(A comment by Xennedy at this thread on Belmont Club which struck me as being particularly perceptive — and histoically apt.)
I’m not thinking of military history for this one. I’m thinking of the various schemes by which the southern states retained political dominance of the United States over the increasingly more numerous and anti-slavery northerners prior to the Civil War. Eventually these schemes became so odious and unpopular that they destroyed the political structure of the Union as it had existed. The response of the South wasn’t to accept demotion or immediate war – it was to engineer a supreme court decision to end the house divided, as Abraham Lincoln put it, and make the whole union slavery friendly. I’m thinking of the Dredd Scott decision, and in my evaluation of that ruling in theory southerners could bring their slaves into (say) New York and compete with free labor unhampered by the free state status of that state. In practice the Civil War intervened before anything like that actually happened, but my point is that the political establishment of the day attempted to rule game over and cement their hold on power in perpetuity regardless of the will of the people.
Seem familiar? In my view similar events are happening today. Cram Obamacare through, hold 40 Senate seats, and it’s extremely difficult to repeal. Issue EPA regulations from the executive branch, and ignore Congress. Re-elect Obama, pick another two or three supreme court justices, and the Constitution means whatever the left wants it to mean.
The problem with this – or perhaps I should say the solution – is that eventually people tire of the rigged game, and lose their willingness to play.
So was Obamacare a new Kansas-Nebraska Act – which preceded the formation of the modern Republican party – or a new Dredd Scott decision – which preceded secession and civil war? Or neither?
I don’t claim to know. But I do think we are in the opening acts of a much larger story, and the drama over the debt limit is much less important than it appears in the immediacy of the here and now. The welfare state paradigm of American governance is collapsing, and that collapse will continue even if a debt ceiling increase gives it a slightly longer run. To quote that famous Chinese curse we live in interesting times. Alas.
I am so spoiled for choice when it comes to political idiocy of the week, but this particular bit of arrogant ‘the proles are too stupid to live without the guidance of the best’n’brightest of the current administration’ just about tops my list when it comes to a list of people who – in a just world should be pelted with rotten vegetables and then shunned by all decent citizens. Words fail – but only momentarily, upon following the breadcrumb trail to the original account in the Wall Street Journal – which is unfortunately subscriber only – just the first few sentences only are quite enough:
“In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Chu said the more-efficient bulbs required would save consumers money over the life of the product, even if the up-front price is higher.
“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.â€
Excuse moi! Or to put it in blunt military language – who the f**k died and made you god – that you and your disgusting ilk think yourselves have the right to dictate what or what we shouldn’t do, when it comes to personal choices as regards the care of our households? Or by extension, what we should eat, wear, drive, drink, where we should live – I had a bucket-load of that when I was in the military, bucko, that’s why I am a prickly libertarian today. And – you kids, stay off my lawn! Keeping people from wasting their own money, forsooth? How about closing down state lotteries? Or Indian casinos? Yeah, thought not.
So, here’s the down-low, Mr. Chu darlin’ – the only possible way that I accept someone dictating to me what is a waste of my own personal money, is either to be my dad (who has passed on) or to marry me (and a couple of million other citizens). Pucker up, buttercup – or take your worthless dictatorial *ss off and get yourself another hobby. Otherwise, this – *0 – is a rotten tomato, headed in your direction with considerable force. And I will be purchasing another case of 100w incandescent light bulbs as soon as possible. Anything to put the tiniest crimp in our government’s grand intentions of foisting off all those insanely expensive curly-whirly, un-flattering light-producing, un-dimmer-switchable, so-called energy-saving bulbs . . . which really don’t last all that longer than incandescent bulbs anyway.
You heard me, Mr. Chu. I’ll spend my money on the light bulbs of my own choice . . . and if you don’t like it – come and take them. Be warned, though; it didn’t work out all that well, the last time someone in Texas tried to come and take it.
If I see one more politico or blogger who I used to respect stand up and tell me that Paul Revere actually WAS warning the British on his midnight ride, I’m going to vote for Obama just out of sheer spiteful frustration with the WingNuttery of it all.
No, it’s NOT worse than 57 states, but come ON people. We learned this in 8th Grade. And it wasn’t a “reasoned” response, she was spewing word salad.
I don’t care if it’s a Dem or a Rep, if you goofed, just say so.
Ok then, it looks like absolutely, positively every middle-school snark that can be made about Congressman Anthony Wiener’s unfortunately risible last name has been made. Every blogger, commentator and internet wit has gotten in touch with our inner sixth-grader . . . it kind of makes a refreshing change from the depressing national news, the really depressing international news, and the suicidally depressing news from the Middle East. Really, the only way that more juvenile humor might of have been milked out of this is for the Congressman in question to have been christened Richard Head. God bless his heart, for someone represented to be so adept with the media, new and old, Congressman Wiener has misstepped so badly and so frequently he almost looks as if he clog-dancing. If he’s so good at it, I’d hate to see who’s the most inept of the current Congressional crop when it comes to dealing with the media. Oh, and one last slam at the cocktail-wiener Congressman? He looks like he was deliberately designed to be someone named Wiener. Central Casting couldn’t have come up with anyone so physiognomically appropriate.
Speaking of other misapplications of the male principle, it looks like John Edwards – he of another wandering wiener – has been indicted on several counts for conspiracy and receiving illegal campaign contributions during the 2008 campaign, all in frantic attempts to cover up the existence of a seriously flaky mistress and what the old-line tabs used to call a love child. Ironical in the extreme that it actually was a tabloid which first brought this sidebar to our attention . . . I guess Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) was correct: “Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.â€
And will Arnold Schwarzenegger pay some kind of penalty for his wandering wiener? Aside from his wife departing – rightfully PO’d – but you’d have thought that since she was a Kennedy, she might have been accustomed to the concept of hubby playing hide-the-salami with anything female and willing. What is it with male politicians these days – are they’re letting the little head do all the serious thinking?
