said that even though she and her neighbors have felt the pain of recession, "We are strong. We are resilient. We are American."

It lives on in the 8-year-old boy in Louisiana, who just sent me his allowance and asked if I would give it to the people of Haiti.

And it lives on in all the Americans who've dropped everything to go someplace they've never been and pull people they've never known from the rubble, prompting chants of "USA! USA! USA!" when another life was saved.

The spirit that has sustained this nation for more than two centuries lives on in you, its people. We have finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us. We don't quit. I don't quit. Let's seize this moment — to start anew, to carry the dream forward and to strengthen our union once more.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.

In advance of my reaction to the State of the Union address

2010-02-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

I missed the State of the Union address; I was out running important family errands. But a very good (and very liberal) friend wanted my opinion of it. So I'm going to go read it and then come back with my opinion. But here are some things I said about it (with some personal stuff excised) in response to my friend's question, "Would you agree that Barack is an excellent writer and communicator, even if you aren’t impressed with his style [of delivery]?" This will serve as the background to what is likely to be an unfriendly fisking in a later post -- since expectations tend to form our reactions as much as objective reality does, this will let you know where I was coming from before B.O. even opened his mouth.

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Would you agree that he is an excellent writer and communicator, even if you aren’t impressed with his style?
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You know, that’s an interesting question, and I think I’ll want to think about the answer a bit...I’ll probably think out loud, so to speak. Also I think I’ll answer BEFORE reading the SOTU speech, and then read the speech to see whether it changes my opinion... (I won’t get much into the question of how much Obama has to do with the writing of his speeches; I think he probably plays a significant role in their composition, but my reason for thinking so is, alas, precisely the bad parts that I don’t think a professional speechwriter would put in there. But at the very least he approves them before he delivers them, which is good enough to go on.)

Back during the campaign I thought the Obama speeches themselves (as distinct from his delivery) were overrated, but that’s mostly because his worshippers thought he was the second coming of Demosthenes and Cicero and Abraham Lincoln all rolled into one -- nobody could have lived up to the absurd billing he was getting. All the same there were certain aspects of them that I thought were quite skillfully done. In particular, he had to navigate the rhetorical space between the rabidly Bush-hating part of his base who wanted red rhetorical meat, and the centrist independents who inhabit the Scott Brown kind of space and highly value bipartisanship and working together. That’s a really tough line to walk and I thought his rhetorical solution was perfect, skillful, and not at all obvious to the non-professional. [The rhetorical solution in question is described at some length here.]

The fascinating thing is that as a President, after running what was widely considered a triumph of a campaign, he has been one of the most dramatic failures as an orator and communicator that we’ve ever seen – for the last six months, every time he has given a speech in defense of his policies, the response in the polls has been a drop in support for the policy he has just defended. His political enemies have been thrilled to hear “President Obama is going to give another speech” – for example, there was much rejoicing and exultation on the red-state sites when it was announced that Obama was going to fly to Boston to campaign for Martha Coakley, which exultation ran along the lines of, “Now we KNOW Brown’s gonna win.” How did that happen? How did the Man With The Golden Tongue become The Guy We Want Campaigning For Our Opponent? And if you ask the President’s own people why it is that health care failed, their explanation is that the President didn’t do a good enough job selling it to the American people – that is, they believe that his failure is a rhetorical failure rather than a policy failure; “What we have here,” the President’s own people are saying, “is a failure to communicate.” Now, I think they’re actually wrong about that; I think they are underrating the quality of his speeches now, just as I thought his campaign speeches were overrated back in the day – I think his problem is mostly with what he’s trying to sell, not with how he’s selling it. Still, it’s fascinating is that the President’s own team thinks it’s the talking part that he’s screwing up. Just a very, very odd turn of events.

I guess I see Obama as being in a very difficult position. The big rhetorical problem for Obama, I think, is that his strength has always been finding words and phrases that have lots of positive connotations but very little concrete denotation, and using those words to appeal to the audience’s generally good intentions (most of us would say, in all seriousness, that we want “the best for our country” and that we want to return our country to “the principles that made America great”) without getting stuck on the audience’s disagreements about how those good intentions should be applied concretely (the specific details of what Kenny Pierce and my ex-mother-in-law think is “the best for our country” and what are “the principles that made America great” are, I think, usually pretty deeply opposed). The Obama style of rhetoric does very well at building the appearance of consensus, which is the goal of a campaign; and thus he was an extraordinarily successful campaigner. But his task as President is actually to build a genuine consensus, by changing people’s minds about what specific policies should result from all of our good intentions, until he’s managed to convince at least 50% or so of the American people that This Particular Set Of Proposals Is A Good Idea. And so far he has turned out to be very, very bad at that – the people who agree with him continue to agree with him and don’t see anything wrong with his speeches, but he doesn’t seem to know how to change the minds of people who disagree with him, and – far more disastrously – the more he talks at the undecided, the more he convinces them to join the other side. So if you look at his general approval rating, it isn’t the average of his policies’ individual approval ratings – every single one of his actual proposed policies polls ten to twenty points lower than Obama himself polls, and after a year during which he has spent an immense amount of time speaking directly to the American People in defense of his beloved health care reform, 69% of the public says it’s time to throw the whole damn thing out and either start over or else just give up entirely. Meanwhile the more he makes clear what specific programs he wants, the more he undermines the illusion he created during the campaign that “Obama Agrees With Me,” since he had lots of people who believed mutually exclusive things each imagining that “he agrees with me” thanks to the low denotation/connotation ratio of his campaign vocabulary – and a person who thinks you’ve betrayed him is much more ill-disposed toward you than is a person who all along knew you disagreed with him. And thus not only do his individual proposals poll very much worse than he does generally, but his own approval rating has set records for the speed with which it has collapsed since his inauguration.

So I personally think he pretty badly needs to fire the guys who wrote his campaign speeches, and to hire people who can help him write Presidential speeches – the two are actually quite different genres, and nobody has seemed to be able to explain the difference to him. Perhaps nobody on his team even realizes there is a difference.

I don’t know if what I’m trying to say makes sense, alas...

Anyway, I guess if I were going to give Obama’s speechwriters advice before the State of the Union, it would be the following, in no particular order:

Most important thing of all: after you give this speech, don’t give another one for at least two weeks. Jesus Christ Himself couldn’t spend as much time on air as you have this year without turning into a self-parody. Your rhetoric sounds much more formulaic and clichéd and tired than it really is, just because you use it so much more than any previous President has. You’re not giving yourself a fair chance. A lot of what seems trite and boring and pedestrian with your speechwriting isn’t really a problem with the phrasing or the writing – it’s the repetition that’s damaging you. Less is more, Mr. President. Less is more. Less is more. Less is more. Less is…see what I mean?

Figure out which one of your speechwriters it is that keeps sticking into your speeches the phrases, “Let me be clear,” and “Some would say,” and fire his ass. There’s no worse sin in a speechwriter than to use a verbal crutch to the point that anybody who wants to get a cheap laugh at your expense can simply assume a mock-serious attitude and quote your crutch-phrase – whoever that guy on your speechwriting team is, he’s both lazy and incompetent. (And if, as I suspect, he’s you yourself…look, there’s a reason Presidents hire professional speechwriters. Start taking their advice.) You use those two clichés (especially the first) in every speech you give and usually several times. That would be bad enough – but you give speeches practically every day; so the last thing you can afford to do is get lazy with the phrasing. You’ve completely ruined those two phrases for yourself. Don’t ever use them again. I meant that quite literally: at this point, you should be almost more willing to drop an f-bomb in the SOTU speech than to allow yourself to utter the words, “Let me be clear.” Half the Republicans in the country will be playing a drinking game that involves the phrase “Let me be clear.” Leave ‘em thirsty.

Hire somebody whose only job is to wait until you and your speechwriters think the speech is ready to be delivered, to then count the number of times you use the words “I,” “me,” “myself,” “my,” and “mine,” and finally to make you cut out at least 50% of them. No President has ever spent a higher percentage of his speechification time on “me, myself and I” than you have. Then on top of that, no President has ever talked as much as you have, period. This means that in your first year you have made the American public listen to you talk about yourself more than they’ve ever heard any other President talk about himself in any entire administration of the past two centuries. Your enemies are, with great success, painting you as a flaming narcissist. Maybe it’s fair, maybe it isn’t, but if you keep talking incessantly about yourself every time you open your mouth in public, you’re playing straight into their hands. Let other people worship you if they insist; but don’t make it look like you’re worshipping yourself. Don’t mention yourself at all in this speech. I mean it. There’s a reason the speech is called the “State of the Union,” not the “State of the President:” it ain’t about you. Don’t use the first person singular. At all..except for one exception, which I’ll get to in just a minute.

If you mention Dubya at all in your speech tonight, make it be in a compliment. You can’t keep saying, “All our problems are George Bush’s fault” in one breath and “We have to move beyond this partisan bickering and finger-pointing” in the next; it simply makes you look like a shameless hypocrite. I know you feel the need to play to your base, but just remember: when you alienate a member of the Far Left, you lose his vote, but your opponents don’t gain it – he just doesn’t vote at all, putting you down one. Piss off the independents, and not only do you NOT get their votes – your opponents DO, putting you down two…and the next thing you know, there’s a Republican sitting in Teddy Kennedy’s seat. Find something reasonably innocuous and praise the man for it; otherwise, don’t mention him at all.

You have to convince the center – which you have lost, and lost in a big way, over the last year – that you have heard and accepted their rebuke, and that you are (as Bill Clinton did in his day, and for which he was duly rewarded with a second term) changing your deeds as well as your tune. Since you can’t change your deeds overnight, it is critically important to change your tune. Remember “we are the change we have been waiting for”? You’d better have a signature line to deliver tonight that sticks in the memory the way that one did, and that communicates that YOU will be a different President in Years Two Through Four than you were in Year One. Your original line has been ruined, because the “change” independents wanted was a change in the way Washington does business, and they think you’ve been just more of the same for the last year. Your campaign fuel was the idea that the nation needed to change. What you have to communicate tonight, to the independents who have almost entirely deserted you, is that you recognize that change is needed – in you. Find a phrase that will capture that in five to ten words, polish the phrasing until it dazzles like diamond, and make your entire speech build up to the moment at which you deliver that particular line. “Next year will be different, because I will be different,” is what you want to communicate (don’t use that phrase, of course; it’s lame -- but then I’m not going to deliver it in front of an in-large-part-distrustful nation). For God’s sake don’t try to go down the path of, “Next year needs to be different; so my opponents need to change their evil ways.” Even if that’s what you believe, it can’t be what you communicate tonight.

In what’s actually a continuation of the previous point, there is one attitude above all that you need to project tonight, and that is humility. Find something to apologize for – in a year in which your approval ratings have plunged farther and faster than any prior President’s, you can surely find at least one thing to apologize for – and say, “I did this wrong, and it changes starting tonight.” Practically every person in America, I suspect, expects you to say at least five times in your speech that the Republicans in general, and George Bush in particular, have done things wrong; nobody expects you to say, “You know what? I’ve been a complete jackass, and I apologize.” Surprise the nation by picking an executive policy that you can reverse by fiat, and by saying, “I was wrong” – in exactly those words – and announcing a change in the policy. For example, I think something like 55% of recently polled Americans wanted the UndieBomber to be waterboarded (! yeah, I know, I was surprised my own self), and the recent testimony in Congress has made it clear that your team’s handling of that situation was a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants cluster rather than the result of any coherent and well-thought-out-beforehand set of policies and procedures. So announce in your speech tonight that you believe your team made the wrong decision and that it’s your fault; announce that you are ordering Undieman to be reclassified immediately as an enemy combatant and to be removed from the criminal justice system, and announce that you are ordering him to be interrogated by military intelligence “in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.” Furthermore, say that in the future the policy will be that in any situation that appears to involve the possibility of Islamic terrorism, your standing instructions are, effective immediately, that the potential terrorist will be treated as an enemy combatant, in compliance with the Geneva Conventions, until an explicit high-level decision has been made to the contrary. Say the words, “I was wrong” explicitly; leave the further statement “but at least I wasn’t an evil torturing bastard like George Bush” implicit in your reference to the Geneva Conventions… -- Look, it doesn’t have to be this particular issue, you understand. What is important isn’t the specific policy; what is important is that you surprise both your enemies and your friends by apologizing for behaving badly yourself, rather than by accusing Republicans of behaving badly. There are times for projecting confidence; times for projecting authority; times for projecting righteous anger…but this, tonight, for you, is a time for projecting humility. Make sure humility gets projected. Above all, don’t come off as thinking that the bad year you’ve had is other people’s fault. Even if it really has been.

Use the following word repeatedly and prominently tonight: “liberty.” Find somebody to teach you how to pronounce it properly. As far as I know you have never used it in public. This isn’t snark; I mean it quite literally: I don’t remember ever hearing you use that word. But for a very significant percentage of the American people, this word is at the core of what constitutes “American values.” In particular, the Tea Party movement, which at the present time polls higher in self-identification than either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, considers “liberty” to be the highest of political values. Traditionally in America, of course, “liberty” has meant “the right to tell the government to go to hell,” and the opposite of “liberty” has been “tyranny,” in the sense of, “government that thinks it can tell you what to do.” Remember Reagan’s explanation of the difference between the American and Soviet constitutions (and if you don’t know how he defined it, go look it up, because in the Tea Party movement you’re dealing with a whole bunch of people who have exactly that take on the proper relationship between government and The People.) Now this is a problem for you because every major political initiative you’ve championed in your first year has had the clear effect of greatly increasing the scope, cost, and general omnipresence of the federal government, in ways that would remind somebody reading the Declaration of Independence far more of King George than of George Washington. I assume that you do not actually want to suddenly start governing as a small-government libertarian; so you’d better get to work co-opting and redefining the word “liberty,” because right now that word’s killing you in the polls. Find some way, in this speech, to promote yourself as a champion of liberty, and use the damned word. You’re an American President. Talk like one.

Lower your chin.

Let me repeat that: lower your damned chin. For God’s sake stop literally looking down your nose at the American people as if you were posing for Mount Rushmore. Humility, remember: you are the servant of the People, not their job interviewer or after-school-detention monitor or The Rich Man Whose Daughter They Want To Date, and they are at present displeased with your performance so far. Get the arrogance out of your body language.

However, while you should be humble, you should also not cringe, either physically or verbally. You should communicate that you are capable of learning from your mistakes, and that you have every expectation of delivering a dramatically better performance in your second year, thanks to the sound advice and firm but well-meant rebuke you have received from the American People. We’re a forgiving nation, and the majority of us still want to like you. Don’t do your “serious, impressive, smartest-guy-in-the-room” shtick you’ve been using for, like, ever – surprise us with an humble but firmly optimistic resolve to make changes in yourself and to do a better job going forward.

Now, let’s talk about your favorite rhetorical tactic: using vague terms to create a rhetorical space which each individual listener can fill in his own substance, by which he effectively creates you in his own image, thus allowing you to be all things to most people. It was brilliant to speak throughout your campaign always of “hope” and “change” while carefully avoiding specifics that could be pinned on you in debate (not “we need to change policy x to policy y,” but instead “we are the change we have been waiting for” = “I create on your behalf those very changes that you, Mr. Pierce, want to see”); and I particularly liked (as a rhetorician, though not as an ethicist) your campaign trick of switching back and forth within the confines of a single speech between very sharply drawn, individualistic portraits of people whom you wanted the voters to pity, and very vaguely drawn, largely impersonalized “forces” of evil whom you wanted the voters to hate and despise, leaving yourself room to close the very speeches in which you fanned the flames of your base’s resentment of the Wealthy Republican Bad Guys with a call for an end to partisanship and mutual sniping. This was rhetorically brilliant. What I don’t think you realize, alas, is that it’s a game with a limited shelf life, and that shelf life has expired. You can’t go into this speech thinking you can appeal to your favorite traditional (but carefully undefined) American buzzwords that you have spent the last year using, because you have now unwittingly filled in lots of your own substance – when you use them now, people are going to fill in not the policies they themselves want (which is what they did during your campaign), but instead the policies you have spent the last year trying to rush through. For example, if you speak of “the American vision,” people will no longer fill in the blank (for “vision,” in political oratory, is merely a rhetorical “________” disguised as a noble aspiration) with their vision of what government ought to be – they’ll now fill in that blank with what they now perceive to be your vision of what government ought to be, which perception they derive from the policies you’ve spent the last year pushing. And this is a huge problem because most Americans are pretty adamantly opposed to those policies. The very same words and phrases that drew cheers from independents in January of 2009, will evoke fear and resentment and anger in those same independents in January of 2010. Remember my telling you that you need to use the word “liberty” several times in this speech? That’s a specific example; now I’m telling you to generalize the principle. You have to completely reset your rhetoric. Do it tonight.

OK, I'll go read the speech now.

Some helpful graphical information in re Eric Steig's Antarctica paper...