Paid work is piling up, and neither myself, my creditors or my employers were raptured on Saturday, so . . . hey, buckle down to it and provide that good bloggy ice cream. Top o’ Sgt. Mom’s list of stuff to blog about – the discovery that the Pima County Sheriffs department is about as good at doing no-knock SWAT raids on ordinary citizens as they are when it comes to protecting local politicians doing a meet’n’greet with constituents from an obvious and frequently offending nutcase like Jared Loughner. Which is to say – not very good at all, which accounts for the stonewalling from Sheriff Dupnik’s department. SWAT . . . I’ve always been told it was an acronym for Special Weapons And Tactics. It this case “Special†is more like “Special Ed.†The fact that all this went down early in May and two weeks later, there is nothing much about what the SWAT team was after, or found in the Guerena house only reinforces my suspicion that they had the wrong damn address. It’s not the crime, Sheriff Dupnik – it’s the cover-up.
On a cheerier note, the gourmet foodie suppliers Harry and David are encouraging customers to donate quantities of their Moose Munch chocolate bars to the troops – more here. Note that if you go to the linked Facebook page, they will provide another Moose Munch bar for every ‘favoriting’ of that page. I like Harry and David, by the way. Their fruit basket assortments are to die for.
In a satirical response to President Obama’s speech demanding that Israel return to its’ 1967 borders – Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the United States return to it’s 1847 borders. The sarcasm, it burns. Finally, courtesy of Weasel Zippers – pictorial comparison of the commando and the hipster – comment is superfluous.
So, not tacky or energetic enough to do anything to note Bin Laden’s sudden shuffling off this mortal coil save for my daughter and I polishing off a bottle of champagne on the Monday afterwards, and me noting that while I had never killed anyone myself, I had read certain obituaries with a great deal of pleasure. Anything more demonstrative would earn us a severe poo-pooing from the likes of German newspaper opinion columnists and the Arch-Bish of Canterbury, among others . . . which disapproval at this late date has all the effect upon me of a flogging with a wet noodle, or of having my ankles attacked by a toothless Chihuahua. This means a lot of slobber, some momentarily but earsplitting noise, but no lasting damage whatsoever. So, consider the poo-poo noted, and thank you very much for your support, such as it has been. The champagne was very pleasant, by the way, especially considering that I had waited nearly nine and a half years to drink to cold justice being served for Bin Laden.
What a pathetic man, he was by the end – and living in such a dump, to judge by the videos and the pictures. Seriously, his place looked like a cheap residential motel, of the sort where the sheets are as thin as Kleenex and the bedside lamp is chained to the wall. And the raiding SEALS took away stuff by the garbage-bag full – although from the secret squirrel point of view, perhaps it would have been better to be completely quiet about what, exactly was taken away. But even so, I’ll bet there have been a lot of hasty exits from various places in the last two weeks, a lot of stuff being burned/trashed/shredded, and a fair number of hitherto upright types hastily making a last deposit into a secret bank account and checking out the rental rates for upscale walled villas in Marbella. And that’s just Pakistan, or as the fine folks at Rantburg call it, ‘Paki-waki-land’. Oh, and among those items removed from the “luxurious villa†are reputed to be his very own porn collection. Seriously, people are having fun coming up with proposed names for Bin Laden’s stash – say, Fatima Does Dallas, Deep Goat, Brokeback Goat, etc.
Oh, dear, what do we have to do to the Paks – more than slap them over the pee-pee with a lead pipe, I would hope. What an ignorant, bigoted, treacherous dunghill of a country, and I only say this because I used to read the Guardian, on a regular basis. Lots of stories about women with acid thrown on their faces, about Christian persecutions, hysteria about vaccinations and other temptations of modernity. I know we were their best buds and Uncle Sugar Money-bags way back when, because India was flirting with China (or China and Russia by turns, depending on the wind direction) and that left us gingerly holding hands with the dregs of the sub-continent . . . but I think the time has come to sever that relationship and the income-stream. The most wanted international fugitive for the last decade, turns up having hidden for the past how-many-years in a town full of retired Pak military, not a stones through from a military academy? Someone’s got some explaining to do. Personally, I think one faction in Paki-Waki-Land was sheltering him and another faction dimed him out. So, cut off the income stream, and watch it all devolve. I know they say that we need them for support of our efforts in Afghanistan, but if this is what their support means . . . umm, maybe we should explore what their non-support would work out to?
And wonderful – our very own press creatures are trying to play ‘spot the SEAL’ in Virginia Beach. I am amused, though, at how our hapless and militarily clueless reporter is foiled at every turn; a word to the wise, to anyone else playing this kind of game in a military town? Don’t go in without a guide or at least a little bit of internalizing military thought about op-sec. Double-don’t think it, if you have to have op-sec explained to you. And a couple of words of reminder about making note of the names of various places reputed to be military hang-outs? Bobby’s in Glyphada. La Belle Disco in Berlin, the Rib House near Torrejon; places that military of a certain vintage recall . . . because they were eateries that American military personnel favored – in Greece, West Germany and Spain. People with a point to make via high-explosives, sussed those three places out as a place likely to kill American service personnel. And they did, with varying degrees of success. So – it should be any different here in these United States? And do you understand, that in making it known to the public at large – that these places in a relatively small town are reputed to be military hangouts, that you are handing some basic research conclusions to people who might not have the long-term health of American service personnel in mind? Yeah, thanks for your support. Duly noted; And again – thanks.
To: AIG From: Sgt Mom Re: Things Happening Almost Too Fast to Keep Track
1. So, it looks like the End is Nigh for Moammar Ghadaffy, or however the heck his name is spelled. I swear, over the last thirty years, it’s different every time he swims back up from the cesspool and back into public consciousness again. There is probably some rule governing this; something to do with whether there is an “r†in the month, or if the aurora borealis is showing . . . anyway, I suspect that when a dictator gets to the point of hiring masses of obviously foreign mercenaries because he can’t trust anybody but his immediate family – not his military, or his secret police, or his own body-guard – and orders those troops who do obey him to drop bombs on their own people . . . game over. There hasn’t been an equal to him as megalomaniacal, totally erratic, terrorist-enabling, crazier-than-a-shit-house-rat brutal dictator since Idi Amin shuffled off the international scene. Is anyone setting up a pool on when Ghaddaffy Duck gets the Mussolini-stone-dead-and-hanging-from-an-urban-gas-station-canopy? Can I get in for Friday?
2. Contemplating current unrest in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran and Lebanon, it looks like a good time to get out that old record of Barry McGuire, singing “Eve of Destruction.†Just saying.
3. It looks like the Koch Brothers are selected as this month’s Emmanuel Goldstein for the progressive-lefty media. Not bad for two guys who hadn’t been heard of until two or three months ago, out outside of libertarian and big-charity donor circles. Note: they really aren’t that big as donors go – the Tides Foundation and George Soros probably spend as much on coffee and crullers as the Koch Brothers donated to libertarian-oriented politicians. It seems to be that the Koch Brothers have committed the solecism of not doing things properly. Donations from billionaires ought to go to the proper causes and people. You know, the causes and people that that all socially conscientious and proper-thinking people endorse – because otherwise it would just wreck everything.
4. Madison, Wisconsin as the epicenter of the political s**tstorm-du-jour, American-style . . . whoever would have thought it, eh? Good old progressive, earnest mid-west Wisconsin, who elected a governor (by the same margin as the current resident of the White House was elected to his current office) who said what he meant, meant what he said, and then went out and did it. Wow – and now we are seeing the public employee unions and their sympathizers having a major meltdown. I somehow think that this will not end as the proper progressive people expect it to end; those who believe with the force of holy writ that a 21st century workplace is just exactly the same as a 20th century factory floor or a 19th century sweatshop. Allow me to break it to you gently, people: All the good things that unions did, they did a good while ago, and yes, it’s OK to be sentimental as all get-out about that and to honor the organizers – well, many of them anyway – who fought for all that. But that was then, this is now. The Man is just not slavering to put all working-class people back in the company town, working for a pittance and persecuted by the Pinkertons any more. (Maybe in China they are, or in Burma, though.) Now, a lot of ordinary, working-class and middle-class Americans do not have a good opinion of union labor as practiced in their own working lifetimes – because they have had experiences with it that were less than salutary. Rotten teachers in public schools to can’t be fired, surly and unhelpful DMV clerks, closed shops with enforced union membership, the antics of the SEIU –also known as the Purple People Beaters, unions who seem to benefit the union management rather than the rank and file, assorted criminal goonery, union demands which essentially wrecked various manufacturing companies, and insupportable levels of pay and benefits charged to taxpayers, politicians in the pocket of public employee unions . . . a word to the wise, oh union bretheren and sisteren – our affection and respect for unions has been worn to a thin shred. Don’t presume upon it. And the noisy antics of your union members and allies in public spaces everywhere in the last year or so is neither winning friends or influencing ordinary people – and voters – in a positive way. Especially when y’all don’t pick up the trash afterward.
5. Finally, how long was that plea for civility in the civic arena honored? A whole six weeks, eight weeks, tops? Ah, well – pleasant while it lasted.
So, it looks like what is unfolding in the streets of Madison, Wisconsin is a logical outgrowth of the last election cycle, in which droves of Tea Party-ish conservo-libertarians replaced Dems and an assortment of RINO squishes at the state level . . . and then promptly set to work doing what they had promised during their campaigns that they would do. Hey, democracy – it’s a wonderful thing. Normally, we’ve seemed to elect candidates who mouth the expected promises and platitudes during the campaign, and once in – or returned to – office, we might get thrown a couple of chunks of pork and maybe get a street or a local government office building named after them. I think we had gotten to the point that most political observers kind of expected that. But to actually say what they mean and mean what they say, and have it last for a nano-second past being sworn in? *enable Vizzini voice* Incredible! *disable Vizzini voice.
And for some reason this is now unfolding in Wisconsin, of all places, and in uber-liberal Madison, and I can’t decide which aspect of it is providing more cynical enjoyment to connoisseurs of state political establishments; the public employee union meltdown/temper tantrum, the fleeing legislators, trucked in protestors or the presence of Jesse Jackson. The Texas Lege set the bar pretty high, in the old days, being usually described as the best free show in town aside from the circus parade – Madison as a state capitol is providing more merriment than Austin, which may be a first. But only holding sessions every other year, and being a right-to-work state, and being fairly fiscally-responsible when it comes to state spending has held a lot of the legislative insanity in Texas to a minimum. Although there are a number of state-level spending black holes, most to do with roads and excessively splendid highway rest stops . . . anyway, back to Madison, and the way that this confrontation has been unfolding . . . Was anyone holding their breath waiting for Jesse Jackson to pop up, like one of those round-bottomed clown dolls that just won’t stay down? Guess it’s truly a national story now that he has helicoptered in to town.
Anyone tracked down the wandering Dem legislators by now? I know they were chased from their cozy digs at the Tilted Kilt, and are now rumored to be in Chicago, which only seems logical. Like to like, birds of a feather . . . can we call them ‘Flee-baggers’ now? It would be a laugh-riot for Governor Walker to declare that since they are no-shows at their assigned duty station, a special election ought to be called to replace them. Elections do have consequences.
The big-time, mega-big time losers are going to be the unions, or at the very least the established union leadership cadre. I mean, way to win friends and influence people – first for having – and insisting on retaining – pay and benefits packages for members that are generous far and above equivalent non-public employee workers compensation, and in a time of what looks increasingly like a depression. And insisting on retaining them in spite of the fact that municipalities and counties are near to going broke keeping pay/benefits and retirement packages current levels, and that the people who are paying the taxes which go to funding them don’t have anything near as generous or as secure . . . it’s a kick in the teeth and mega-awful public relations, people – this makes y’all look greedy and careless of consequences. But this is all of a piece with urban schoolteachers now going on sick-outs for most of a week and closing down schools Those workers who had to organize child-care on sudden notice must be near-nuclear with rage.
Threatening to picket and protest at private homes – that’s a lose-lose. Carrying signs with a Hitler mustache painted on the governor, and targets superimposed on his face? Nice to see that the call for civility and a dialing-down of eliminationist rhetoric lasted a whole . . . what, six weeks. And leaving piles of post-protest trash around for someone else to clean up just underlines contempt for fellow citizens and taxpayers that the union demonstrators seem to be holding.
Interesting times – in the ancient Chinese curse sense.