2009-12-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

...and Jeff Id's attempted takedown thereof.

Id's point -- and you should read his post so that you aren't victimized by unwitting misrepresentations on my part -- is that there were lots of weather stations in Antarctica to choose from, but GHCN's "value-added" process threw out all but one. I thought I'd help out by pointing out what it's like to use a single thermometer to measure the temperature for all of Antarctica.

First of all, Antarctica is big. Here it is on the same scale as North America:

If you go from the coastal thermometer used by GHCN to the South Pole, that's 1,555 miles, which is slightly less than the distance between coastal Corpus Christi, Texas and...Winnipeg. If you go from that same thermometer to Vanderford Valley, on the opposite coast, that's 3,200 miles. If you start at the point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all meet, about fifty miles or so from Trenton, and you go 3,200 miles in the general direction of Alaska, you wind up in Fairbanks.

So let me ask you: if you had a single thermometer in, say, the Catskills, and I told you that that thermometer could tell you what was happening to the average temperature across all of North America between there and Fairbanks...how much crack would you think I was smoking?

Now I add that there are actually thirty or so other thermometers, but I only took this one. And then I add that the one I picked showed more warming than any of the other thirty. And then I add that since that thermometer was installed, they've built an airport next to it and turned that outpost into a sort of tourist destination complete with a coffee shop...would you begin to have suspicions about my scientific integrity?

Then you point out that maybe global warming's not that unprecedented because people used to farm successfully in Greenland and make wine around Hadrian's wall -- and I respond, "Oh, well, you have to ignore that; that was just a local warming effect."

Hmmmmmmm...Greenland's being farmable for a century or so is a purely local effect of no significance, but a thermometer in the Catskills is a good proxy for Anchorage, Fargo, Cleveland and Seattle...look, I'm not exactly saying there's inconsistency in the standards here, I'm just saying the consistency isn't obvious to the Uninitiated Non-Scientist, like, um, yours truly. Just sayin', that's all.

Here's another thing: looking at this picture of Antarctica, where would you guess this oh-so-representative thermometer sits?

Try right where this arrow points...yes, on that island just off the coast, on the part that sticks out way further north than the rest of the continent.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.....if there was any grant money or political power-grabbing at stake here I might be suspicious. Good thing it's just our good old trustworthy friends the Scientists...

Al Gore, Poet Laureate of Climate Change (UPDATED WITH VIDEO)

2009-12-13T14:21:00.001-08:00

You think I'm snarking with that headline, but I'm just copying the honorific that Vanity Fair gave him in all seriousness. What's that you say? Well, okay, fair point: merely to quote what Vanity Fair says in seriousness, is to be snarky -- kind of like any direct quote of Dubya that involves the phrase "nukyular power."

Here's you an e-mail thread from earlier this week, involving yours truly and a couple of quick-witted co-workers:

_____________________________________________
From: Pierce, Ken
To: Guidry, Randy; Greer, Chris
Subject: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the one, the only, the incomparable, the red-blooded...AlGore! Whose poetry is, I humbly submit, proof that extraterrestrial life exists, as this is true Vogon poetry if ever I heard true Vogon poetry.

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune's bones dissolve

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning's celebration

Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups

Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

By the way, the Poet Laureate thing is not my gag...Vanity Fair uses it. The “gag” part (in both senses) is that Vanity Fair means it seriously, and goes on at length about Gore’s comic poetic genius. I don’t know which is funnier, the original poem, or the Vanity Fair brown-nosing:

KP

_____________________________________________
From: Greer, Chris
To: Pierce, Ken; Guidry, Randy
Subject: RE: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

Ha. And I quote from the article:

“The result is a surprisingly accomplished, nuanced piece of writing. The images Gore conjures in his (untitled) poem turn a neat trick: they are visually specific and emotionally arresting even as they are scientifically accurate.”

:-O

_____________________________________________
From: Pierce, Ken
To: Greer, Chris; Guidry, Randy
Subject: RE: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

You did read it aloud, right? You can’t truly savor the full delights of any poetry without reading it aloud...but out of consideration for others, you should do it alone. Preferably in a soundproof room.

KP

_____________________________________________
From: Greer, Chris
To: Pierce, Ken; Guidry, Randy
Subject: RE: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

No, I am in full panic mode now waiting for the destruction of our planet. Not by global warming, but due to the construction of a space lane bypass...

_____________________________________________
From: Guidry, Randy
Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 9:27 AM
To: Pierce, Ken; Greer, Chris
Subject: RE: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

I know some Vogons and Mr. Gore, you are NO Vogon, Sir!

Is that how the poem ends???? It left me wanting more! What are these tools he refers to at the end? I must know! Perhaps our salvation lies in them! I bet Pelosi knows!

UPDATE!!Thanks to Guy Fawkes by way of Ace, we can now bring you a dramatic reading by the Poet Laureate Himself. And thank goodness, because, if I'm 100% honest with you, up until I heard His Goreness demonstrate how the poem is supposed to be read, I, um, frankly didn't think it was that good...

Hey, this is genuinely useful

2009-12-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

Rasmussen has come up with a way to attempt to classify the basic emotional orientation of a voter toward the very concept of government. I think this is awesome, and suggest that you ask yourself these questions. (The Perilous answer to each one is not merely obvious, it's obvious with lots of exclamation points / lots of non-Baptist emphasis / ALL CAPS / all of the above means of emphasis plus jumping up and down vigorously in place.)

-- Generally speaking, when it comes to important national issues, whose judgment do you trust more - the American people or America’s political leaders? [The Peril trusts political leaders of any country, as a class, rather less than the Peril trusts the sort of person who advises prostitutes and their pimps on tax-evasion strategies.]

-- Some people believe that the federal government has become a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests. Has the federal government become a special interest group? [What do you mean "has become"? When 25,000 years ago the first bossy Lucy-hominid picked up a big rock and threated to hit the other members of the tribe with it unless he did as they were told by their Betters, which is to say himself, goverment "became" a special interest group. And it has stayed one ever since.]

-- Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors? [Whenever government and big business work together, which is pretty much all the time except when government is working with big labor unions, it is pretty much always at the expense of consumers and whichever part of the investment community has stocks in companies other than the ones in bed with government. So, um, that's a...

GREAT.....!@#$!@#$!
..........BIG..................YES!!!!!!!!!!
]

Stay classy, Governor Huckster. And judicious as well.

2009-12-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

First of all, we have the letter in which public prosecutor Robert Herzfield objects, in vain, to Happy Saintly Christian Governor Huckabee's decision to commute the sentence of future police-executioner Maurice Clemmons. I would very much like to have seen the earlier letters -- Herzfield appears to have sent a letter providing a "standing objection" to all clemency proclamations in his district, pending an opportunity in each case for him to investigate the facts of the case, and Huckabee appears to have written a somewhat pissed-off response; but I haven't seen either of those two letters. This particular Herzfield letter, however, is impressive and well-argued:

Dear Governor Huckabee,

I've received your letter of January 5th in which you state that you "judiciously" review each clemency application "on a case by case basis, carefully analyzing the merits of each." After reading your letter, I was surprised to hear that your spokesman stated that you "just do what the Post Prison Transfer Board recommends." These statements seem to be mutually exclusive. Do you analyze the merits of each case or do you rubber stamp Board recommendations? [That seems like a very good question to me -- especially since "I review each application on a case by case basis, carefully analyzing the merits of each" sounds like the sort of vague, insincere boilerplate a politician would feed to an inconveniently pestersome prosecutor accusing him of carelessness, while "I just do what the Post Prison Transfer Board recommends" sounds exactly like a politician speaking to the public and trying to disavow any responsibility for his decisions. Can't blame Herzfield for asking the Huckster to make up his feeble mind. I'm curious to see how Huckabee responds to this excellent question.]

Secondly, it seems clear that you did not finish reading my December 29th letter. As I stated last month, if you have a case which merits clemency, I requested that you contact me with the reasons you believe clemency is appropriate for persons incarcerated and allow me to research the facts and then determine whether I would withdraw my objection. I did not -- as you stated in your letter -- declare that everyone from Saline County "is beyond any consideration for extra-judicial relief, no matter the facts." Perhaps your anger at having your judgment questioned prevented you from reading the entire letter. [Let's see: a prosecutor asks, "Before I agree to go along with granting clemency to some convicted murderer or rapist, I'd like to have a chance to check the facts," and the governor responds, "You don't want anybody to get clemency and you don't care about the facts." That does seem to imply either that Herzfield is lying to Huckabee on a point where Huckabee would certainly know that he's lying, or else that Huckabee has a reading disability. It would be very interesting to see the previous two letters in the series, wouldn't it? Can't wait to see how Huckabee responds to this point, which doesn't seem very easy to respond to in any way other than with an apology.]

Finally, I believe your administration's policy of granting clemency is fatally flawed. You would be wise to take the time to re-evaluate your rocedures. I suggest an approach that is more public, and that you announce specific reasons for granting clemency at the time you announce your intent. [Note: the Governor was obliged at the time to publish and "intent to grant clemency" thirty days before actually granting it, in order to allow for public comment; Herzfield's suggestion is that the government provide his specific reasons for wanting to let this particular murderer or rapist get out of jail sooner, so that the public commentary could be better informed. Can you think of a reason not to do this, other than that you, as Governor, were afraid that if people knew what your reasons were, they'd crucify you as an ass for granting clemency on such weak grounds? Me either.] An open system along these lines would be more respectful to the people of Arkansas, and allow them the opportunity to understand why a convicted murderer (or rapist) should be set free. [Do you see any problem with this, Gentle Reader? I certainly don't, and am very interested to see Huckabee's response to these seemingly well-thought-out suggestions.]

It is inevitable that citizens will question the motives of public officials who take such dramatic action without offering the slightest explanation or justification whatsoever. This type of situation damages the credibility of everyone in public service, and is harmful to our democracy. [Seems a trifle overwrought at first reading...but then he's a prosecutor who's watching murderers and rapists set free, and I imagine the families of the four dead Washington cops don't find it overwrought at all.]

I hope you will consider updating your policy to reflect the suggestions above.

Sincerely, etc.

Well, I certainly can't wait to read Huckabee's response to this letter. How will he clarify his position on the degree to which his decisions are his own doing rather than mere rubber-stamping? Will he apologize for carelessly mis-reading Herzfield's original letter? Will he give careful consideration to Herzfield's seemingly excellent suggestions for improving the clemency process? Let's see, shall we?

Dear Robert,

The governor read you [sic] letter and laughed out loud.

He wanted me to respond to you. I wish you success as you cut down on your caffeine consumption.

Sincerely yours,

Cory Cox,
Deputy Legal Counsel and Adviser on Criminal Justice

Ladies and gentlemen, the front-runner for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination in 2012...and you wonder why, in a country where more people self-identify as conservatives than liberals, the Republican Party has trouble getting its candidates elected.

Sometimes it takes wives a little while to get a clue

2009-12-01T07:08:00.001-08:00

Michelle is out for a walk in the Rose Garden when she sees Barack pacing back and forth, in apparently intense concentration, muttering under his breath. She grows concerned and goes over to check on him.

MICHELLE: Barack, honey, is everything okay?

BARACK [looks up a bit distractedly]: Sure, there's no problem, babe, I'm just praying.

MICHELLE: Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize...I thought you were talking to yourself.

BARACK [trying hard to bear her obtuseness with patience]: Well, yes, like I said...

The real tragedy would be if we lost our excuse to congratulate ourself on our political correctness diversity

2009-11-19T16:32:00.000-08:00

General Casey is a disgrace to the armed forces, in my opinion; but it's not entertaining for me to say so in that bald, unadorned fashion. But with the Army's and media's desperate attempts to find some way to avoid admitting, "Uh, yeah, we let a jihadist stay in the armed forces because we all know Muslims are one of the Specially Protected Victim Groups that only racists hold to the same standards other, whiter people are held to," perhaps the best thing to do is just parody the hell out of it.

Sort of the way Latma does here:

Respect for one's neighbor's political opinions...

2009-10-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

...is a critical element of American civic spirit, admirably demonstrated in this picture forwarded to me by my friend August.

Looks photoshopped to me but that doesn't hurt the gag.

It's only startling if you're a particular kind of jackass

2009-10-23T16:21:00.001-07:00

Okay, everybody, repeat after me something my daddy taught me long ago, but that apparently most Americans' dads didn't bother to say:

"Anybody can lie with his words. It's hard to lie with your deeds. So if you want to know what a man is going to do, don't listen to what he's saying -- look at what he's already done."

Barack Obama has played dirty his entire political career. It's not like this is a big secret; he's a standard-issue dirty Chicago pol. Now comes Peter Wehrner to whine, in apparently honest astonishment:

The Obama White House is showing a fondness for intimidation tactics that might work well in the wards of Chicago but that don't have a place in the most important and revered political institution in America. To see these impulses manifest themselves so early in Obama's presidency, and given all that he has said to the contrary, is rather startling.

The emphasis is mine. And the reason I emphasize it is simply this: if you paid any attention whatsoever to what Obama SAID, rather that looking at the record of what Obama has DONE, then you have s*** for brains. Who in God's name, other than people with single-digit IQ's, listens to what a politician SAYS and doesn't bother to go back and say, "Um, how does that line up with what he's spent his life DOING"?

Apparently one hell of a lot of self-impressed we're-way-smarter-than-you-illiterate-rednecks American intellectuals, that's who.

Yes, that just about sums the Bushes up

2009-10-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

Andrew Ferguson, talking about Ted Kennedy's "bipartisanship":

And so, for example, he happily conspired with the first President Bush to pass the draconian Americans with Disabilities Act and, with the second, the disastrous No Child Left Behind education reform. In the proponents of "big-government (or compassionate, or national-greatness, or kinder, gentler) conservatism" he found the useful idiots he needed.

I agree with the Left that an Alzheimer-stricken Shetland pony is likely to have a higher IQ than the two Presidents Bush combined...but I fear that we arrive at our common conclusion from very different premises.

Line of the Day

2009-10-10T08:17:00.001-07:00

From Vodkapundit, disagreeing with Jules Crittendon's labelling of Obama's Afghanistan/Pakistan policy as "Chaosistan" (at the 3:14 mark):

"I'm gonna have to disagree with Jules on this one; it is a little like chaos, sure, but, um... [pause for effect]...less disciplined."

And as we all know, people who don't know sports shouldn't express political opinions

2009-10-05T16:36:00.000-07:00

"I'll tell you another thing about Glenn Beck," James Taranto quotes James Carville as saying. "He wouldn't know the difference between a football, a bat and a hockey court."

For those of you who know as little about sports as does Glenn Beck, and therefore labor under the misapprehension that hockey is played on a "rink," the word is now apparently "court," one presumes in honor of the invariable mutual courtesy displayed by the participants...

Barney Frank (D - Fannie Mae)

2009-10-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

I like theblogprof's habit of referring to Barney Frank not as "Barney Frank (D - Massachusetts)" but instead with reference to Barney's true constituency.

Bush Lied? Nah, probably not Clueless George himself...but my money says Paulson did

2009-10-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

And if that makes me a member of the Left, then you can color me pink, because this sounds perfectly credible to me.

HT: Hot Air.

And you wonder why old people are opposed to Obamacare...

2009-09-05T08:06:00.001-07:00

...maybe they've been looking around to see how this whole government-run-health-care thing works in other places.

For example, note this bit: "And, as the Patients Association report points out, most of these stories are about old people."

Or this:

Poor basic hygiene was a factor in the recent disaster at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust hospital where at least 400 patients died needlessly; the official report of 2007 blamed “shocking and appalling” standards of care. But two years on, it emerged earlier this year that 10 NHS health trusts have even worse death rates than Mid Staffordshire had.

There's this, of course, but then the fact that liberals hate monopolies in business but love it in government is something nobody who has paid attention to politics for a single day at any time in the past seventy years could have failed to notice:

One of the problems is that the NHS is a monopoly — any patient knows there is nowhere else to be treated and any nurse or doctor brave enough to blow the whistle runs the risk of never working in medicine again; there is no alternative to the state medical monolith.

See, the thing that sucks if you're a liberal and 49% of the people in the country don't like doing it your way, and you're having to compete in the free market where people don't have to give you their money unless they personally think you deserve it, is that you only have a market with 51% of the people...'cause you can't take the 49%'s money without their permission, and since you don't have a monopoly they can give their money to somebody else, and, to be blunt, they think you're a moron and haven't the slightest intention of giving you their money. Every private businessman without a monopoly has to deal with this every day; it's called "customer satisfaction" and without it you go out of business. (This is why businesses that have enough money to spend on lobbyists -- such as big insurance companies -- spend that money urging legislators to regulate their industry "for the good of the public" and thus raise entrance costs enough to keep the small players out and protect the big guys' monopoly, the fostering of exploitative monopolies being the primary economic effect of government regulation.)