So – been following what happened/happening in Tunisia, and now in Egypt . . . that’ll be one for the history books, I’m sure. Egypt much more than Tunisia, I’m afraid, what with the Suez Canal and all. Tunisia’s a nice country and all, lovely Roman relics, coastal aspect on the Mediterranean, ancient culture, spectacular if arid scenery and I am sure the people there want and deserve the best they may get for themselves, but Egypt – oh, my, talking about balancing on a knife edge, when it comes to throwing out an entrenched and despotic dictatorship. Egypt’s got all of our attention, whereas Tunisia seems to have had only that of those aficionados of drastic unrest in exotic foreign countries. But access to the Suez Canal does tend to draw a higher level of interest, not to say concern. With umpty-ump percentage of world-wide ship traffic going through the Canal – the Suez Canal, not the Panama – that will tend to make political administrations sit up and pay attention. It may even teach Chris Matthews a little geography. The Suez is still a strategic choke-point, and that has everyone’s attention. With Mubarak Junior and his kithn’kin and various prominent members of Egyptian high society all departing at speed, extraneous Americans also being urged to depart at similar speed, the Egyptian military going over to the protestors, cutting off internet access, and citizens of every rank and stripe turning out into the streets . . . well, at least as near as we can make out from this distance and through the filter of time, distance and the various credentialed and un-credentialed news media . . . something momentous is happening, will happen, or might even have happened already. (Oh, wow- I see that our old camera-hound Dr. Zahi Hawass has gotten in front of them once again . . . Jees on a cracker, is the most dangerous place in Egypt that between Dr. Hawass and the nearest news camera? Up until this week it probably was . . .)
So far in this crisis, the absolutely funniest thing that I read on Open Salon was this comment “Been picking up hints on NPR of this broiling Mideast situation. Thank goodness Obama is president. Can’t begin to imagine the scenario we’d be facing with McCain.†on a post by this OS writer who otherwise is relatively sane – although the Stellaaaaaaa that she refers everyone to for further education is . . . well, why bother with her if you have Rantburg at your fingertips. Nice people at OS, many of them. High percentage of bat-shit crazy libs, though. Have to take them one by one, and refrain from pushing their particular buttons and they’re OK. There are also more libertarians and veiled conservatives among them than is apparent at first glance from the front page. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes – Egypt.
Sorry, the pooch is probably screwed now matter what we – that is the Obama Administration does or doesn’t do. Whatever happens, we will be blamed, solo and chorus. Support Mubarak, or support the right of the Egyptian people to protest, or support whatever leaders eventually emerge, knowing that whatever shakes out, the best-organized faction will probably come out on top. Odds seem to be on the Muslim Brotherhood organization, much as the Ayatollah Khomeini came out on top in that little ruckus in Iran thirty years ago. In that case, the good side to that outcome is that the Egyptians are guaranteed to get good and tired of a strict theocratic rule, just as the Iranians have. Downside – it will take thirty years. In the mean time, the Egyptian tourism industry will be totally napalmed, ship traffic through the Suez Canal ditto, and the odds of a mob of protesters attempting to take over the American Embassy and holding all the staff hostage seem to be pretty good. Second verse, same as the first, just a little bit louder and a little bit worse. On the up side? Can’t think of one, actually . . . except that Jimmy Carter can heave a sigh of relief; there exists now an administration with the potential for karking up an international crisis even more disastrously than the Tehran embassy-hostage affair.
Depressed enough already? You’re welcome – I live to serve.
. . . But definitely starting to get a little runny around the edges, with last Friday’s presser. I speak of our present chief executive, of course; the one so fond of all the perks and parties – not so much the hard grind of actually managing something. Well, he had to learn about it sometime, pity it’s been at our expense. I swear, there are times when I would like to go back in time to the campaign season of 2008, extend a hand to the major media . . . and grab them around one massive throat, shake them and scream – “Get up off your knees, you morons! Can’t you see that he’s a flashy, empty, affirmative action fast-burner, effortlessly hoisted higher and higher above his level of expertise? Just do your job!†And then I’d like to likewise grab that portion of the electorate who put him there (the non-dead, non-imaginary portion thereof) around the one massive throat and scream “What were you thinking! He’s never run a business, a military unit or municipal entity! He’s never done anything but run for office!†So he got the highest office in the land so a portion of the American electorate could feel good about themselves voting for the Ultimate Diversity Hire. I blow a subdued Bronx cheer in the direction of those fools who thought everything would turn out just peachy.
Ah, well – and just as well. I wrote about the Fresh Prince of Chicago often enough then, and take no particular joy in being proved more or less correct. Pity he wasn’t the least particle of what everyone in the rarefied intellectual and journalistic circles were convinced he would be – a fine intellect, well-tempered, a soaring public speaker. Alas, he’s a Chauncey Gardiner-type celebrity without the intellectual self-knowledge. Observing various public intellectuals and experts reluctantly come to that conclusion has been grimly delicious – for me, anyway. Experience is a valuable teacher, even if the learning of lessons acquired thusly tends to be painful. Why some of these people even have any credibility after going so coo-coo for the faintly cocoa-tinged community organizer is a mystery for the ages.
Do have to admit, some of the pratfalls have been as amusing as hell; giving the Queen an Ipod loaded with his own speeches was a particularly cringe-making move – but bailing on a Friday afternoon press conference to go to a party, and because Michelle Antoinette would be mad . . . and then leaving Bill Clinton in charge. That’s a trifecta of disengagement. I can hardly wait to see what happens next.
Having witnessed one form of American rebellion flame up from small individual local protests into a political movement that is about as unstoppable as a wild-fire with a Santa Anna wind behind it, now I am wondering if I am not seeing another, in the current ruckus kicked up about the TSA.
It has often seemed of late that just about every simple pleasure of air travel – and there used to be a good few, even when it just seemed as if flying by commuter air was just a Trailways bus with wings – has been precisely and surgically removed. Cram-jammed flights. A seat about the size of one of those chairs in a kindergarten – and about as comfortable. No meal service. No movies save on long-distance hauls. Fewer direct flights . . . And then, post 9-11 – security. No meeting someone at the gate upon arrival. No seeing someone away, by accompanying them to the departure gate. Emptying your luggage of nail-clippers, lighters, and any sort of liquid. Wearing shoes that can easily be slipped off. Getting to the airport at least two hours early to be sure to make it through the security line to start with. And now this: the unedifying choice between having to go through the stark-naked scanning machine, or a humiliatingly intrusive pat-down search.
Frankly, if I am to be seen in the altogether, or to be intimately groped by another person, I’d like it to be consensual and after a good dinner, a couple of drinks and a movie.
We put up with all of this in the name of “safety†– but my sense is that it has hit a wall of not only diminishing returns, but our own patience. The final straw, as it were. The far frozen limit. The TSA makes a great show of searching for things and of avoiding seeming to ‘profile’ those who might actually be terrorists intent on airborne mayhem. It’s not the tool, fools – it’s the person with the will, training and intent to use the tool – but oh, my – we can’t be caught singling out those specific persons. Might upset them, and then what might they do? So, in order to prove that we are not ‘profiling’ –screaming three year old kids, elderly nuns in full habit, semi-invalids in scooter-chairs, teenage girls, respectable middle-aged business persons with no record of brushes with the law whatsoever, get to be treated like convicted felons on intake to a long term in the state pen. There have been reports lately of terrorists smuggling explosives by stuffing them into body cavities; given how the TSA goes into full reaction mode to counter past terrorist tactics, I can only expect the next step is to administer colonoscopies and issue speculums. Complaints about unprofessional behavior by the TSA agents have become legion. I don’t have any myself – having only flown once in the last five years, but travelers who do have some real doozies to tell, and some of them even have video.
It’s going to be real interesting, seeing how this avoidance of air travel might go, in the next couple of weeks. With the economy the way it is, probably not as many can afford or want to fly, but I have a feeling that unhappiness over the back-scatter screening and intrusive pat-down searches have driven travelers to the limit of saying ‘heck with that, might as well drive.’ Interesting to see what the airlines may do, if travel falls off that far. Any bets?
Ok, so I can’t stop snickering at all those poor lefty-progressives at Open Salon, now that they have stopped whimpering and sucking their thumbs. Gosh, I wouldn’t be so cruel as to begin deriding them openly, for I have made a solemn vow not to be to terribly candid about my Tea Party sympathies over there. For several reasons – one being that OS is to promote my mad writing skilz, a second being that the Tea Party is a state of mind about fiscal responsibility-strict Constitutionalism-free markets, and thirdly, that the old axiom about teaching a pig to sing grand opera applies when trying to teach lefty-progs about the Tea Party. In that it’s a waste of your time and only annoys the pig. Intelligent people will eventually figure it out on their own, or when reality applies the clue-bat on a regular basis.
Hey, the radical libertarians are taking over . . . and they’re going to leave everyone alone!
It is refreshing though – that the frequency and use of the word “tea****er†seems to have fallen off markedly, though, although there are some interesting hissy fits going on over at Daily Kos. (Notably with this lefty-progg screamer – I’m posting the link as an example of the genre, but all you really have to know is that his screed is called An Open Letter To The White Right On the Occasion Of Your Recent Successful Temper Tantrum). I can only suppose that those most prone to brandish the “Raaaacist†stick at the Tea Party have only got around to noticing that candidates like Nikki Haley, Allen West and Quico Canseco were carried to victory on the shoulders of extensive Tea Party interest. Ah, yes – the reality clue-bat – fair and impartial.
Can’t help wondering if the various traditional news orgs haven’t been taking notice and pulling up their socks: OMG, those Tea Party people are successful! And coming close to being a majority! And perhaps we might rethink constantly denigrating them, ‘cause our ratings are tanking worse than the post-iceberg Titanic and selective appeal doesn’t sell the advertising. I’m amused as heck that Keith Olbermann has been given the sack from MSNBC – you suppose he and Juan Williams are going to get together for a drink?
See, it’s not the beginning of the end – it’s more the end of the beginning. What got overlooked perhaps, in the national election-night coverage, was how many state legislatures have turned from Dem to GOP, and how many of those GOP legislators are now more aligned with Tea Party sympathies, and how many local GOP caucuses have been also taken over by those with a taste for Tea and a new enthusiasm for political involvement. No more the go-along-to-get along career RINO squishes; they’re almost as disconcerted as the traditional mainstream media. That’s another part of the real story – and it wasn’t any big secret, it’s just that no one was looking. No wonder the senior GOP leadership cadre and strategists like Karl Rove look – and are acting – just like they have just discovered half a dead cockroach in their breakfast taco.
Just wait until 2012, people. It’s gonna be fun!
This is a repost of the speech that I gave at the San Antonio Tea Party rally, April 15th, 2009, when all of this kicked off, and we were set on a new course. We vote today – but it is not the end of the long haul – only the beginning of the next leg.
Hullo – and thank you all for coming to our modest little tea party in the heart of San Antonio! (pause for laughter) First of all – are we having a wonderful time? Fiesta San Antonio begins tomorrow, so we have been telling everyone to come for the Tea Party and stay for Fiesta. First though, I would like to thank everyone who took that extra effort, and worked very hard to make this particular place – this very special place – available to us, on very short notice. We would like to thank the ladies and gentlemen of the various departments of the City of San Antonio, and acknowledge the graciousness shown us by the members of the Fiesta Commission! Thank you, City of San Antonio!
Yes, this is a very special and significant place for our Tea Party – although most visitors, upon seeing it for the first time are surprised, because it looks so very small – nothing like the way appears in all the movies. San Antonio de Valero… so called ‘the Alamo’ for the cottonwood trees that grow wherever there is plenty of water in otherwise dry country. And there were cottonwoods nearby then, enough that the soldiers of Spain who set up a garrison in this old mission called it so, after those trees. Imagine – if you can – how this place would have looked, then! Just… imagine.
Close your eyes, and if you can, banish the sight of all these tall modern glass buildings, and those rambling beaux-arts storefronts, while I paint a word-picture for you. Go back… go back a hundred and seventy three years. The actual town of San Antonio is now some little distance away, a huddle of adobe and stucco walls around the tower of San Fernando.