But if you're a liberal, you don't have to worry about satisfying the 49%. You just have to round up the 51% to outvote them -- and then you can say to the other 49%, "Screw what you want, hand over your money," with all the practically irresistible power of the state to back you up. So what if the Republican down the street thinks you're a moron and thinks that you will do a terrible job of taking care of his health and the health of the homeless guy down the street? So what if he wants to make his own health care decision with his own doctor rather than having you decide what decisions he's allowed to make? So what if he thinks the local Catholic hospital will do a vastly better job of caring for the homeless guy than will your army of bureaucrats and he wants to give his charity-for-the-homeless-guy money to the hospital rather than to you? Too bad for him; he'll damned well give you the money whether he likes it or not -- because you and your fellow Fifty-One-Percenters voted yourselves a monopoly on health care.

Liberalism is the quintessentially anti-democratic political philosophy, though it doesn't perceive itself that way. It is the free market that is truly democratic: my dollar is worth as much as yours, and I get to vote with it. If 80% of us like HEB and 20% of us like Randall's, then HEB will get 80% of the money and Randall's will get 20% -- but I, Mr. Randall's Lover, will still get to spend my money at Randall's. If HEB's customer satisfaction drops to 60%, then the voting shifts to 60% HEB and 40% Randall's...and so do the dollars. If Randall's pulls ahead 51% to 49%, then the money shifts accordingly -- but the almost-half-the-population that prefers HEB, still gets to go to HEB, and Randall's won't get those people's money until it finds a way to make them happy.

But in politics, if you're in the 49%, you're hosed. There were all kinds of liberals who hated having Dubya as President. I personally was no fan of Dubya; I have litte or no respect for McCain; and I got stuck with Obama. But if you are in the 49%, your vote doesn't count, and your money goes to the 51%.

Do you see what I mean? Here's how it works in the private sector for me, Mr. Randall's Lover.

Voting is running 80% / 20%: I get to shop at Randall's.
Voting is running 60% / 40%: I get to shop at Randall's.
Voting is running 49% / 51%: I get to shop at Randall's.
Voting flips back to 51% / 49%: I get to shop at Randall's.
Voting flips back again to 49% / 51%: I get to shop at Randall's.
Some guy opens a new store called Whole Foods and I, along with 5% of my fellow Americans, discover that it is awesomely better than either Randall's or HEB: I get to shop at Whole Foods.

Noticing a theme there, are we? But now what if the private sector worked like the "democratic process" beloved by liberals?

Voting is running 80% / 20%: I have to shop at HEB.
Voting is running 60% / 40%: I have to shop at HEB.
Voting is running 49% / 51%: Yay, I get to shop at Randall's!
Voting flips back to 51% / 49%: [sigh] I have to shop at HEB again.
Voting flips back again to 49% / 51%: Yay, I get to shop at Randall's again!
Some guy opens a new store called Whole Foods and I, along with 5% of my fellow Americans, discover...oh, wait, never mind, he's not allowed to open it because he doesn't have 50% of the vote yet.

You see, anybody who attempts to take any part of life that is currently in the private sector, and move it into the public sector, is an essentially anti-democratic person -- because he is trying to move that part of life out of the world where every person's dollar counts, and move it into the world where your vote is worthless unless you're part of the biggest mob.

Liberalism: always looking out for the little guy...

P.S. (I admit I'm being deliberately provocative here to make my point...if you want to say in the comments that the free market isn't democratic because rich people have more dollars than poor people do, fire away. But it's not going to change the primary points I'm making in the post, since "liberalism is anti-democratic" isn't really the main point.)

Good luck refuting Mr. McCain

2009-09-03T17:15:00.000-07:00

No, not I-Hate-The-First-Amendment Senator McCain. I mean Stacy McCain.

I have yet to hear a single argument in favor of the obvious and blatantly fraudulent system known as American "public education" that could be put forth without blushing by a ten-year-old of reasonable intelligence and a minimum of intellectual integrity. There are many things in America that are indefensible, but few are more hopelessly indefensible than is public education. (As empirical evidence, I could cite the fact that most people who read my blog would be considered to be "well-educated" Americans...and I'd be shocked to find that even one has seen either of those J. S. Mill quotes before. I'm not blaming you, Gentle Readers. You were, after all, educated by American public schools.)

Feel free to take a shot at defending it if you like. Just know that I won't pull any punches when demolishing your arguments. Come up with a defense of public education -- by which I mean, a public school regime that survives only thanks to compulsory attendendance and compulsory taxation -- that holds water even for five minutes and I'll buy you a steak dinner. There are many complex policy issues in the world. This is not one of them.

HT: Vodkapundit.

[Cackling delightedly]

2009-08-31T19:50:00.001-07:00

Barack Obama: in the words of Vodkapundit, "the first man to prove the Peter Principle over-optimistic."

As I was just saying...

2009-08-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

...if you want those of us who disagreed with Teddy Kennedy's politics to pipe down and not be so gauche as to raise political disagreements during a time of mourning and of spiritual significance, then you had bloody well not recruit a kid to pollute the Prayers of the People during the Mass itself (!!!!!!!!!!) with the following ever-so-cute little variant on the standard liturgy:

“For what my grandpa called the cause of his life, as he said so often, in every part of this land, that every American will have decent, quality healthcare as a fundamental right and not a privilege, we pray to the Lord.”

If every conservative in the church had simply stood up at that point and walked out, it would have been less than the Kennedy family deserved. And had the same thing happened at a conservative politician's funeral, I'd lay even money that at least some of the liberals present would have walked out -- and if Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton had been in the crowd, then I'd've given you ten to one on those two guys personally.

---

By the way, I won't link to this particular post because of non-family-friendly language, but Protein Wisdom also has the line of the day. Many of us non-fellow-travelers have been disgusted (though of course not surprised) by the shameless rush on the Left to use Kennedy's death as a way to push health care, as though there were any acceptable reason to vote for a bill other than that it is in the best interests of the country. (If you weren't going to vote for the bill on its merits, but now that Teddy's dead you'll vote for it as a sentimental gesture, then the place for you is not the Senate, but someplace far less congenial where you can have no influence whatsoever on the public policies of this great nation.) But nobody had found the perfect way to capture that disgust in a single pithy line...until Darleen pulled it off:

"[N]ot even 24 hours could pass without them shamelessly running Teddy’s corpse up the flag pole and demanding we salute it by giving up our liberty."

Pretty much sums it up for me. Well done Darleen!

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

2009-08-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

"Speak no ill of the dead," is one way to translate that classic Latin tag; but I prefer, "If you can't say anything good about a dead guy, don't say anything at all." Which is an excellent reason to say nothing at all about Teddy Kennedy.

But there are two problems with staying silent about "the Lion of the Senate." (Excuse me for a moment...okay, back. Sorry about that; had to rinse the bad taste out of my mouth there.) First of all, public figures become part of history and lessons must be learned from their legacy, and anybody who has gone to the trouble that Teddy Kennedy went to in order to remain a public figure, cannot reasonably hope to avoid blunt commentary on what that legacy is, even after his death.

But the bigger problem is that the Kennedy hagiography industry wants to tell the rest of us not to say anything bad about ChappaTeddy; which I would personally be happy to do for a decent period of mourning, at least, as long as the hagiographers would agree not to say anything false (including false by fallacy of emphasis) about Kennedy. If the hagiographers would restrict themselves to things along the line of the Anchoress -- "May God have mercy on his soul, as I hope to find mercy myself," basically -- then there would be nothing I would want to contribute to the conversation until a few months from now, at which point I would simply comment on Kennedy the same way I comment on FDR or LBJ, ad hoc, depending upon the political issue that happened to be under discussion.

But to have to listen to the 24/7 glorification of one the most repulsive public figures of twentieth century American politics...wow, that really tries one's patience. It is especially trying when you remember, for example, how artfully Teddy turned Mary Jo's death into a "Kennedy curse" (if you have never watched Teddy's eleven-minute exercise in please-pity-me-so-that-I-don't-have-to-suffer-consequences-for-my-action speechifying, which we now know was in large part composed of lies, then you certainly ought to), in a speech containing what I consider to be the single most shamelessly hypocritical utterance in Cold-War-era American politics:

It has been written, 'A man does what he must, in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures, and that is the basis of all human morality.' Whatever may be the sacrifices he faces, if he follows his conscience -- the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow man -- each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of the [sic] past courage cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look in his own soul. I pray that I can have the courage to make the right decision.

You have to admire a man who can speak so honestly about struggling with the decision of whether or not to come clean and tell the truth about his actions, actions that cost an innocent young woman her life...oh, no wait a minute, he's not talking about how he ought to have done what was best for Mary Jo instead of spending time concocting an alibi to try to avoid persona consequences, and he's not talking about how he now needs to come clean with the people of Massachusetts about what he's done. He's talking about...well, let's just let him finish:

Whatever is decided, whatever the future holds for me, I hope that I shall have -- be able to put this most recent tragedy behind me and make some further contribution to our state and mankind, whether it be in public or private life. Thank you, and good night.

In other words, he's hoping that he can muster the "courage" to "put this most recent tragedy behind me" (instead of going to jail like anybody with a different surname would have done) -- and keep his Senate seat, as of course he did. "A man does what he must, in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures, and that is the basis of all human morality." The fact that Kennedy, under those circumstances, could utter those words, leaves one wondering how it is possible to avoid suspecting Kennedy of being completely bereft of either conscience or shame.

Then you hear a friend of his, who is trying to praise Kennedy with the standard line you get so often about how, "He wouldn't want us to be sad; he would be here making jokes to make us feel better..." Pretty standard thing to say at a wake, right? And Ed Klein is running along these lines, and he gets carried away since he's in a room full of fellow far-Left Kennedy-worshippers, and then...well, here's a transcript:

KLEIN: I think he'd be the last person who would want us...those he's left behind...to...um...be...um...m-morose and, and full of bathos; I think he, he'd be...

DIANE REHM [hostess]: [helpfully, as Klein seems to be struggling to find words] He would come in with a big guffawing laugh and make us laugh too.

KLEIN: He would, and...yes, and he, you're so right, he would, and he'd probably have a joke to tell, as well...

REHM: [chuckling] At his own expense.

KLEIN: Well, you know, he'd...[starts to chuckle happily, having just thought of something that will show what a cool guy his buddy Teddy was] I don't know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" [in tones of fond admiration] I mean, that is just the most amazing thing. It -- [suddenly realizing what he has just said, as the producers, presumably in horror, hit the button to play the "we're going to commercial now" music, and then desperately trying to salvage the situation] it's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw...um...the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.

REHM: [firmly, no longer chuckling] Ed Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and author of a new book on Teddy Kennedy; we will be taking more of your questions after this short break...

You may think I have transcribed this bit unfairly and imputed tone and motivations unreasonably; so by all means listen yourself here and draw your own conclusions. But I see no reason not to think that Klein has let a perfectly legitimate cat out of the bag -- and the imagination reels.

By the way, if you want to say, "That was a long time ago, why can't you let it go?" -- well, if there was the slightest bit of evidence that Kennedy had ever genuinely repented for what he did at Chappaquiddick and in the weeks that followed, I would say simply, "The man did an evil thing; he repented and confessed and sought forgiveness; and I say it should be granted to him." I have, for example, not been able to get out of my mind these past few days the example of John Profumo, onetime up-and-coming politician, who was discovered to have cheated on his wife. (And it turns out that I'm not the only one; Mark Steyn compares Kennedy's behavior to Profumo's in this column.) In Profumo's case, unlike Kennedy's, the girl he was amusing himself didn't wind up dead. But still, Profumo made his public confession of guilt, after a brief period of trying to wriggle out the noose -- and then resigned his public office, walked away from his political career for good, and...let's let wikipedia take it from here.

Shortly after his resignation Profumo began to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London, and continued to work there for the rest of his life. He "had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place", eventually becoming Toynbee Hall's chief fundraiser, and used his political skills and contacts to raise large sums of money. All this work was done as a volunteer, since Profumo was able to live on his inherited wealth.

. Now, that is what an honorable man does when he commits an uncharacteristically evil action. One feels that Lord Longford was reasonable in feeling "more admiration [for Profumo] than [for] all the men I've known in my lifetime." And had Kennedy reacted by living a life of penance and good works, rather than using political connections and dishonesty to keep a grip on a position of immense personal power that he clung to grimly literally for the rest of his life, then I would say of Kennedy, as I say of Profumo, "I hope that when I find myself face-to-face with my own sin, I respond to it with the courage and honesty and humility that man showed." Probably I wouldn't; probably I am much more like Kennedy than I am like Profumo...but to be compared to me, is not to be complimented.

You know what else is difficult? It's especially difficult to sit in silence when you remember the unprecedented venom and dishonesty of his unspeakable and inexcusable personal attack on Robert Bork, a speech which marks a stark and apparently irreversible turning point in the way Supreme Court nominations in particular and Washington politics in general were carried out. Only a man utterly without honor and utterly without ethics could have said the things Kennedy said with a straight face, knowing them, as he did, to be lies and grotesque exaggerations; only a man dedicated to partisan politics at the expense of all else including simple human decency could have launched that attack.

And it is especially difficult to sit in silence when you hear the likes of Melissa Lafsky say things like this:

So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

Um...I find myself speechless.

Wow.

Okay, here's the deal. If you want to take the line the Anchoress takes, I'll happily take it with you: Teddy Kennedy is somebody God loved, and there was no doubt a priest with him most of the way in his final months, and we may hope that he found his way to the repentance and mercy that we all will have to find when our time comes. And if that's all you want to say, then that's all I'll say, and we can be in agreement. And you can stop here; the rest of what I have to say, is not addressed to you.

If you want to try to convince me that Teddy Kennedy's life is being "rightfully heralded," in the sense that you want to try to convince me that Kennedy was a good man and a good Catholic, then the politest thing that I can tell you is that you are passing judgment on him when you call him good, in apparent refusal to weigh his actual behavior by any standard that I consider to be moral or rational, and that I can only do my best to refrain from passing my own judgment -- given that all the evidence available to me points to the conclusion that he spent most of his life as an evil and manipulative man, and therefore only the knowledge of my own ignorance of his spiritual state can stand in the way of my condemning him unservedly. His actions in personal life were, when he thought he could get away with it, shockingly often downright evil actions, and I know of no evidence that he repented of them. I can only plead ignorance of the psychological pain and motivations that lay behind those actions (any son of Joe Kennedy could hardly escape psychopathy of some sort), and my further ignorance of what happened spiritually in Kennedy's last days...which is to say, I can at best say, "I do not know for sure that Kennedy was an evil man, though he did many evil things." But then by that standard you cannot possibly say, "I know for sure that Kennedy was a virtuous man, for he did many virtuous things." I will agree not to spend the next two months saying that Kennedy was a sociopath, if you will agree not to spend the next two months saying that he was a nice guy once you got to know him. Fair enough?

But of Kennedy the politician, we most certainly can pass judgment. There is hardly a piece of catastrophic legislation from the past fifty years that doesn't bear his fingerprints, and insofar as he has influenced the way in which politics are done, that influence has been disastrously negative. It is not possible to calculate the price in personal devastation that has been paid by the citizens of this country, and especially the poorest and most vulnerable among us, by the folly and influence of this deeply wrongheaded but deeply powerful man. I cannot speak with confidence to the question of whether Kennedy's impact on those he knew privately was a net positive or a net negative, though certainly he would have to do a great deal of private good indeed just to get back to break-even after what he did to Mary Jo, and to his wife, and to the powerless waitresses and star-struck political groupies he used and discarded along the way. But I know that those harmed by all the statist legislation that Kennedy's hagiographers assure us would not have been passed without Kennedy's influence, number in the tens and perhaps hundreds of millions.

Now, God is able to bring good even out of great evil, and therefore my faith tells me that on that Day when all is revealed, we will be able to see how God has used Kennedy's folly and dishonesty and partisan malice to accomplish things Kennedy himself would never have imagined. But that is no excuse for Kennedy; "these things must come, but woe to him through whom they come." And these are great mysteries, of which we can but profess ignorance. If you are willing to say with me, "Whether the direct and humanly inferrable consequences of Kennedy's political actions was good or bad, Romans 8:28 still applies, and therefore we should focus on the good God will accomplish rather than on the harm that Kennedy did" -- well, I'm happy to go there with you, too; though that marks the end of the useful part of the conversation since the "good God will accomplish" is almost by definition something presently invisible to our fallen vision. But, yes, I'll very happily agree not to talk about how much harm Kennedy did to the country if you'll agree not to rhapsodize about how much good he did it.

But if you are going to insist on carrying on and on about what a wonderful human being Kennedy was and what a great Senator Teddy was, then at a certain point you had better be prepared to hear me eventually say two things:

1. On the humanly observable (non-8:28) level, the world in general, and America in particular, is a worse place today because Teddy Kennedy was born in 1963. He left the world worse than he found it, and his influence was profoundly negative. God save this nation from more politicians like that one.