The air smells of wood-smoke and cooking, of sweat and horses, and spent black-power. We are in a sprawling compound of long low buildings, a single room deep, with tiny windows, and thick walls. Some of these have flat rooftops, others with shallow peaked roofs. Many buildings have their inside walls razed – others have been filled with rubble and dirt to make cannon-mounts. The gaps between them are filled by palisades of earth, tight-packed and reinforced with lengths of wood, and tangles made of sharpened tree branches. All of this work has been done painfully, by hand and with axes, picks, shovels and buckets. The chapel – of all of these the tallest, and the strongest – is also roofless. Another earth ramp has been built up, inside; to serve as yet one more cannon-mount. This place has become a fortress, and last defense, surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force, a large army of over two thousand men, outnumbering bare two hundred or so defenders by over 10 to 1. This enemy army…, trained…, hardened and disciplined, is well-equipped with cannon and ammunition, with cavalry and foot-soldiers alike. By the order of the enemy commander, a blood-red flag signifying no quarter to the defenders of this place has been flown from the tower of the San Fernando church.
The story is, that on the day that the last courier left the Alamo – a local man who knew the country well, mounted on a fast horse bearing away final letters and dispatches – one of the Texian commanders called together all his other officers and men. He was a relatively young man – William Barrett Travis, ambitious and to be honest, a bit full of himself. I rather think he might have struck some of his contemporaries as a bit insufferable – but he could write. He could write, write words that leap off the page in letters of fire and blood, which glow in the darkness like a distant bonfire.
He was in charge because of one of those turns which bedevil the plans of men. His co-commander, James Bowie was deathly ill… ironic, because he was the one with a reputation as a fighter and a leader. Bowie was seen by his enemies – of which there were many – as a violent scoundrel, with a reputation for bare-knuckle brawling, for land speculation and shady dealing. And of the third leader – one David Crockett, celebrity frontiersman and former Congressman, he did not claim any rank at all, although he led a party of Tennessee friends and comrades. He had arrived here, almost by accident. Of all of the leadership triad, I think he was perhaps the most amiable, the best and easiest-tempered of company. Of all those others, who had a stark choice put before them on that very last day, that day when it was still possible to leave and live… most of them were ordinary men, citizens of various communities and colonies in Texas, wanderers from farther afield – afterwards, it would become clear that only a bare half-dozen were born in Texas.
It is a vivid picture in my mind, of what happened when a young lawyer turned soldier stepped out in front of his rag-tag crew. Legends have that Colonel Travis drew his sword – that weapon which marked an officer, and marked a line in the dust at his feet and said “Who will follow me, over that line?†It was a stark choice put before them all. Here is the line; swear by stepping over it, that you will hold fast to your comrades and to Texas, all you volunteer amateur soldiers. Make a considered and rational choice – not in the heat of the fray, but in the calm before the siege tightens around these crumbling walls. No crazy-brave impulse in the thick of it, with no time to do anything but react. Stay put, and choose to live, or step over it and choose to go down fighting in the outpost you have claimed for your own.
The legend continues – all but perhaps one crossed the line, James Bowie being so ill that he had to be carried over it by his friends. It was a choice of cold courage, and that is why it stays with us. These men all chose to step across Colonel Travis’ line. Some had decided on their own to come here, others had been tasked by their superiors… and others were present by mere chance. They could have chosen freely to leave. But they all stayed, being convinced that they ought to take a stand … that something ought to be done.
Imagine. Imagine the men who came here, who made that choice, who had the cold courage to step over a line drawn in the dust at their feet.
They were animated by the conviction that they were citizens, that it was their right – and their responsibility to have a say in their own governance. They were not subjects, expected to submit without a murmur to the demands of a remote and arbitrary government. They did not bow to kings, aristocrats, or bureaucrats in fine-tailored coats, looking to impose taxes on this or that, and demanding interference in every aspect of their lives. They were citizens, ordinary people – with muddled and sometimes contradictory motives and causes, fractious and contentious, just as we are. But in the end, they were united in their determination to take a stand – a gallant stand against forces that seemed quite overwhelming.
This evening, we also have come to this place, this very place – as is our right as citizens and taxpayers, to speak of our unhappiness to our government in a voice that cannot be ignored any longer. This is our right. Our duty… and our stand.
(Couldn’t resist G&S updated, and an Obama look-alike…)
Found through a comment here, at Protein Wisdom, where Jeff G. is having yet another go-around with She Who Must Not Be Mentioned, in whom the serious crayzee is in full flood.
(Shamelessly quoted entire, from commenter FordPrefect 1969, on this story at Big Journalism. Enjoy the delicious sarcasm, and thank you, Ford Prefect!!)
To: all NPR Staff
It has become exceedingly obvious that we are about to be forced to justify our existence to a group of people who to whom we have shown nothing but condescension and contempt for our entire careers here at NPR. I’m going to go ahead and continue to work on the assumption that they will be Buckleyesque whipping boys who will treat our apologies and sudden willingness to have a conversation with reciprocal honesty and forthrightness as sincere, rather than simply pulling the goddamned flush lever on us like someone with basic self-respect would. It is quite possible with influx of the Tea Party caucus that that will not work out, but since our lavish paychecks, benefits, and vacation time have always been dependent on revenue confiscated from the aforementioned group, and we have, frankly, been dicks to them 100% of the time, and have very much enjoyed the process of lecturing from a tax-funded ivory tower that they were forced to finance. It has that Orwellian tang to it that really makes it an authentic experience.
So, at any rate, you are, from here on out, to pretend that you think people who are not within the Progressive fold have the same rights good people like us have. Under no circumstances will you communicate to our new bosses that you would put a boot on their necks and make slaves out of them if only you could switch sides of the desk, which, frankly, is what we were really expecting after Dear Leader was installed. Now, it appears, we may all meet our Fryolators of Destiny.
So, after a year and three-quarters of the existence of the political entity known as the Tea Party (only it isn’t really a party, just a sort of decentralized mass movement) said movement is getting a little respect. Fearful respect, to be sure – but ever such an improvement on crude and ignorant denigration! Oh, we’re still getting the denigration, but it has become a little more muted lately, and use of the epithet t******er is not as frequent as formerly, possibly because the media personalities who delighted in using it may have discovered that a good-sized subset of the viewing audience took exception and offense . . . which might have affected ratings, and audience share and the sales of advertising time. Myself, I can deal with fearful respect, and so – no doubt – can the rest of those scattered the length and breadth of the Land of the Free Home of the Brave who cherish Tea Party principles. Especially when the fearful respect comes from the likes of Dick Armey . . . or from RINO squishes who come to love the perks of office so much they will do anything, and say anything to stay there. Yes, it was most especially amusing – since I have not the slightest shred of a doubt that the senior GOP strategists and long-serving office holders were quite absolutely sure – right up until the last few weeks – that Tea Party principles would automatically translate into votes for Republican candidates. Booted, spurred and ready to ride, they seemed to think that all was necessary to do was to saddle that Tea Party mustang, and it would obey.
The Dems also assumed – and trumpeted it loudly and often – that the Tea Parties were nothing more than great swaths of GOP Astroturf; the GOP’s sudden horrid discovery vis-à -vis the biddability of Tea Partiers is presumably as much of a surprise to them as well. I can only assume they were goggle-eyed with horror, upon making this discovery, since you’d have thought a canny strategist would have known the words of Sun Tzu.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Ah, yes – the dear old Donks, they may know themselves but, I am pretty sure they do not know Tea Party: they know only a caricature of the Tea Party. I derived some innocent merriment these last few months, visualizing the expressions on the faces of various political operatives in the current administration, the higher reaches of the Democrat Party and their water-carriers in the media, as they tried to counter the Tea Party – and discovered that none of their favored tactics worked. I swear it’s been like Wily Coyote, Super-Genius trying to catch the Road-Runner. The results were pretty much uniform; Wily Coyote scorched to a crisp, forming a neat crater at the bottom of a deep ravine, or augered in by a falling 5,000 lb weight – and meanwhile, the Tea Party elements pause for a brief moment, shout meep-meep and zip on, unfazed and . . . more to the point, un-distracted.
So, one more time, just to make everything clear: The Tea Party is a loosely organized, essentially leaderless and distributed political insurgency, holding these things as our highest values: fiscal responsibility, strict adherence to the Constitution, small government and free markets.
Everything else is secondary: believe me when I say this. Everything else is secondary. People who hold to those principles may also have strong convictions about illegal immigration, social issues, gun rights, home schooling or any number of other current rights-and-issues brangles; some of these Tea Party supporters may have had a long history of advocacy with regard to these issues, but they are not the Tea Party’s main motivating influence. And even though the Tea Party did not exist in anything like the currently accepted form, there were some of us whose concern with federal government excess – to include ill-advised regulations and ballooning deficits – predated the anointing of President Obama. It’s just that damn few in the media, or anywhere else outside the blogosphere gave a rat’s ass, and most of us were lone voices, crying in the wilderness. Just because it didn’t make the headlines doesn’t mean such concerns didn’t exist before 2008.
And just so that we can get that straight – when it comes to President Obama, it’s not the color of his skin, it’s the content of his character, and his admittedly thin resume. (And his weird Chicago friends, his effortless rise to the top unassisted by actual accomplishment, and of late, his propensity for vacations and golf days.) Which a scattering of us were pointing out in 2008, for all the good it did come Election Day. Curiously, in many of the admittedly libertarian/fiscally conservative/veteran circles in which I have been hanging out since 2002; a President and Commander in Chief of color was pretty well accepted – it’s just that we all thought then that Colin Powell or Condi Rice would have been a better bet, as well has having a much more reassuring resume and some, you know, real-world experience. Demanding that Tea Party leaders do, or denounce, or disavow something or other, just to prove something-or-other? Good luck with that. Leaderless, distributed political insurgency, strong emphasis on the leaderless, high value given to individual personal initiative and responsibility. Think D-Day, when everything on the beaches had gone to s**t, but individual NCOs and soldiers stepped out and did what they knew had to be done.
Some of the Tea Partiers I began to know over the last year came from a strong evangelical Christian background, which in this part of the world is hard to avoid. A casual observer might assume that the Tea Party is an evangelical Christian movement – and the casual observer would be wrong. Frankly, not too many of us had any heartburn over Bristol Palin’s baby, Scott Brown’s college pinups, or Christine O’Donnell’s flirtation with witchcraft. Seriously, the evangelical Tea Partiers were supposed to get all bent out of shape over all that? OK, I realize that a lot of people took their ideas about Evangelical Christians from Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady . . . but what did I say about Sun Tzu, again? One more time – the main thing is fiscal responsibility, small federal government, free market, strict adherence to the Constitution. Social issues – secondary importance. A good few other Tea Partiers were cranky and independent libertarian types, and not conventionally religious in any way. In fact, in our own quiet way, a lot of us are pretty worldly. Quite a few are military veterans, small and medium-sized business owners, a good few were bloggers, and well-versed in the ways of the internet as a means of informing and coordinating.
About Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News? Not our leaders. Sarah Palin? Not our leader either. Personally, I never cared much for the first two, never watch the second unless there’s some local disaster – but I did think that picking the fourth for the VP slot on the GOP ticket for 2008 was a stroke of genius. So, mayor of a small town, effective governor of a pretty large state – and with high local approval ratings; nah – don’t believe the lady is an idiot, a fascist or an ignorant hillbilly, not for a moment. But if it satisfies something in the soul of those of the progressive persuasion to think so . . . well, Sun Tzu again. Or whoever it was that advised never interrupting your enemy in the process of making a complete douche of him or herself.
So, after a year and some of being constantly belittled as ignorant, closed-minded bitter clingers and racists – how do I feel? That holding to that line has probably bounced back and resoundingly. Because those of us who are Tea Partiers know it isn’t true. And those who are close to us – friends, co-workers, neighbors and kin; I think they have probably figured out by now that it isn’t true also. Those of us within the Tea Party movement – we can keep our cool, and be a bigger person about the mindless abuse and constant rain of accusations – but don’t for a moment think that we have forgotten, or will ever forget the names of the worst offenders.
So, everyone clear on the concept? Good. I can see November from my house. And until then, a musical interlude. Enjoy.