2. God forbid that my personal life and my moral choices should remind anybody of Teddy Kennedy's, and may God forgive me for those times in my past where it already does.

On praise of Kennedy by Republican fellow Senators

2009-08-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Doesn't it strike you that almost all of the "he was a nice guy even though I disagreed with his politics" praise that Kennedy gets from his Republican colleagues, really reduces to nothing more than, "If you were somebody, like me, whom Kennedy found it useful to charm, then he could be very very very charming indeed?" It's as if Republican politicians have completely forgotten that charm and virtue have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, that charm is the indispensable requirement of every S.O.B. who wants to be able to get away with outrageous and sociopathic behavior, and that furthermore charm is the primary professional skill of the professional politician. Kennedy could charm you if he thought it worth his while. Okay. And that says what, exactly, about his character?

If I want to know what kind of person a man is, I don't ask how he treats the people he thinks he might need favors from later -- which would include, in Kennedy's case, pretty much every member of the media and every member of Congress. I ask how he treats the people whom he thinks he can treat as he wants without fear of repercussion...waitresses, for example, or starstruck young staffers whom he has gone to the trouble to get drunk, or young ladies who have been assaulted by his close relatives. If you tell me, sure, Kennedy left Mary Jo to a lingering death by asphyxiation and then spent the rest of his life collecting and being amused by Chappaquiddick jokes, but that's not so bad because when I arrived in Washington as a fellow Congressman he made an effort to charm me...sorry, but that doesn't make me think well of Kennedy's character. It just makes me think badly of your intelligence.

Delightfully, blissfully un-self-aware Democratic website of the day

2009-08-15T11:04:00.001-07:00

Today we find ourselves over at Talking Point Memos, where I happened to notice a sidebar reference to John Mackey's outstanding op-ed on an approach to health reform that is quite different from (and quite a bit saner than) the One's. Now I've already pointed to that op-ed, and if you have read it, you will note the following points:

1. Mackey doesn't like the current system and wants to reform it. He is, therefore, emphatically in favor of health-care reform -- just not in favor of Obama's proposals, which he believes will make things even worse than they are now, and which upsets him precisely because he thinks it's really, really important to make sure Americans have access to good health care. To say that Mackey "opposes health-care reform" is...well, the most charitable description would be "clumsily misleading," assuming that one believes it is more charitable to believe that an adult person cannot read than it is to believe that he would deliberately create a false impression.

2. The one absolutely certain consequence of the Obamessiah's proposals is that the power of politicians such as Reid and Pelosi and The One Himself, would be immensely enhanced -- which is to say, that they would personally be vastly enriched in the only currency that politicans care about, which is political power. The conflict of interest that exists whenever a politician proposes laws that increase the power of politicians and reduces the individual's right to tell the politician to bugger off, is the ~~elephant~~ donkey in the room in every public debate involving Democratic politicans (and more than half the debates involving Republican politicians as well, Republican politicians being by and large politicians by essence and Republicans by chance). But the True Bara-meter Of All Virtue And Wisdom of course has nothing in view but the Good of the People. Well, the Good of the Right Sort Of People, at least.

John Mackey, however, is a business owner, and therefore presumptively evil. Sure, he has catered for years to a market sector consisting heavily of urban liberals who happen to have quite a bit more money than your average Joe, but there's always been something fishy about him that we can't quite put our finger on...oh, yeah, he's a business owner. And he's rich, like, he has more money than your average upper-middle-class urban liberal. Now, I mean, being rich can be forgiven if you're a Kennedy or a Kerry or an Edwards or you work in Hollywood and say the right sort of things about the wrong sort of people (namely Republicans), but you have to be suspicious of anybody who got money by identifying things other people need and figuring out how to meet those needs reliably and at low cost, rather than by inheriting it or being bribed by lobbyists to confiscate it on their behalf from taxpayers. I mean, these businessfolk are such bastards.

Now, Mackey's salary is $1 per year because he decided a while back that he didn't want to work for money any more. Furthermore, most of his arguments keep coming back to, "I've paid attention to what my employees say they need and want, and one thing they need is really good health care, and this is how we think we need to get there, because experience shows that going the direction Obama wants to go takes you to a place where people can't get the health care they need." Furthermore, by openly taking a position opposed to Obama while knowing perfectly well that most of his customer base will have a knee-jerk "boycott the bastard" reaction while spending precisely as much time on reading his actual op-ed as the average Democratic Congressman will spend reading the health-care bill he votes into law, Mackey knows perfectly well that the impact of his op-ed on Whole Foods revenues will be negative.

So what does Talking Points Memos tell its readers is going on here? Pretty simple:

1. John Mackey is opposed to reform and doesn't think Americans need health care.

2. He is doing this not because, like The One, he is genuinely concerned for the welfare of Americans, but because, unlike The One, he is out to expand his personal corporate empire.

But conveniently, [Mackey] also includes the following advice: "Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat."

Translation: Whole Foods is the solution to all of America's health care woes.

Translation: Mackey is merely trying to boost his corporation's profits. By, um, openly taking a position certain to infuriate well more than half his customer base. Oh, the cunning of it all!

I'll leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to decide whether my translation of TPM's point is more or less accurate than TPM's translation of Mackey's op-ed.

In a related item, can you believe the way those awful swastika-carrying Astroturf mobs are pretending that the President is saying things he isn't really saying at all? What kind of scumbag could sink so low as to misrepresent his opponents' views?

[chuckling] I swear, sometimes I think the Democratic Party has an initiation ritual in which the pledge is required to locate the part of his brain that provides self-awareness and a sense of irony, and lobotomize it. Thank God I actually know some reasonable Democrats in private life, because if the only Democrats I ever heard from were the ones who make all the noise and get all the air time, I'd be absolutely convinced that 50% of our electorate had gone clinically insane.

A genuinely fascinating point embedded within the Whole Foods opinion piece

2009-08-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

Whole Foods president John Mackey has written an excellent op-ed piece demonstrating the idiocy of leaping from "the current system is unsustainable" to "therefore you should support whatever insanity the President and his far-Left cronies wish to impose since anything is better than what we have." He demonstrates it by the simple act of listing common-sense reforms which go in exactly the opposite direction from President Obama's "reforms," which would go miles toward solving the actual problems that we actually have, and which I think would get lots of support from most people...except the main donor base of the Democratic Party, which is drastically Left-of-center and is far more concerned with imposing a New World Order than with, you know, actually helping people be healthy.

The part I find most fascinating is this one:

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Exactly. The reason they want those supplemental dollars is, of course, that in these countries where health care is "free," you can't get a simple cholesterol exam unless you're willing to fork out $900. Welcome to the wonderful world of Something For Nothing. I mean, you did believe the liberals when they promised it to you, right?

This is pretty good

2009-08-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

In fact it's outstanding. You are welcome to suspect Crowder of special pleading; but then I've been interested in this subject for a decade and if anything he understates the problem. I'll vouch personally for the accuracy of his analysis; but he presents it far more entertainingly than I would be able to.

In particular, note that at two different government health care outlets, the staff there told Crowder's friend that the only solution available to him was to go pay $900 -- at a private clinic. I think my favorite bit is when the friendly helpful nurse at one clinic, in giving Crowder's buddy advice on how to go about getting a cholesterol test, tells him that he needs to put in his two or three years on the waiting list for a family doctor -- yes, you heard that right, two to three years on the waiting list to get a family doctor -- but that that's okay because "you're young, you have time." (This section runs from the 7:25 mark to 7:45, if you can't really believe that it's possible to be told such a thing by a woman who is actually well-intentioned and wants to be helpful.) Canadian health care is free, you see, in about the same sense that it's free for me to have the government send me on a joyride into space, which is to say that you don't get charged money to fail to receive a service...oh, wait a second, in Canada (thanks to those taxes) you do get charged money to fail to receive service. A helluva lot of money, in fact.

Or, as the nurse helpfully points out, he could pay $900 at the private clinic...if he happened to be one of the Canadians who had enough money left over after the exorbitant taxes Canadians pay, and the absurdly high cost of living, to have $900 spare dollars lying around to spend on a cholesterol test.

I also love the part with Diane...I mean, I don't love the fact that her mother unnecessarily lost her leg to the waiting list; that's exactly the reason that I think that whole system is evil in its end results as well as in its means, and I use that word "evil" in its full, literal, technical and carefully considered sense...what I mean is, I love the way Diane frames her disgust with the Amazing Wonderful Single-Payer System That We Americans Should All Emulate Even Though It Literally Treats People Worse Than Dogs:

DIANE: ...because I have a dog, and if I want to get a blood test for him at the vet, it takes me 15 minutes and costs ten dollars and I have the results.

STEPHEN: And it's private?

DIANE: Well, yeah, it's private -- he's a vet. I'd be willing to pay ten dollars to have my blood tests right away too.

If you aren't prepared to explain to me why you believe that Obama's health care program won't fall afoul of exactly the same economic laws that have savaged the NHS in Britain and the single-payer system in Canada, then don't bother wasting my time telling me about how our current system is "unsustainable" and that anything is better than what we have. Um...no, frankly. You could make the system catastrophically worse than it already is. You could implement Obamacare.

Mr. President, please add me to the list...

2009-08-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

…of individuals who think that this whole health care plan of yours is either the lunacy of economic barbarians with the approximate cumulative IQ of a small school of goldfish who were oxygen-deprived at birth, or else a shamelessly dishonest attempt grossly to extend the reach and power and intrusiveness of federal government into private life, by persons with neither honesty nor honor who couldn't care less about how much irreversible damage they do to our health, our economy, and our liberties, so long as they can temporarily pacify their insatiable craving for ever more power. I will happily be expressing this opinion to anybody interested in it right up until your jackboots crush my windpipe. As this makes me by definition a liar and a member of the swastika-toting mob, your list would be incomplete without my name. As it is difficult to think of any roster on which it would be more honorable to appear, I demand to be placed thereon.

What an inconvenience that First Amendment must be for you and all of your fellow…I tell you what, I will generously allow you the opportunity to choose your own derogatory term to complete this sentence, stipulating only that it must be an extremely non-Baptist one.

And how utterly unfit to be the leaders of a free people you are. "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism..." Unless, of course, the Obamessiah is the One against whom the free citizen dares to direct his dissent. As my father always told me, nobody fears debate more than the man who knows he has no case. And not since Richard Nixon has this country seen a President less capable of facing disagreement with grace and equanimity.

I attach my name, Social Security number, address and telephone number for your Big-Brotherly convenience.

Yours most sincerely,

Darrell Kenneth Pierce, Jr.
Social Security # [omitted from the blog but not from the actual e-mail]
731 South Marathon Way, Stafford, Texas, 77477
Telephone number 832.643.8820

A proposed divorce agreement

2009-07-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

While this purports to be from a law student, I don't for a moment buy it -- you wouldn't believe the cleanup I had to do on grammar, punctuation, and the spelling of "Barbara" Streisand's name; and the references to individuals seem very dated. I mean, Shirley MacClaine was a nutcase, I'll give you that -- but who under the age of thirty-five or so remembers the glory that was Shirley MacClaine's nuttiness? Am I supposed to think that this was written by a guy who is still in law school...in his forties? Sorry, ain't buyin' what you're sellin' there.

So I imagine this is an old piece I hadn't seen before that's been updated with a Sarah Palin allusion or two and re-issued. Still pretty funny, though -- especially because so many on the far Left wouldn't see anything funny about conservatives' offering to keep Bibles, the NRA, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies or Wal-Mart.

---------

Dear American liberals, leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Obama supporters, et al:

We have stuck together since the late 1950's, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has run its course. Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on what is right; so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own ways.

Here is a model separation agreement:

Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by land mass, each taking a portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets, since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.

We don't like redistributive taxes so you can keep them. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU. Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA and the military. You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnell. (You are, however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of them.)

We'll keep the capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart and Wall Street. You can have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies and illegal aliens. We'll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO's and rednecks. We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.

You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us. You can have the peaceniks and war protesters. When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we'll help provide them security.

We'll keep our Judeo-Christian values. You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, humanism and Shirley McClain. You can also have the U.N., but we will no longer be paying the bill.

We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Subaru station wagon you can find.

You can give everyone health care if you can find any practicing doctors. We'll continue to believe health care is a luxury and not a right. We'll keep "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the national anthem. I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute "Imagine," "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," "Kum Ba Ya" or "We Are the World."

We'll practice trickle-down economics and you can give trickle-up poverty your best shot.

Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our flag.

Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other like-minded liberal and conservative patriots and if you do not agree, just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you ANWAR which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.

Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law student and American

P.S. Also, please take Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda with you.

----------------------

On Obama's speaking style (hint: o-v-e-r-r-a-t-e-d)

2009-04-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from a chatty e-mail to a friend who had referred to the President as "the Obamanable One":

About Obama I generally say very little, except to make private use of the ample comic potential he provides as long as one can distract oneself from the devastating consequences likely to ensue from his conceit, naivete, and genuinely staggering ignorance. "The Obamanable One" is pretty good, though. I'll share with you a couple of things that I hope will allow you to extract some gallows humor out of the appalling situation...

First, is a riddle from my son, brought home from school in the middle of the presidential campaign:

Q. What's the difference between Obama and Osama?
A. It's the BS.

Second, there's a conversation I had with a close Pakistani friend who thinks Obama is the bee's knees. Obama was on television giving a speech at the time. Now, I've watched a lot of politicians give speeches over the years, and they have tended since the invention of the teleprompter to all look more or less the same: the politician glances at the teleprompter for as long as it takes him to be reminded of the contents of his next paragraph, and then for as long as that paragraph lasts in his memory, he works the crowd and the camera. In particular, ever since Kennedy/Nixon, all politicians know the importance of looking into the television viewer's eyes -- which is to say, straight into the camera -- and projecting sincerity and concern and whatever else he's hoping to b.s. the viewer into believing the politician feels. And when Obama first burst onto the scene, all any Democrat could talk about were three things. (A) How Satan had a lot to learn from Dubya about this whole Master Of Evil schtick (not all Democrats were into this but, very noticeably, Obama himself played to it shamelessly). (B) How it would prove that America didn't care about race any more if we were to elect a black dude, a proposition of whose inherent self-contradiction its proponents were blissfully unaware, even as they babbled incessantly about how cool it was that Obama was black, and about whether it was more important for America to elect a black dude in penance for racism or to elect a chick in penance for sexism. (C) What a great speaker Obama was.

Now, I don't have a very high opinion of Dubya, but that's because I think he inherited from his family some very foolish assumptions that had highly unfortunate consequences, not because I think he is an evil man; so (A) didn't interest me. And I genuinely don't give a rat's ass what color a man is, and think it says just as much evil about a country when that country elects a man because he's black as it would should that country refuse to elect him for the same reason; so (B) was of no interest to me either. But (C) caught my interest...up until I saw the man speak.

What struck me forcibly about Obama's speeches were the following:

1. He had a fascinating rhetorical technique in which, whenever he appealed to "victims" that the Democratic Party was going to help (that is, by taking money away from other people and giving it to the "victims"), everything was concrete and highly personal. He would pick a specific single mother who was a victim of tragedy, for example, and tell her story with lots of details. But then when he turned to the traditional Democratic pasttime of demonizing those Americans who dare to be more successful than is the Democratic Party's base, all of the accusations and bitterness were there -- but they were carefully depersonalized. The attacks were bitter and vicious and were clearly intended to stir up anger and resentment -- but it was never "evil rich people" who were keeping Democratic voters poor and hungry, as it would have been in the past speeches of such notable Franciscan practicioners of poverty and simplicity of life as, say, the Kennedy brothers. No, when Obama was stirring up the bitterness pot, the bad guys were never people; instead they were "the forces of intolerance," or something similarly impersonal. Thus we had the fascinating spectacle of a man whose message was in large part, "You've been getting screwed by evil rich Republicans and I'll make it stop," i.e., an appeal to bitterness, but who in the very act of presenting that message, presented himself -- successfully! -- as the candidate of reconciliation and healing, in defiance not only of his own entire life history, but even in defiance of the actual content of the very speeches in which he spoke of the need for healing. The student of rhetoric within me gives him a standing ovation; that was a helluva trick he pulled off (though it does not speak at all well for the intelligence of those taken in by it). The moralist and patriot within me naturally has a rather different reaction.

2. He seems to me to be a one-note pony: I've never seen him give a speech in which he didn't seem to be posing for a bust. The chin is elevated slightly in a pose of self-conscious nobility; the voice is self-consciously serious and self-important; and when he attempts to be humorous it falls painfully flat. If, like a great many Democrats, you believe that George W. Bush represented the end of all civilization worthy of the name, and you think that every speech of the President should be the next Gettysburg Address...why, then, you probably liked Obama's speeches, because he clearly thinks that each of his speeches is the next Gettysburg Address. Those of us who are old enough to remember Reagan know better.

3. But the thing that really caught my attention was that Obama never looks at the camera. He looks at a forty-five degree angle or so off to his right, and then he swings back to look at a forty-five degree angle or so off to his left. Then he looks back to his right. Then back to his left. He's practically a metronome. And he's always looking at the same elevation, have you noticed? He never looks down at the people in the front row, never elevates his eyes to the "ceiling fans," as I once heard a pop singer call the fans in the back row of the balcony. For a long time I couldn't figure out what was up with that -- right up until I saw how astonishingly badly he floundered in any venue in which he is forced to ad-lib rather than use his teleprompter. And the penny finally dropped: Obama reads his whole speech word-for-word from the teleprompters. He looks at the teleprompter on his right, and then he swings back to look at the teleprompter on his left. Then he looks back at the teleprompter on his right. Then back to the one on his left.

Now, Dubya is never going to be mistaken for a great orator. But even Dubya knew his own speeches well enough to take his eyes away from the teleprompter every now and then and look at the camera. So now I get the hugest kick out of watching Obama give a speech, because I just watch his head move to the right, and then to the left, and then to the right...and I laugh myself silly.

At any rate, I was sitting with Novera (my Pakistani friend) while Obama was speaking, and I mentioned this teleprompter thing. "Just watch," I said after explaining it to her, and then I did a simple play-by-play: "See, he's looking at the one on his right...now the left...now the right...now the left..."

After about ten seconds an incredulous Novera burst out, "Oh my God, you're right!"

"...now the right...now the left..."

Then in tones of mingled amusement and outrage, Novera demanded to know why I had insisted on showing her that. "I always LIKED watching his speeches, and now I can't see anything but his head swinging back and forth between those teleprompters -- you've ruined it for me!"

At this point I felt I had earned the right to cackle in evil triumph, and I accordingly exercised that right. Then I told her one of the very few jokes that I've ever made up on my own rather than stealing from somebody else -- another Obama riddle, as it happens:

Q: What did Barack say to Michelle at the very height of passion on their first night together in the White House?
A: Nothing. The teleprompter was broken.

Well, that's enough uncharity for now, I suppose...

By the way, I think it's only fair to say that I'm not the only person who caught onto the "forces of intolerance" rhetorical trick. (I mean, it was an obvious trick, of course; the fact that Obama felt safe, and was safe, in using it, is proof that the American public knows nothing about rhetorical technique and therefore has no defense against even the more obvious tricks. There were probably hundreds of people across the country who noticed what he was doing; unfortunately there were a couple of hundred million other people who had no idea.) I think I remember seeing on some other political blog -- the Corner, perhaps? -- a comment about this trick of Obama's, and thinking, "Yes! That's EXACTLY what the little slimeball does! Thank God somebody else sees it." So if I happen to remember where I saw it I'll come back and retroactively hat-tip 'em.

George Will nails McCain's character...

2008-09-24T07:09:00.001-07:00

...which is why there are only two reasons that I can stomach voting for McCain this election cycle, having, before stepping into the voting booth, quaffed a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a forlorn attempt to preempt the inevitable nausea as I pull the lever:

1. Sarah Palin needs four years of Vice-Presidential experience before I can be truly happy voting for her for President.

2. Barack Obama...God help us all.

Here is Will on McCain. Money quotes:

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people.

I would argue that you can explain McCain's entire history in the Senate by postulating a single motive: the motive of assuring himself that he is morally superior to all his fellow Republicans, while always histrionically covering his eyes to the possibility that his disagreements with them arise not from his moral superiority, but from his intellectual inferiority. Being well aware of the fallacy of the affirmation of the consequent, I do not allege that his entire political career has in fact been driven by the desire to assure himself of moral superiority. I merely affirm that such a motive would explain pretty much everything the man has ever done since entering politics -- including (since this is the most Democratic of motivations) his flirtation with switching parties to the party whose entire raison d'être is assuring its members that by voting appropriately they prove their moral superiority to all Republicans. That's our boy John: the least repulsive Democrat running.

But here's my very favorite part, simply because Will has found the perfect wording, wording that absolutely captures what has always seemed to this cynic to be the essence of John McCain the politician (however much I admire and appreciate John McCain the military hero):

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

How perfect is the bit about McCain's "bottomless reservoir of certitudes"? As Ambroce Bierce once said, "For every man, there is a tag that will stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it." "Boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes" probably isn't quite there. But it's getting close.

The only problem with Will's analysis in that last paragraph, is that the alternative before the American people is not one that pits a grotesquely inexperienced and ill-prepared but temperamentally sound candidate against a candidate who is crippled by boiling moralism, a bottomless reservoir of certitudes, and utter contempt for the morals and character of any person who presumes to disagree with him. No, alas, the American people must choose between two candidates whose wellsprings of repulsive self-righteousness are to all appearances bottomless, two candidates overflowing with boiling moralism, two candidates absolutely convinced that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who agree with them, and those who are evil (and furthermore that every public crisis is, of necessity, a result of evil people acting from malicious intentions, never the result of incompetent persons acting from disastrously ill-advised good intentions). The differences lie in the fact that one boilingly moralistic candidate does at least appear to attempt to live by the ethics he would propose for others, while the second preaches political moralism while practicing political prostitution; that one boilingly moralistic candidate has a sense of morality that is at least grounded in something resembling the natural moral law, while the other works from a sense of morality that resembles true morality about as much as Janet Reno resembles a supermodel; that one boiling moralist has been tested in the crucible of torture and proved to have a core of steel in times of crisis, while the other crumples into an incoherent "My Pet Goat"-style fetal ball of helplessness and confusion whenever he hits a rough spot in his Presidential campaign and it takes days for his teleprompter-armed advisors to prop him back up into a simulacrum of a leader...oh, and also, one boilingly moralistic candidate at least has a reasonable degree of preparation for the job, while the other is patently inexperienced and unprepared for the position's inherent burden of responsibility.

Other than that, there's nothing particularly invidious or irresponsible about Will's final compare-and-contrast paragraph.

Need some help from liberal friends here

2008-09-16T12:16:00.001-07:00

Okay, I'm feeling kind of stupid because I'm obviously missing something. I'm thinking I must be laboring under some sort of unnoticed assumption, because Obama's defense in this Taheri/Zebari kerfuffle looks to me like a confession. But Obama's spokesman doesn't seem to think she's confessing anything; she acts like she's denying something.

I don't understand, and I really dislike not understanding. So I would be very grateful if somebody could help me out here.

Here's the accusation:

In the New York Post, conservative Iranian-born columnist Amir Taheri quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying the Democrat made the demand when he visited Baghdad in July, while publicly demanding an early withdrawal.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview, according to Taheri.

"However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open," Zebari reportedly said.

Okay, so the charge seems to be that Obama asked Zebari to wait until after Bush was no longer President to sign an agreement to withdraw troops.

Now the...well, Ms. Morigi certainly seems to think she is issuing a denial:

But Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial."

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

Um...look, I don't get it at all. Didn't she just say that Obama told the Iraqis that they should put off signing the agreement about U.S. forces until after Bush was no longer President?

I mean...

????

I could use some help here, guys. What is the difference between what Taheri said and what Morigi said? I mean, substantively -- obviously she said "they should not rush through" and he said "delay" but I don't see what difference that makes.

Did I mention that the Intellectual Left reminds me of Wile E. Coyote?

2008-09-16T06:58:00.001-07:00

Obviously it's not just me.

A new twist on fisking, and this ETK (English Teacher's Kid) loves the device

2008-09-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

Suitably Flip sends the Obamessiah's latest speech off to his sixth-grade English teacher so that she can grade it.

HT: Ace.

Oh, she MUST be fisked...

2008-09-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

...but I don't have time to do it today.

Still, here we have about as clear an example as we possibly could have that the Left has come completely, utterly unhinged. Sarah Palin [gasp] has lived all her life in the Pacific Northwest. And there are some crazy frickin' people up there. So, you know, how do we know she isn't one of 'em?

I think we need a new phrase. "Guilt by association" seems so...inadequate in this case. Why, Sarah Palin lives in the same state as crazy people. Are you people blind, blind to the danger?????

I love this bit:

But the region also must be defined by its history of intolerance, resentment, antistatism and violence. Appearing in the region in the 1980s and 1990s were some of the most notorious "hate radicals" of our time: militia groups, survivalists, Identity Christians, secessionists, white supremacists and others.

Some simply hated the federal government, like...

THE PERIL: Wait! Wait! [waving hand in the air excitedly] I know the answer! Pick me, Miz McNicol! Pick me!

MS. McNICOL: Yes, young Peril?

THE PERIL: It's Jeremiah Wright, ain't it?

MS. McNICOL: Why, you unspeakable young racist whippersnapper! Just for that, you will stay after class and write one hundred times on the chalkboard, "It is only bad to hate the federal government if you are a white redneck Christo-nut. And George Bush isn't running it."

HT: The Corner.

On the Democratic ticket...

2008-09-15T12:05:00.001-07:00

...no resume goes unembellished, it would seem.

HT: Alas, I forget. Mea culpa.

My initial analysis of the Palin pick, from before her convention speech

2008-09-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

NOTE: the following was written the day after McCain named Palin his running mate. I intended to go back and check on a bunch of the numbers, which were pulled from memory and probably inaccurate (e.g., the jump in Michelle Obama’s salary within a couple of months of her husband’s acquisition of power in the Chicago machine); and I intended to cut way down on the snark factor, out of respect for the many liberal Democrats in private life who I think far more worthy of said respect than are the parasitical, narcissistic likes of Obama and Biden. But events have moved rapidly, and I didn’t get it rewritten, and the truth is I keep these blogs primarily for as a journal for my own reference so that I can look back and see what I was thinking at various times in the past rather than as entertainment for my friends or persuasion for the masses…so it goes up. I assure my liberal friends that I am aware that the tone is uncharitable, unhelpful and inappropriate. I am, you perceive, something of a jerk; all I can say is that most of the time I try to keep myself on something of a tight leash.

I just want to point out my prescience on the comparison of small-town mayorial experience to experience as an Alinsky-esque community organizer; turns out Palin saw the same comparison and made it one of the most memorable moments of her speech, with the even more delightful result that Obama publicly soiled himself in apoplectic rage over the idea that somebody might denigrate the critical and noble job job of ~~talking people into pestering the government to give them money~~ community organizing – under the apparent impression that in so doing he was proving how much more than Palin he is in touch with ordinary Americans. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Oh, and one other thing: because I genuinely am interested in understanding the people who disagree with me (it’s not just a pose, you know) I’ve been looking around, since writing this, to find out how exactly Democrats expect Obama to bring “reconciliation” -- as you will see from the text, they seem to be using the word "reconciliation" in some sense that at my most charitable I would have to call "idiosyncratic." When people who aren't stupid say something that seems stupid, it's usually worth your time to dig into it and figure out what it is they're really trying to say; so I've been trying to do that. I haven't found much other than sheer blind faith; about the only thing I have to work with is one common, but I think patently unseaworthy, theme: the idea that Obama will “inspire us” in some way, that he will “inspire” us to work together, that he will “inspire us” to make change happen, etc. Um, not to be unkind, but this presupposes that most of us are lacking bullshitometers, and haven’t noticed the tremendous gap between the Obama rhetoric and the reality of his record (and even the reality of his own campaign’s more-or-less constantly verbally abusive, bad-faith behavior). And maybe, given that Americans don’t study rhetoric in high school any more, that’s a perfectly valid presupposition. I kinda doubt it, though. Furthermore, look at the way Obama's supporters have been savaging Palin and her kids. Where is the New Politics that Obama was supposed to inspire? As far as I can see, the politics of Obama's public supporters is savage to the point of insanity. Either Obama has no influence at all on people like, oh, say, the mainstream news media (in which case why are we electing him?) or else his influence is negative (in which case the sooner he is banished from the national political scene the better the Republic's chances of survival). So, um, I guess I ain't buyin' the inspiration thang.

Certain Democratic commentators are delighted with McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, on the grounds that it destroys McCain’s argument that Obama is too inexperienced. We can return to that in a moment, but first let’s turn to something that seems blindingly obvious to me but apparently has not occurred to these commentators: Palin does far more damage to Obama’s twin mantras of change and reconciliation, than she does to McCain’s arguments to experience.

I think it’s hilarious that Democrats simultaneously (a) talk about Obama’s ability to “bring America together” and “unify America,” and also (b) compare Obama to Lincoln. Um…on the reconciliation thing there…y’all keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it is. Lincoln may have been one of our two greatest presidents, but nobody in the entire history of the world has so notoriously sucked at “bringing America together” than Lincoln. Um – does the phrase “American Civil War” mean anything to you people? Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot – you went to government-run American public high schools. My bad. Let me fill you in a bit: 620,000 dead Americans. (Which is, to say, about 150 times as many as in Evil Chimpy McHitler’s War.) Brother against brother, father against son. Bitterness that lasted more than a century and was still causing bad blood in state legislatures as recently as fifteen years ago.

Yeah, quite an architect of reconciliation, that Abe Lincoln. That is, if by “reconciliation” one means, “civil war.” And come to think of it, maybe that is what the Democrats mean by the “reconciliation” they expect the Obamessiah to bring to America – since that's pretty much exactly what he’s already brought to the Democratic Party.

In all seriousness, Obama is considered to be a “reconciler” only by liberal Democrats, for the simple reason that Democrats apparently do not think reconciliation involves compromise and good will and seeing the best even in those that disagree with you. Instead, so far as I can see, the Democrats that trust Obama to bring “reconciliation” think that “reconciliation” is brought about by shameless tokenism. Obama has spent his life in the company of domestic terrorists, of lunatic-fringe, paranoid, hate-filled black supremacists, and of the particular American subculture that is composed principally of folly-ridden, self-impressed soi-disant “geniuses” (“geniuses,” that is, in much the same sense as is Wile E. Coyote), a subculture populated by intellectuals who confuse intelligence with wisdom and can no more speak of “rednecks” and “fundamentalists” without sneering than they can fly. His politics are extreme as they can get, and he responds to any suggestion that his ideas might be mistaken or misguided by accusing those who disagree with him of racism, and asking the federal government to silence them by threat of legal action, and encouraging his cult members to drown them out by the raucous invocation of the mystical incantations known as “talking points.” No sane person could possibly think Mr. Keep-Infanticide-Safe-and-Legal a likely candidate for healing the divide between Left and Right; and therefore, if one wishes to think the best of those who disagree with one and therefore do not wish to question their sanity, one is forced to ask, “What in God’s name do the Left mean when they use that word?” And as far as I can tell the answer is simply: in the mind of those on the far Left, if we elect him as President, that will prove that we aren’t racist, and that will make all our racial problems go away.

And if that’s really what they think, then they have the approximate cumulative intelligence of a school of guppies. I presume that’s not really what they think, of course, but if you ask me by what reasoning process they have concluded that Obama will unify this nation in any meaningful sense, all I can say is: beats me like a stepchild, Sugarlips. Maybe some of my liberal friends will generously forgive the chain-yankingly obnoxious tone of this piece and enlighten us.

But Sarah Palin, on the other hand? Well, she’s got an approval rating of 75% -- among the Democrats in her state. After two years of governing them, which means that they’ve seen how she actually performs, and they still think she rocks.

What do you think Mr. Reconciliation’s approval rating is among Republicans in his district? For that matter, what do you think his approval rating is among Democrats nationally? – excluding black Democrats, of course, who would approve of a Labrador retriever as a Presidential candidate as long as it was a black one.

So if it’s reconciliation you want, and an appeal that crosses party lines, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she has the goods. Obama? I think all you have to do to see how much of a “unifier” Barack is, is to look at the 2008 Democratic primary experience. As far as I can tell, by “unifying the American people,” Democrats presumably mean, “inspire the creation of an entire political movement that denotes itself by the acronym, ‘NUMA.’” Maybe he can get O-Zone to play “Dragostea din tei” at his next political convention. (You know: “NUMA, NUMA, yay! NUMA, NUMA, yay! NUMA, NUMA, NUMA yay!” Granted, I took a few spelling liberties with the original Rumanian there…)

Then there’s “change.” Here again, Obama talks about change. But if we look at deeds rather than words, what do we find? We find a man who has followed the tried and true methods of political advancement: got himself the right sponsors, got a spot in the Daly-family Chicago political machine, served as a loyal partisan soldier and was rewarded by the machine’s arranging for his opponent’s sealed divorce records to be opened once it became obvious that Obama was getting his butt kicked in the fair election, got a good old-fashioned cash infusion in the form of a plum job for the wife and rewarded his wife’s employer in the good old-fashioned way by steering more than a million dollars of taxpayer money into the coffers of said employer.

I can't remember the exact numbers so I made them up because I don't have time, what with the hurricane, to go hunt them up at the moment. You guys got that? The numbers are made up. If the Republicans were really going to go with this line of attack they would obviously have to go get the right numbers. I'm just illustrating the graphic I think they ought to generate. THE NUMBERS ARE MADE UP. We're clear on this, right? Made up. Okay.
If Obama’s such an agent of change, how about you guys show me some? Find me any point at which Obama bucked his party’s powers-that-be, up until the point at which political calculation told him he could leapfrog to the head of the line. Show me any change, even a tiny one, that Obama has brought, and compare it to what happened in Juneau when the Sarahcuda showd up. In the inspired words of I forget which pundit, “Obama loves the future, because that’s where all his accomplishments are.” It’s no wonder that Obama never invokes change without invoking hope as well – he certainly can’t invoke his past record. If you’re gambling on getting change from Obama, you’d bloody well better be good at hope. Let me guess: you also hope your alcoholic brother-in-law is sooner or later gonna pay back that money he owes you, right?

Again, one has to wonder, what can the Democrats possibly mean by the word “change” when they associate it with Barack Obama, whose career is pretty much a textbook, by-the-numbers example of the dirty, crony-machine-playing career politician? And here again, the only thing I can figure is that the “change” that Democrats have in mind is a change in which all the crooked, self-serving, career-parasite Republicans are kicked out and replaced instead with crooked, self-serving, career-parasite Democrats. I can understand that that’s a change Democrats can believe in. It’s also, if you go by Barack Obama’s past deeds rather than his promises, the only kind of change you could possibly think Obama likely to bring about.

But Sarah Palin, on the other hand?

Sarah Palin has brought an earthquake to the Republican Party machine in Alaska – that is, to her own party. When she first took office as mayor, her husband didn’t get a 180% raise – instead, she promptly gave herself a 60% pay cut. (Anyone want to look up the Obamessiah’s voting record on questions of pay and benefits for legislators?) Granted, when her husband’s company did show up to do business with the state, her husband got a nice fat…oh, no, actually, he resigned in order to avoid conflict of interest, just like the scrupulously ethical Michelle Obama resigned from her hospital job…um, oh, sorry, never mind. Um, nice weather we’re having…yes, how about we go back to Palin? Let’s see. Instead of playing ball with the powers-that-be in the local political machine, she took them on – and beat them; beat ‘em in elections, fired ‘em from their cushy boards, indicted ‘em in the courts. Those cushy little sweetheart deals the Big Three oil companies had negotiated with Palin’s predecessor? Cancelled, and new rules implemented to make sure Alaska’s citizens could be comfortable that no kickbacks were taking place, and oddly enough once kickbacks ceased to be feasible the big corporations that had been awarded the contract to begin with decided they didn’t want to play at all, and the pipeline winds up getting built by a company whose business is (gasp) building and maintaining gas pipelines. Odd, that.

See, when Sarah Palin shows up, change happens, baby. Been happenin’ her whole career, since back in the days when she was first Mayor of W-town. (Not impressed with that experience? Understandable. Then again, during that same time period Barack was a “community organizer;” I’m sure you’re impressed with that heavy burden of responsibility. [NOTE: I actually wrote this before Sarah made the same comparison in her convention speech; so I’m pretty proud of myself about that one.]) You understand what I’m saying? You want to hear fine-sounding speeches about change, then you want Barry; but if you actually want real live change that actually happens, then you want the Barracuda. If I may put it in the straightforward, vivid language of my fellow good ol’ boys: like most of the other intellectuals in the academic echo chamber the Democratic candidate has lived in all his life, Barack Obama is good at bullshittin’. Like most of her fellow blue-collar working men and women here in this great country, Sarah Palin is good at gettin’ shit done. If you need somebody to sit on a panel or stand at a podium and pontificate about change, why, sure, Obama can handle that. But if you want actual change to really happen, in real life? Um, not Obama’s department – or at least, never has been up to now. But the state of Alaska, and that state’s Republican Party machine (or the tattered remnants thereof), can testify that when Sarah Palin comes to town then you better grab hold of somethin’ that’s nailed down tight and hang on for dear life.

The strategy for the Republicans ought to be to run Sarah Palin against Barack Obama, not against Joe Biden. You got a black guy? Fine; we have a woman; only we like her because of what her past actions say about her character, not because of her genetic makeup (this, for the Democrats among you, is the difference between an affirmative action token and a candidate of demonstrated merit); plus if you criticize her she comes back and answers your arguments rather then curling up in a wounded little ball and accusing you of sexism. You want change? Palin brings it, hurricane force, everywhere she goes – always has, always will; Obama mellifluously congratulates himself on his ability to sound really good and look really sexy while orating about the kinds of changes he’s going to bring in the future even though he’s never brought anything remotely resembling such changes in the past. You want reconciliation? Obama has brought civil war to the Democratic Party; Palin has the entire state of Alaska together in her corner. The end of –isms, the reconciliation of the divided American public, change to the old ways of doing politics? On all three of those points, Sarah Palin can kick Barack Obama’s ass so hard that her foot can make contact in Alaska and he’ll land in Hawaii.

But Sarah Palin isn’t even the Republican candidate for President, ‘cause there’s somebody even better ahead of her on our ticket. And when your number one guy can’t even win a comparison with our number two guy, how bad does it get when he has to match up to the Big Guy at the top?

That is, at least, the way I think the Republicans should play it.

But in actual fact, I think that ironically the reason Sarah Palin is producing such raptures among Republicans, is the very strong suspicion among the rank and file that we’d be a lot happier after four years of a Palin presidency than we’re likely to be at the end of four years under McCain – in other words, I would imagine that there’s a great big chunk of the Republican base who, like yours truly (though probably for very different reasons, since a Huckabee selection would have made lots of that same base happy while ensuring that my vote was lost to McCain), thinks that it isn’t really true to say that “there’s somebody even better ahead of her on our ticket.” I wish to goodness that Sarah Palin was ready to step in and be President right now, but I don’t think she is. But fortunately I don’t have to vote her into the Presidency; I can vote her into the Vice Presidency. Give her four years in the Vice-Presidency, and I think she’ll be ready to be the first Presidential candidate I’ve ever been able to vote for with a smile on my face. I think the “heartbeat away from the Presidency” think is, at least from the standpoint of risk management, largely bogus, because any such consideration has to be probability-weighted, and the chances that McCain will go down within the first two years are quite slim. And with two years of the Vice-Presidency under her belt, Sarah Palin becomes, from my point of view, a Presidential candidate that I would rejoice to vote for. Even right this moment, today, I strongly suspect that I’d be happier with a Palin presidency than with a McCain one, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that she’d be a vastly better President than either the Obamessiah or the Mouth of the Senate. Four years of seasoning and as far as I’m concerned…ladies and gentleman, the first female President of the United States.

Behold the power of the Sarahcuda

2008-09-08T12:36:00.001-07:00

Feel her fury.

Dahlia Lithwick continues to make the case against her Obamessiah without being smart enough to realize she's doing it

2008-09-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

I swear, John McCain's best friends are the people who think they're helping Obama out.

Two priceless bits from Dahlia Lithwick:

...by every obvious metric—experience, knowledge base, decades of public service, policy experience, understanding of the world — Palin is an unserious candidate for the vice presidency of the United States.

To which any swing voter -- that is, anybody who is not, like Lithwick, hopelessly smitten with the Obamavirus, instantly responds, "And Obama is a serious candidate for President?" They really are completely and utterly blind, in their infatuation, to the glaring weaknesses of their candidate, and so they continue to scream at the top of their voices that the most important considerations in deciding who should be the Vice President, are precisely the considerations on which McCain obliterates Obama...a fact made even more damaging by the fact that most ordinary Americans would agree that those considerations are more relevant to the person who plans to assume the Presidency on Day 1 than to the person who is signing up to be the President's sidekick and who might, at some point during the scheduled four-year term, find herself unexpectedly promoted.

There's also this wonderful line, and although I know what she's trying to say, it's a bad place to go when you're supporting a candidate whose entire campaign strategy is predicated on convincing swing voters that the person he will be as President is radically different from the person he has been throughout his life up to this point. Here's the subtitle to the article, which Slate puts in all caps:

Joe Biden can beat Sarah Palin by pretending she's a man. And that he's not Joe Biden.

When your hopes for victory depend on your ability to pretend effectively that your opponent is not who she really is and that you yourself are not who you really are, perhaps you are not the right person for the job? Just a thought there...

Here again, showing the casual attitude Lithwick has to dishonesty in the pursuit of political victory:

You will need to match Palin point for point in the blue-collar-off. If she invokes her sister's gas station, bring up your cousin's Laundromat. (Try to locate one in the coming days, if you aren't in possession of one already).

Um...no further comment required from me on that point, I think.

One last unintentionally funny bit from Lithwick -- whose entire article is shot through with snide, bitterly dismissive and patently unfair snarking at Sarah, each of which snarks Lithwick clearly thinks is a sparkling sally of sophisticated wit:

Caution: Sarah Palin is funny. And it's the kind of jeering Ann Coulter-funny that's assuredly going to irritate the heck out of you.

Actually, Dahlia, I've read some Ann Coulter, and I've seen lots of Sarah Palin's humor (such as the clip below, in which Craig Ferguson certainly seems neither to feel jeered at nor to be irritated), and I've just read what passes for humor in your piece, and between you and the Sarahcuda there's no question whose humor more resembles Ann Coulter's. But don't worry, your stuff didn't irritate me. I always get a kick out of seeing people torpedo their own boats by mistake. You've made my day and it hasn't even really gotten started yet.

(By the way, the "jeering" and "irritating" Sarah Palin has a 75% approval rating, after two years as governor, among the citizens of her home state -- and that's if you only count Democrats. You just keep right on sneering, Dahlia, me girl.)

Here's Sarah Palin "jeering" at and "irritating" Craig Ferguson:

I'm not the only one who sees it

2008-09-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

Actually, of course I'm not the only one who sees it -- anybody who has spent fifteen minutes paying attention to any prior Presidential campaign, and who has an IQ at least as high as the summertime setting on your household thermometer, can see the jaw-dropper of a mistake that Obama not only made when Palin's name was announced, but continues to make, as if there's not a single member of that All-Genius Campaign Advisory Team who has any more of a clue than the would-be Next Leader of the Free World and Savior of the Planet.

But Ace lays it out with rather more gusto than I do -- also, of course, being Ace, rather than more profanity. For example:

It's just that... she... is... not... running... for President. But Obama is elevating her to the presidential level. So the race, it seems, consists of two candidates of presidential timber on the Republican side, and one weak, confused jackass on the Democrat side.

And somewhere Joe Biden is talking to an unenthusiastic crowd of three dozen people, half of whom were confused by his constant mentions of "Scranton" and showed up in the erroneous belief that he was Dwight K. Shrute from The Office.

...

But McCain and Palin are just now outright [very creative but very bad neologism] [Obama]. He probably is smart enough to know he's doing all the wrong things, but he just has no idea of what else he can possibly do.

And neither, it seems, does his brain-trust of 300 super-talented scary-smart advisers, who will similarly respond with open-mouthed stupidity if, God forbid, he calls upon them for advice in dealing with Vladimir Putin.

So, voters of America, if Obama becomes President, and Putin or al-Qaeda do something that is both deadly-effective and completely unforeseen by Obama and his team, how will The One respond in that time of crisis?

I'd say we all know the answer to that question now.

I have a good friend who I think is a more or less liberal Democrat, though he may just be somebody who (like me, before Palin showed up) looks at Republican candidates and thinks, "Like I'm gonna vote for that." (Obviously we don't talk politics much.) At any rate, his reaction to the Palin pick was a head-shaking remark about how "scary" was the thought of Palin's having to manage the United States in a crisis situation. Um, well, the thought doesn't really thrill me, actually; which is why I'm glad I'll be voting to make her Vice-President rather than President.

But now you've seen how the Democrats' candidate for the Presidency responds when the heat is on.

Are you scared yet? Because God help you, you should be.

The best attempt I've seen yet to capture what it is about Sarah Palin

2008-09-06T07:06:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle, at National Review, nails it -- at least, this is precisely why I've been walking on air ever since I found out that Palin was McCain's choice. He even has the italics in the right place:

She is so absolutely, remarkably, spectacularly ordinary. I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)

...

A candidate who is young, funny, well-spoken, intelligent, charming, drop-dead gorgeous — and one of ours? Is this actually happening?

Exactly, exactly, exactly, he has word-for-word (literally!) exactly the same reaction I had when the news broke that McCain was going to name Palin as his running mate: "Is this actually happening?" (Okay, I exaggerate: I think my exact words -- which I blurted out loud even though I was alone at the time -- were, "Are you kidding me? Is this really happening? Are you kidding me?" So it wasn't literally word-for-word the same reaction. My apologies for the hyperbole.)

One of the many, many signs that the Obama campaign is as clueless as...sorry, simile fails me...clueless beyond what one would have thought to be the limits of human cluelessness, is this: they have come out, even after that speech, complaining with a straight face and apparent sincerity that Sarah Palin is out of touch with ordinary people. Sarah Palin?!? Sarah Palin is out of touch with ordinary people?!?? Sarah Palin, whose speech and (more importantly) personality and character so moved and exhilarated my non-political farmboy father, who so far as I know has never in his life donated a penny to any political party, and who watched the speech because he was curious about Palin after hearing me say I was excited about her...Sarah Palin, who so moved and exhilarated my father, I say, that he literally couldn't sleep for the rest of that night?!?? (Why bother to sleep if you already feel like you're dreaming?) The Sarahcuda, who is the first candidate in my lifetime to walk onto the national stage and instantly cause an entire nationful of ordinary, hard-working, blue-collar men and women (including undercover-in-Whitecollarville, stealth-redneck operatives like yours truly) to leap to their feet in incredulous delight and say, "Oh my God, I know that woman!!"??? Barack Obama, who has lived his entire life (even his childhood) in the emotional and intellectual sterility of the academic hard Left and in the radical activist movement that sees nothing controversial or unusual in trying to be a Saul-Alinsky-style community organizer, or in hanging out with the Weathermen, or in the Jew-hating, paranoid ravings of Jeremiah Wright -- Barack Obama is in touch with ordinary Americans and Sarah Palin isn't?

It's obvious that even now, Barack Obama has no idea what hit him.

But he bloody well knows he's been hit.

I owe a hat tip on that article to Rachel Lucas (warning: that particular post is okay but if you go spelunking about the rest of her blog, be warned that she rather aggressively has no children and therefore goes to no trouble whatsoever to stay family-friendly). Rachel is also a completely smitten (politically, that is) Sarahcuda fan, and indeed I believe it's Rachel who coined the "Sarahcuda" moniker that (like "Shrub" for Dubya, The Little Bush) is, as soon as you've heard it, the obviously correct tag for the Thrilla from Wasilla. (I was pretty proud of that last one until (a) I saw it someplace else, so apparently it's pretty obvious and there's nothing special about having thought it up, and (b) I saw "Sarahcuda" and knew, "That's the one.")

Rachel, by the way, is into creating her own demotivational posters, and she's having a field day with Palin posters. I presume (since lots of them get e-mailed to her by other people) that they aren't copyrighted, or at least that there's no objection to they were meant to be shared with the wide, wide world, and therefore I happily pass on to you this one, from a post Rachel entitles happily, "Palin makes me want to dance:"

But my favorite so far, I think, is this one:

If Barack Obama actually manages to lose the unlosable campaign, here's what history will say

2008-09-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

The moment he lost it -- which is to say, this campaign's version of, "I won't hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him": Historians won't say that it was when John McCain chose Sarah Palin. They will point to the following words:

"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." With those words, Barack Obama, like the Russian sub captain in The Hunt for Red October, torpedoed his own boat by mistake. Whether the damage is fatal remains to be seen; but that it was both unbelievably stupid and devastatingly damaging, is I think beyond question.

A whole post, maybe series of 'em, coming on that one.

The fatal character flaw that doomed him: Vanity. (I think I'll do a whole post on that one, too, someday when I have time.) Not pride; not arrogance. You must remember that vanity, while a vice, has this endearing and pitiable quality that pride and arrogance do not have: it is based on a core of deep insecurity. Obama is not pride or arrogant; he is vain, a proposition I hope at some point to have time to defend with lots of evidence drawn from his behavior over the years. And, tragically, he was put into a position in which vanity was, of all the character flaws he could possibly have suffered from, the one most capable of sinking all his hopes.

The crippling misfortune he was unable to overcome: His utter inability to understand any American who does not come from the extremely provincial far-left academic subculture into which he was born, in which he was raised, and in which he has spent all his life. There is no subculture in America that makes more noise about diversity; but there is no subculture in America whose members are more smugly ignorant of anyone other than their own kind, nor less interested in relating with those others on a level of genuine mutual interest and equality (Obama and his friends can patronize the common man, or they can sneer at him, but they do not understand him and, even worse, have no idea how deeply out of touch they are and how severely limited they are by their own provincial ignorance). The greatest mismatch in this campaign is not the mismatch between McCain's and Obama's experience, vast as that mismatch is, nor between McCain's and Obama's oratorical ability, vast as that mismatch is. It is the Great-Rift-sized gulf between how well McCain and his team understand Obama's team and the swing voter, and how utterly Obama's team fail to understand McCain's team and those same swing voters.

Those words, that flaw, and that misfortune may not be enough to sink even as incompetent a campaigner as Obama in this Year That Should Be Of The Democrats (at this point I'd say it's a pick-'em); but if he does indeed go down to ignomious defeat (and in this year, any Democrat who can't beat a Republican in a national election is deserving of ignomy and permanent retirement from politics), then I believe history will deliver an analysis pretty much along the lines I just laid out briefly here in this post.

A very quick note because I don't have any time, on the competence of Barack Obama's campaign

2008-09-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

WHAT THE !@#$!#$!#$! ARE THESE 1#$!#$!#$!ING 1#$!#$!# !@#$!@S OF EXCUSES FOR CAMPAIGN MANAGERS 1#$!#$!#@$!# THINKING THEY'RE DOING???????????????????? HAVE THEY ALL BEEN PAID OFF BY JOHN MCCAIN????? I MEAN, WHAT THE 1#$!##$!ING !#$!#@$!#$# OF A $!#$!#$!#ING !#$!@$!@#$!#$!#$!#@$!@#$!#$!#$!#$!#$!@#$!#$! ARE THEY THINKING????

More details later, probably in three or four days given that this is my weekend with the kids.

But seriously, John McCain handed Barack the Presidency on a sliver platter. A ten-year-old child could have told Barack what to say and the campaign would have been over. Instead Barack has decided to hand the Presidency right back and say, "No, thanks, I don't want it; you take it instead."

Seriously, I cannot BELIEVE what I'm watching. Where the !#$!#$!#$!# did he find these idiots (by which I mean, whoever is giving him the jaw-droppingly abysmal advice he seems to have been taking ever since the Palin pick was announced)? And why the !#$!#$!#$!##$ does a man who thinks he's smart enough to run the country, think putting his campaign in the hands of these advisors was a smart personnel decision? And the most ridiculous thing of all -- he actually is claiming that his best qualification for the Presidency is his management of his campaign for President -- a risible claim even if the campaign were being run well, but off-the-charts moronic when you reflect that it's this campaign that he's talking about.

I mean, WHAT THE #$!#$!#$!@#$!@#$$@%@#$%!#@$$@^@#$@#%?????????!?!

I'm...well, not speechless, exactly. Let's just say bereft of the ability adequately to express myself in a manner that wouldn't get me excommunicated from any self-respecting Baptist church.

Will explain precisely what I'm talking about when I get some time.

I swear, in a year when you would have thought that the Democrats couldn't lose even if they ran a poodle and the Republicans ran Mahatma Ghandi, Barack Obama may very well manage to lose -- thus making history as being, not the first black President, but instead being the most breathtakingly incompetent candidate in the entire history of world democracy.

And I don't think that statement is anywhere near as hyperbolic as it sounds. (In other words, sure, I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you might think. This man is a SERIOUSLY incompetent campaigner, and he is going to come bloody close to managing to lose what I would have bet the farm was an unlosable campaign.)

What I think Palin should go for in her convention speech

2008-09-02T16:10:00.001-07:00

I think she should emphasize, heavily, the following three points:

1. She should cast herself as the candidate of proven change -- but she should do so without making a single reference to the historic nature of her candidacy; her mantra should be that she changes things, rather than she merely, by virtue of her genetic makeup, symbolizes change. Obama's constant refrain is, implicitly, that he represents salvation for the country because of who he is; Palin's emphasis should be on change as being what she does. Without drawing explicit comparisons between herself and Obama, she should make it clear that throughout her entire political career, as soon as she shows up, change starts happenin', baby, usually to the mingled astonishment and chagrin and rage of the political powers-that-be. It's easy for any genuinely independent, undecided voter to connect the dots and compare the guy who's really good at talking about change (but whose entire career, when one looks at deeds rather than mere words, is the standard career of the moderately sleazy Chicago-Democratic-machine politician), to the woman who actually has gone in and changed things everywhere she's gone politically.

2. She should cast herself as a candidate of national unity and reconciliation. She should point at her extraordinarily high cross-party approval ratings in the state she has governed for the past two years. She should state openly that while reconciliation does not mean that people who disagree with her political views should feel obliged to vote for her, she still does believe that it is important to identify and respect the admirable qualities and good intentions of people on the other side of the aisle -- and then she should emphasize that her past record (appointing Democracts as well as Republicans, gaining the approval of all kinds of different Alaskans) shows that she understands how to reach out even to those with whom she disagrees. She should say that nothing is gained by accusing other people of bad motives when other explanations (such as simple disagreement on principles) will do just as well, and say that therefore she pledges that nobody who attacks her political opinions and positions need ever fear that she will react by accusing them of sexism. She should end up by saying that there is one group of Alaskans who genuinely, deeply despise her -- and that group is not Democrats. It's the fat cats of the corrupt Republican machine. With everybody else, she gets along fine.

3. She should emphasize John McCain's experience, and how privileged she is to have the opportunity to serve an apprenticeship under him and to learn from all the wisdom he has to offer. (Yes, I know that you guys know that I think McCain is an ass, but I'm telling you what she should say in her campaign speech.) She should emphasize how well she believes that he and she will work together as a team, and of how humbly honored she is to be able to join with him in forging a new identity for the Republican Party, a legacy that he will be able to look on proudly in years to come long after he has retired from active duty (I would use exactly that phrase, as a subtle reminder of his military record), as he and she and the Republican Party rank and file join together to carry out at every level the mindset of reform and of cleaning-up-one's-own-house that she and he have fought for independently in their own respective arenas.

The balancing trick on that third point is simply this: I believe that the core strategy of McCain's team should be -- and I suspect in fact is -- to sucker Barack Obama into campaigning against Sarah Palin. Therefore Palin ought not talk about her own lack of experience explicitly; instead she should talk about McCain's experience and her role as his apprentice, precisely in order to dangle herself as bait in front of the more and more obviously outclassed and amateurish Obama campaign team.

McCain has basically found his party's Barack Obama -- the young, potentially history-making newblood with immense talent and immense charisma and immense resonance in the base and immense crossover potential, but with hopelessly inadequate experience -- and has brought her into the race in precisely the apprenticeship role that would be perfect for Obama. Head-to-head against Obama, Palin wins in an ordinary year, though not in this year in which a poodle ought to be able to win the Presidency as long as it runs on the Democratic ticket. Granted, this year she doesn't beat him -- but she doesn't have to beat him. She just has to (a) energize the base and (b) come across to swing voters as the Republican Obama.

Here's the core thing I think has to be understood about this race; I think McCain understands it and I think the Obama campain hasn't got a clue. The dominant line that McCain is selling to the American people is, "This Obama guy is very impressive; he has a ton of promise; with a few more years of seasoning and experience he could be something really special; but he isn't ready yet, and now is not the time to gamble the leadership of the free world on a pretty but inexperienced new face."

In fact, the core line McCain wants to get across to the American people is simply that Obama may be the right guy, but he's running for the wrong office at the wrong time: he is not yet ready for the Presidency. Isn't it too bad that the Democrats put him at the top of the ticket, instead of running an experienced old hand like Hillary for President and letting the youngster serve as Vice President in order to learn the ropes?

Now as that is the core message that McCain needs to sell, the overriding goal of the McCain campaign should be to get as many voters as possible to subconsciously identify Barack with Palin. Conversely, the overriding goal of the Obama campaign should be to do everything possible to keep voters from associating the two -- and therefore every time Barack campaigns against Palin, rather than McCain, he subtly and unintentionally reinforces the core Republican point that it's Palin's spot, not McCain's, that Barack should be campaigning for.

We've already seen that bear fruit: Barack was asked by Andersen Cooper to compare his experience to Palin's, and what was Barack's answer? "Well, I'm qualified to be President because I've run a successful political campaign." That will no doubt sound convincing to Barack himself; and it will sound convincing to his political advisors and to the effete, elitist political junkies among whom he has lived as his life -- because those people are actually impressed by political campaigning, seeing it (as they do) as an intrinsically valuable activity. But to the blue-collar swing voter in Ohio, that response will prove (I believe) knee-slappingly risible.

What Barack should have said is simply, "I don't think experience in that sense is actually relevant in this race. I think what matters is character and conviction and being on the right side of history..." or whatever. Barack's line should be, "I have no objection to Palin's lack of experience because I don't think experience matters for the Presidency. I'll be a great President, and I have no experience. It's not inexperience that will make her a bad President; it's her medieval views on the right to choice [blah blah blah on to the talking points]."

By nominating Sarah Palin, McCain took the risk of making his "inexperience" argument an irrelevance. But all he was really doing, was giving Obama's campaign a chance to make it irrelevant. If the Obama campaign had instantly welcomed her to the race and said simply, "We don't mind her inexperience," then the race would have ended, right then. But they're too damned stupid to have said that. Instead they instantly screamed like banshees about her inexperience, and then Barack himself, like a lamb to the slaughter, endorsed the importance of experience by trying to argue that he was more experienced...than Palin. Even if he can win that argument, every moment he spends arguing that he's more experienced than Palin (a very debatable point indeed, and I think actually by any rational standard Palin actually has the more relevant experience and certainly the more encouraging track record), he quietly reinforces both of McCain's core assertions: that experience matters (else why would Barack be so desperate to argue that he's adequately experienced?), and that Barack can't even begin to compare with McCain in terms of experience (else why would Barack be spending all his time comparing himself to the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate when he's supposed to be running for President?).

Unbelievable. You'd think a moderately intelligent ten-year-old would have been able to see that trap. But then, of course, that's not relevant, because Barack is not a moderately intelligent ten-year-old; he's a very bright forty-seven-year-old...who has spent the bulk of his life being assured by those around him that he's God's gift to a desperate nation, which is the best recipe I know of for taking a promising young individual and turning him into an adulation-addled fool.

Well, we'll see what line Palin takes in her speech. But I think if she's wise, she'll hammer those three points. Because if the American swing voter comes to see Palin as being more or less the Republican Obama, then the Democrats are, I think, totally and 100% toast. For analogies are, in the end, simple but powerful things, and the analogy the Republican Party wants the American people to draw is:

Palin is to Obama as McCain is to...oops, sorry, the Democrats have nobody in the running against McCain.

Things the Peril would like to hear Sarah Palin say in her convention speech

2008-09-02T07:46:00.001-07:00

Actually, it's not that I think she should (from a standpoint of charity or political strategy) say them, just that I think it would be hilarious if she did.

"I think the Democrats should stop worrying about what we're going to do if John McCain dies and Sarah Palin has to run the country, and instead they should start worrying about what they're going to do if Joe Biden dies and Barack Obama has to run the country."

"You know, I said something to John about how one Democrat after another compared Obama to Lincoln. And John told me, 'Sarah, I knew Abraham Lincoln…[pause for laughter and cheers from the cooperative home-team crowd]…and Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln. [wait for gleeful roars to die down] By the way, I think it's important to say that I borrowed that line from Lloyd Bentsen -- I wouldn't want Joe Biden to accuse me of plagiarism."

Holy cow, can this be happening?

2008-09-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

I didn't vote in 1984 -- I turned 18 a couple of days before the election and didn't meet the deadline for voter registration. I mean, I'm sure there was a way I could have pre-registered or something, but I didn't get around to figuring out how. So my first Presidential vote came in 1988. My choices?

George Bush the elder. Michael Dukakis.

You're kidding me, right?

Maybe things would get better next time around...

George Bush the elder, having spent four years proving that everything I'd feared about the spineless, lying jerk was true. But the alternatives? Bill Clinton. And one of the few demonstrably insane men ever to get a significant number of votes for President, Ross Perot.

Maybe 1996 would be better?

Bill Clinton, Bob Dole. (And Ross Perot, too, though most of the country had finally figured out that Perot had more ears than sanity; so he wasn't nearly as much of a factor.)

2000? Dubya, and Al Gore. We were getting worse instead of better.

In 2004? Dubya, and John Kerry. [sigh of horror]

And it was obvious months ago that 2008 was going to be more of the same: either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, versus John What First Amendment? McCain. Two more choices drawn from the same political elite classes that have misgoverned our country throughout my political adulthood.

I am unduly prone to pessimism and cynicism -- this is something I know about myself -- and so as a corrective I went hunting for some politician -- any politician -- whom I could respect. I actually found two: Sarah Palin of Alaska, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Maybe someday, I told myself, I'll have a chance to vote for one of those two people. Didn't talk the possibility all that seriously because the Republican Party is, generally speaking, run by fools; and I'll admit that, what with the stuff that's been going on in my personal life, I haven't paid all that much attention and haven't really done a ton of research, leaving open the possibility that upon closer inspection they too would turn out to be typical politicians, just with slightly better up-front P.R. But still, from what I could see, here were two people who seemed to have a basic attitude toward government that was a lot closer to mine than one would expect a professional politician to have, and who seemed to actually get results. Jindal had his drawbacks (I'm no fan of teaching "intelligent design" in public schools, for example, but then I think the government ought to get out of the education business entirely and no politician is going to propose that). But Palin in particular was purely delightful: the scourge of career politicians in her own party, a free-spirited, blue-collar, down-to-earth lady who clearly had a great deal of personal character and a great deal of personal charm and also the same ruthless stubbornness I remembered in my own grandmother.

So I figured, nah, neither of these two will be get the nod. It'll probably be Romney or Guliani or some other standard-issue politician who has paid his party dues...

And then it was Palin. And to my own astonishment I've been absolutely giddy ever since.

For the past twenty years I've been telling people that for somebody like me, politics is a purely spectator sport, because nobody I would approve of really has much of a chance to survive the party politics that have to be played in order to get the nomination. But I forgot something very important about my Republican friends: the rank and file genuinely hate politics. When professional Democratic politicians play politics, it doesn't appear to bother their supporters much, because if you didn't approve at a fundamental level of politics-as-a-way-to-get-what-you-want, you wouldn't be a Democrat. Nobody becomes a Democrat because they want the government to just leave them alone and stay out of as many aspects of life as possible so that they won't screw up anything more than is absolutely necessary. A Democrat who is represented by a professional politician is a Democrat represented by somebody who shares the fundamental Democratic belief that political action is an intrinsically good thing.

But Republicans? A great big slice of the Republican coalition is made up of people who believe that the government that governs best is the government that governs least -- but they have no option but to be represented by professional politicians. All you have to do is look at how thoroughly and enthusiastically the professional Republican politicians reneged on every promise they made in their Contract With America to see the dilemma limited-government Republicans face.

And so I forgot something critically important. I forgot that there actually are literally millions of Republicans who would look at Sarah Palin's cheerful disembowelment of the Republican party machine in Alaska and think, "Hey, whaddaya know, there's actually a Republican politician out there who really believes what the rest of them tell us just because they know it's what we want to hear." And, too, I forgot that McCain loves to tell himself that he's a Reform Guy, so that McCain is probably the one career politician in either party who would actually place value on Palin's having played whack-the-establishment. I'm used to having a low opinion of Republicans because of the people they keep nominating, and while I had fought off my cynicism enough to recognize that it was possible to find, here and there, a Republican politician who appeared to live out the best aspects of what Republicans tell me they believe, I had not believed that any such Republican could actually find his or her way onto a national Republican ticket.

To my Republican friends: I apologize. In fact, I'm sufficiently grateful to you for nominating Palin that I will do my very best to forget that a bunch of you actually wanted to nominate [shudder of horror] Huckabee. Won't mention it again. If I can help it. Really, will do my best to pretend it never almost happened.

Now, I don't get to vote for Sarah Palin as President in 2008. But that's okay, because I don't think she's ready yet -- although, considering that my other choices are McCain, Obama and Biden, she might already be better than those three lifetime Senators. (The historical record says that if you want a disaster of a President, then by far your best bet is to elect somebody whose only life experience involves the legislature, as life in the legislature inflates the ego of the legislator while being nothing like life in executive office. The two jobs are not remotely similar, but nobody in the world has a bigger ego than a guy who has spent his life in the legislature -- and there's no worse combination than a guy who isn't qualified but think's he's God's gift. The one saving grace at the top of either ticket this year, is that John McCain at least had a life before politics and may possibly have learned something about real leadership before he entered the environment of corporate pathology that is the United States Senate.)

However, I'm looking to the future. If Palin stays in Alaska, then every time her name comes up, the same media commentators who think Obama is the salvation of the nation will complain that Palin doesn't have the right experience. I want Sarah Palin ready to go in 2012, and by far the best place for her to serve her apprenticeship is in the Vice-Presidency. Furthermore, all the talk about the "heartbeat away from the Presidency" is largely irrational since it pays no attention to probabilities, and any decision made without reference to probability-weighted risks and rewards is a foolish decision. The most likely outcome of a McCain/Palin Presidency would be that McCain, with the benefits of modern medicine, serves out his full term in full health. The second most likely outcome is that McCain will serve most of his term before going down. As you move the date of the proverbial heartbeat closer and closer to the present, the odds of its actually happining shrink ever smaller and smaller, until you get to the all but infinitesimal odds that McCain will, like the Harrison of popular myth, give his inauguration speech and then promptly die. (Don't give me Harrison as an example of, "See, it's possible!" by the way; in the age of antibiotics Harrison would have been fine and literally nobody would remember that he got a cold three weeks after his inauguration.)

So the odds are against Palin's succeeding to the Presidency without being elected to it, and even if she does, it's more likely to be late in McCain's term than early.

Now, if Palin runs for office four years from now, after four years as Vice President, will you still say that she is too inexperienced (especially if you are one of the people who has been slobbering in adoration of the Obamessiah)? I won't, at least; I'll consider her ready, and certainly vastly more likely to be a President of whom I approve than is McCain or Biden or Obama, or than was Dubya, or Clinton (either one), or Dole, or Dukakis, or Perot. But what if McCain goes down with six months left to go on his term? Will three and a half years be enough? I would think so, given Palin's proven ability to excel faster than the old pros expect her to. How about two years? Hm...well, I would imagine two years would be enough to make her the best available option. One year? After one year I don't think she'll be ready to be President by the standards I think the country ought to follow -- but by the standards I think the country ought to follow, neither Obama nor Biden would be taken seriously as a candidate, and McCain would be fairly far down on any rational person's list. Personally, I think one year as Vice President would be enough to get the Barracuda past the very low bar that is set at "better than John McCain" (who, let it be said at once, I expect to be a poor President, though not the epochally disastrous President that either Obama or Biden would be).

And if McCain pulls a Harrison and goes down minutes after taking the oath of office?

Well, at least we'll have a candidate who's more prepared than Obama is, and who has accomplished more in two years as governor than Obama's record gives us any reason to think he will accomplish if he stays in the Senate another twenty years. I think Palin's speech on Tuesday night (it is Tuesday night, right?) should include the following words:

"I think the Democrats should stop worrying about what will happen if John McCain dies and Sarah Palin has to run the country, and should instead start figuring out what they're going to do if Joe Biden dies and Barack Obama has to run the country."

I also think, given the Democrats' odd insistence on comparing their candidate of "reconciliation" to the one President in all of American history who was most spectacularly unsuccessful at bringing reconciliation to America (unless by "reconciliation" one means "civil war"), that it would be hilarious to have Palin poke fun at both the age issue and the absurdly over-the-top Obamessiah hype by saying something along these lines:

"I was talking to John yesterday about the Democrats' belief that Obama is the next Abraham Lincoln, and he answered, 'Sarah, I knew Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln.'" But that one, of course, isn't going to happen. [sigh of cheerful resignation]

Back to seriousness: I think that no matter how this election turns out, I'll suffer under a bad President throughout at least 2009, whether that President is McCain, or Obama, or a post-assassination Biden, or a post-medical-crisis Palin. But McCain is a much better bet than Obama. And every day that McCain's collapse is delayed and Palin accumulates the experience that is, right now, the only thing she seems to me to lack, is a day that gets us closer to what I have long thought was an impossible dream:

The day in which America's President is a President who I think actually is worthy of the office.

So for the first time in my life, my vote in this year's Presidential election is going to be a vote for somebody I believe in (even though it's strictly speaking a vote for Palin in '12), rather than a vote for the guy I think will screw up the country less than my other choice. A week ago I was prepared, reluctantly, to vote for McCain as the least repulsive Democrat running. But, unless I find out something about Palin in the next few months that belies everything I've read and seen in her over the past year, this November I'll walk into the booth and for for Sarah Palin, as the Vice President whom I actually would be delighted to see serving the people in Washington D.C.

It's a bizarre feeling. Never had it before. Kinda like it, though...

The global warming debate in a nutshell

2008-07-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

Christopher Monckton (whose integrity, by the way, I don't have any particular reason to bet my life on) writes a paper examining the IPCC's earlier conclusions on global warming. It includes such paragraphs as the following:

Such solecisms throughout the IPCC’s assessment reports (including the insertion, after the scientists had completed their final draft, of a table in which four decimal points had been right-shifted so as to multiply tenfold the observed contribution of ice-sheets and glaciers to sea-level rise), combined with a heavy reliance upon computer models unskilled even in short-term projection, with initial values of key variables unmeasurable and unknown, with advancement of multiple, untestable, non-Popper-falsifiable theories, with a quantitative assignment of unduly high statistical confidence levels to non-quantitative statements that are ineluctably subject to very large uncertainties, and, above all, with the now-prolonged failure of TS to rise as predicted (Figures 1, 2), raise questions about the reliability and hence policy-relevance of the IPCC’s central projections.

And it goes on from there with a great many detailed arguments, all eminently suitable for refutation, which refutation I would peruse eagerly. But wait a minute -- he's not falling in line with emerging truth! So the organization that invited him to write the paper puts a label in red above the paper on their website:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. [This, I presume, depends on one's definition of "scientific peer review."] Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. [I've written about this before: real scientists who have evidence to hand point out flaws in the logic; dishonest pseudoscientists who can't refute arguments but have political games to play, appeal to "scientific consensus" in hopes that people will skip the whole logic part -- in which they would almost certainly get their asses kicked, which is why they're appealing to "overwhelming opinion of the community" rather than to logic.] >The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions. [Then write your own damn paper and refute his logic -- which, since Monckton's paper is one of a series of a papers in a formal debate, somebody else is presumably already doing.]

Guess what? Monckton is steamed. So he's written a formal letter in which my favorite sentence is a dry, "This seems discourteous." Here's the meat of the letter:

This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur's findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a copy of the text of the Council's decision, together with the names of those present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo, that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the "overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community"; and, tertio, that "The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions"? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what scientific grounds (if any)?

The last sentence in particular is the language of a man who is not afraid of debate. The red lettering is the language of a (currently anonymous) gentleman who desperately wishes to avoid debate.

I'll be interested to see the follow-up pieces in the debate. In the meantime, that red warning perfectly encapsulates the global warming "debate" as it stands today: in response to a paper rich with detailed arguments that lend themselves (if inaccurate) to ready and devastating refutation, the global-warming alarmists' response is a typographically-enriched appeal to "scientific consensus."

If you are not yourself a scientist, and you believe, on the authority of the "scientific consensus," that mankind is on the brink of causing a global climate Armageddon, then, no offense, but you are three hundred and seventy-two different kinds of stupid. As I've said before, I don't know whether CO₂ is contributing to global warming or not. But I know when I'm being lied to by people who don't give a damn what's true or not and will just say whatever they have to say in order to get you to along with what they want. And if the global warming alarmists aren't utterly dishonest shills playing the credulous public for suckers, then Paul Ehrlich was right all along and "hundreds of millions of people" starved to death during my childhood while I wasn't watching.

By the way, I am not blind to the fact that Monckton has his own political ax to grind, and, as I say, I would be interested in refutation. Here is the conclusion of Monckton's paper, in which he draws explicitly political conclusions from his scientific reasoning:

Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century’s warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming. Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic “greenhouse-gas” warming is entirely absent from the observed record. Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking. Even if per impossibile the models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines. Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue. [That's an interesting assertion, by the way. Monckton has defended it at some length here, but it's a separate topic. -- Peril] Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate. Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, “just in case”, can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them. Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.

In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong. If the concluding equation in this analysis (Eqn. 30) is correct, the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity must have been very much exaggerated. There may, therefore, be a good reason why, contrary to the projections of the models on which the IPCC relies, temperatures have not risen for a decade and have been falling since the phase-transition in global temperature trends that occurred in late 2001. Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no “climate crisis” at all. At present, then, in policy terms there is no case for doing anything. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

I don't know whether global warming is really a problem or not, though the more I see the less reason I can imagine to be worried about it. So farming becomes feasible in Greenland again...this is a disaster why, exactly? (Yes, I know some low-lying areas could conceivably be flooded. I have two words for you: "moving van.") But if Monckton gets nothing else right, he gets one fundamental political principle right:

"The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."

Amen, and amen. (But then Democratic politicians would have to get real jobs...)

A vile slander against liberals

2008-06-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

Whoever it was that started the whole business about referring to Gore Vidal as "the voice of liberalism," must really hate liberals. Is there anybody on the planet who is more of a jerk? Not more evil, or more brutal, or anything else, just more of an asshat?

I don't appreciate it when people assume that, merely because I am an evangelical Christian, I am therefore represented by Jimmy Swaggart's voice. By the same token, I hold strongly that nobody but Gore Vidal should be held responsible for that sneering, please-punch-me-in-the-nose-as-soon-and-as-hard-as-possible "voice of..." himself, and of not a single other person in the whole wide world.

INTERVIEWER: Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you.
VIDAL: I doubt that.

If he's never been right about anything else in his life, he was right about that last bit. And that's how he treats a friendly interviewer.

I know a lot of liberals and not a single one of my liberal acquaintances would be able to work themselves up to that pitch of completely unnecessary, unreasonable rudeness even if they took mood-altering drugs to rile themselves up.

"The voice of liberalism," my Gore Vidal.

A high-five to the Daily Kos

2008-06-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

It's a rare day when you find the Kos and I on the same side. All such occasions are greatly to be celebrated, say I.

So, a big thumbs up to Woodward's Friend.

And to the CIC and Canada's hate-speech bureaucrats:

Just how freakin' insane and out of control and just flat-out lost to reason and common humanity do you have to be to get both the Daily Kos and the Redneck Peril mad at you for exactly the same reason?

I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of eugenics. But I can't help but hope to God you freak-show losers haven't bred.

Of course, this being the Daily Kos, there are commenters who can't wait to rush in and say that the CIC is on the right side because of course the article is racist (despite the fact that the article has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with race, a point that would register on a moderately intelligent puppy but is beyond the grasp of the typical Kos commenter) and racists should be silenced by government force (though those same commenters, not having the irony gene, will no doubt hop over to the next post and complain that the Right are a bunch of Nazis). But that is NOT Woodward's Friend's fault, and I refuse (unlike the CIC) to hold anybody responsible for what nutjobs say in his comments section.

So, once again: Kudos to Woodward's Friend of the Daily Kos, with whose point I am 100% in agreement, with the volume cranked to 11.

On global warming

2008-05-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

Listen, I don't want to insult the intelligence of my loyal readers, but I could use a good rant to blow off some steam, and that is, after all, one of the reasons I have a blog. So, if you think global warming is a Serious Threat to Humanity, then you probably don't want to read what follows. Just givin' ya fair warning, that's all.

For those of you who don't know, the whole global warming thing...well, I absolutely defy you to find any issue on which all the signs shriek more loudly "FRAUD! FRAUD! 100% TOTAL BS!"

That doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening (though the more evidence rolls in the more it looks like that dog's huntin' days are rapidly coming to an end). But the only way you can believe that "science" has established that global warming (a) is happening, (b) is happening because of us, and (c) bespeaks looming cataclysm, is if you (a) don't know much about history, (b) don't know much about science, and (c) have never been taught how to tell when somebody's lying to you.

I mean, nothing personal if you've bought the hype, but the tactics are and have long been unmistakable.

I really do mean this, by the way: the thing that grabs my attention about the whole global warming controversy, is the fact that all the signs that you would expect educated people to have been trained to look for, are there in great big flashing neon...but it's like the public is functionally illiterate. Dorothy Sayers complained a long time ago that in teaching everybody to read, but not teaching people the rules of logic and rhetoric, universal education made it far easier for people to be deceived and manipulated, rather than making it harder.

But so much time and embarrassment can be saved once you know the tactics liars use to bamboozle you.

To take just one example on the global warming thing: if you have just been taught even the basic principles of scientific method and the scientific mindset, you know that real scientists hate declaring debate over...because the one thing consistent about scientific "consensus," is how consistently it is proved wrong. But on the other hand, if you know anything about con artists, you know that they hate honest and open debate and prefer silencing their critics to refuting them. You know that the stronger an honest man's case is, the more eager he is to get his opponent's arguments out into the open so that he can address them; but that the weaker a liar's case is, the more zealously he tries to ensure that his opponents remain unheard.

But one of the most striking characteristics of the whole global warming campaign is the desperation with which global warming alarmists insist that the debate is over and only vile and evil persons express doubts on the subject. At the very suggestion that a news agency might allow a "climate change skeptic" to present his case on television, the lobbying groups swing into action:

"The consensus about global warming in the science community is now overwhelming, so accusing the BBC of campaigning on such an undisputed threat is like suggesting it should be even-handed between criminals and their victims."

How's that for rhetoric? Or check out this e-mail exchange between the BBC and a global-warming activist who is incensed that the BBC has dared to report that there are scientists who say the whole thing is bunk and that evidence for their viewpoint is beginning to accumulate. (To be fair, the BBC is after all a notorious shill for right-wing extremists; so we have to cut her a little bit of slack, I suppose.) My favorite part comes about four or five e-mails into the exchange, when the frustrated activist starts to resort to threats, and also with a classic resort to obfuscatory language that no serious scientist would be caught dead using (the whole "emerging truth" thing):

Your word "debate". This is not an issue of "debate". This is an issue of emerging truth. I don't think you should worry about whether people feel they are countering some kind of conspiracy, or suspicious that the full extent of the truth is being withheld from them...

...It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth.

I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth...

...I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.

Now when you see this sort of thing going on, or the posturing and profiteering of Al Gore, that doesn't mean that global warming is not happening. But it does most certainly mean that what is fueling the engine of the global-warming movement is something that is not science but pretends to be -- and that will use the global-warming scare for its own ends with a complete disregard for whether or not there is actually any reason to think global warming is happening. If it is, great, we were right. If it isn't, no problem, as long as we can keep you from figuring it out long enough to get what we want.

In other words, you're being played.

But you would only know that if you've been taught how liars operate, and you've been taught how by contrast scientists operate. Which is to say, you would have had to have been taught logic and rhetoric -- or, to put it another way, somebody would have had to equip you with common sense and a realistically skeptical knowledge of human nature.

If you had to get that from your public school education...well, then you're probably terrified that global warming will kill us all.

I don't want to wish death on anybody...

2008-05-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

...but I'm genuinely having trouble coming up with any other solution to the Jimmy Carter problem. As far as I can tell only death will stop the man in whose honor we might as well retire humanity's trophy for All-Time Biggest Gap Between Self-Estimation and Actual Worth. Perhaps a long prison sentence for betrayal of state secrets? Permanent committal to an institution for the criminally insane? (I like the last option because it brings the word "lobotomy" into play, and any measure that would increase that pitiable gentleman's intelligence is something I think a charitable regard for the man's well-being requires us to consider.)

Oh, as far as what has triggered this rant: I thought the world of potentiality had run out of new depths to which Jimmy Carter could sink.

I thought wrong.

Not that it's surprising that Jimmy "I Was Yasser Arafat's Homeboy" Carter wants us to be friends with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A man is known, after all, by the company he keeps. And by now we all know Jimmy Carter.

HT: Gateway Pundit, who also provides us with a link to this helpful Jimmy Carter Threat Level Advisory System.

Hey, I thought The Onion was supposed to be a parody site

2008-05-22T19:07:00.003-07:00

When did they start doing straight news?

Yet Another Educational Experience Dept

2008-05-22T16:45:00.001-07:00

First, it was the "300 plus members of the crew of the television show Ugly Betty" who were discovering to their astonishment that when a state raises taxes too high its revenues actually drop. Now the professors at Harvard are suddenly cluing into the fact that when you deliberately target the exceptionally wealthy, you are -- quelle horreur -- in fact punishing success! My God, what will these rapacious politicians think of next?

Wow, brains like that, I guess that explains how they got into Harvard, eh? (My favorite line, though to be fair I don't think Richard J. Doherty is from Harvard: "It's like Florida taxing oranges." Um...Richard...something you should know about that...oh, never mind.)

I am so grateful that I know one particular remarkable and bright Harvard-educated college professor (who probably doesn't want to be the subject of a blog post), because if it weren't for her and my deep admiration for her, I probably would be saying something really silly right about now, like, say, "There's nobody on earth more useless than a Harvard professor..." Which would be a very stupid thing indeed to say in any world that possesses Congressmen. ;-)

I would hat tip Ace except that I can't link to his post because the title of that particular post has a very naughty word in it.

New blog

2008-05-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

Pretty simple: I'm separating my politics and religion out away from my personal anecdotes and the "Dept" items, i.e., the silliness. The latter will remain at Redneck Peril, which will become a more or less controversy-free zone. The former will now live on the blog you're looking at right now, Politics of the Peril.

That's all for now, other than to say: welcome.