So it begins – the seeing of what was screamingly obvious to me a good few months ago; the horrified realization among the politically connected (especially in the GOP) that the loose confederation which amassed under the yellow Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake motif and goes by the name of the Tea Party is not just a sort of mass temper-tantrum, or a collection of irate voters to be gentled, tamed and gelded to better serve the purposes of the Grand Old Party. Nor are they – being a loosely connected and leaderless network of fiscal conservatives, free-market small business owners and strict constitutionalists – a tool and Astroturf organization deliberately created by the machinations of the Dark Lord Rove. Nope – the fact the Dark Lord himself got downright pissy over the fact that Christine O’Donnell scooped the primary in Delaware over the favored GOP candidate . . . and then went on to demonstrate that financially, she has no need of the established lords of the GOP and their deep coffers. It’s not just a case of the tail wagging the dog; the high lords of the established American political process (Republican Division) have discovered to their absolute horror that in this political season, the Tea Party is not the tail . . . but the dog itself, and they have been reduced to being the tail. Or possibly the materiel which emerges regularly from a little bit south of the tail – but I don’t think they will be the first to come to this realization, nor will they be the last.
See – if you really had paid attention to the Tea Party, or been deeply involved from the get-go, you’d have known a number of things about them. One of those things is that – although a fair number of original Tea Partiers are social conservatives, even evangelical Christians – the fiscal-conservative/free market/strict constitutionalist mindset trumps all that. There’s also a strong libertarian bent among them, and a prejudice towards individual responsibility. Basically, it’s ‘let me alone to work out my own economic/personal salvation’ which usually results in statist tools pouncing triumphantly and saying things like “Ah-ha! So you don’t want roads, or police departments, or an FDA screening dangerous drugs, or social security – hah! You hypocrites!†This is something of an exercise in straw-man construction when it comes to Tea Partiers; generally we acknowledge that a government is good for something: roads, delivery of the post, defense of the nation, and a care for the health of the public are good things, and the rightful interest of a representative government elected by the people. It’s just that a good thing taken too far eventually becomes a bad thing . . . and in the words of that wonderful document, the Declaration of Independence ‘destructive of those ends.’ The way to Hell is paved with good intentions – in the eyes of Tea Partiers, a cold and unsparing look at the long-term results of those various good intentions is way, way past due, as well as a reconsideration of maintaining such programs which grew, like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, out of good intentions some thirty, fifty or eighty years ago. Or even severely modifying them – because one of the other unspoken tenets of people who tend to become Tea Partiers – is that if well-intentioned laws, programs and practices have a bad result in the real world, than perhaps such laws, programs and practices out to be revised, amended or terminated.
All the good intentions in the world do not – repeat, do not – excuse or justify a destructive result. In the real world – that one where one in which most of us live – that which has a bad result should not be continued, full stop, end discussion. It has also been noticed that frequently those who insists that such a law, program or practice ought to be continued with just because of the original good intentions were noble, and that it hasn’t worked because we haven’t worked hard enough at it – have a vested interest in such continuation. As it looks to be shaping up this election season, that kind of blind devotion to principles, lack of consideration to results and self-interest has consequences, some of them severe. Life-threatening, even. Certainly career-threatening, to judge by the way that long-time career Dem politicians are distancing themselves at speed from bagatelles such as Obama-care, and top GOP strategists are regarding primary victories by Tea Party oriented candidates over the properly anointed candidates with horrified disbelief. I can almost hear them saying ‘OMG – they are serious about small-governments and the Constitution!’
So, what do you call it when you – theoretically speaking – have a certain designated freedom bestowed upon you, such as freedom of speech or thought . . . but you are afraid to exercise it, for whatever reason? What then, oh wolves; are you then truly free if you are constrained from exercising that right because . . . ? If honest discussion of certain topics is essentially forbidden because it is infra dig, or rude, or may cause hurt feelings to another, or offend a segment of society, then can we still claim that we have freedom of speech, or any sort of intellectual openness, even if convictions for sedition or blasphemy are relatively rare in the West? That speech is still unspoken, those thoughts un-aired are still un-aired, whether it is fear, social pressure or the rule of law what keeps them so.
Which brings me back to the matter of the Danish Mohammad cartoons – even after four years, the matter is still resonating: at the time I wrote this:
(It) depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.
They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon – but a dozen relatively tame cartoons? Oh, dear – we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Muslims. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people . . . The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.
The latest iteration in this farrago of freedom of the press is the fatwah on American cartoonist Molly Norris, who originally created “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day.†The fatwah originated in Yemen, a place which I am sure a great many members of the American public would have difficulty pin-pointing it’s exact location on a map of the world. But the tentacles of the murderously offended reach a long way. She is now in hiding, and in various discussion threads, a dismayingly large number of commenters are blaming her for provoking Moslem ire.
But that is my point – what good is it to have brave principles about open, intellectual discussion, freedom of the press, of thought and expression, if in the end they are not exercised out of fear?
Here’s the thing – the other half of the intellectual freedom thing; there is no right of the individual never to be offended. In a free and open discussion, there will be differing opinions and interpretations, and there may even be people offended by the exercise of it. God knows, the artistic set have been cheerfully offending the bourgeoisie for decades, on the principle that it is good for us to be shaken up now and again, just to make us all consider or reconsider our preconceptions, or expand our consciousnesses or whatever twaddle they will use to justify themselves with. And the good bourgeoisie, even if offended, usually wasn’t motivated to do much more than grumble and write a letter to the editor; they didn’t go around chopping off heads. One might therefore have grounds for suspecting that in the case of the Danish Cartoons o’ Doom, and Everybody Draw Mohammad’ that a good part of this sudden unwillingness to offend is plain old fear.
Compounding the irony is the fact that those who are the most fearful of repercussions are also afraid to openly admit their fear in the first place – that some Islamic radical nutbag would come after them with a knife, or a car-bomb, or even just get their asses fired for ‘Islamophobia.’ So much easier to transfer the blame, and never have to admit that intellectual freedom has been stifled – not by law, but by fear.
So, now in the multitudinous fall-out from the Ground Zero Mosque, or Cordoba House or Park51, or whatever the heck it’s being termed – is a threat by a Florida whack-job minister to burn Korans as a public demonstration of something or other on Saturday. Cheesncrackers, people, just when I thought this whole issue couldn’t get any more demented. Is there someone I have to sleep with, in order to live on a planet with sane people, preferably ones with a sense of proportion and humor, not to mention toleration for those who don’t agree with them in every aspect of existence?
Frankly, I’d like to set the good Iman Rauf and the good Reverend Jones down on the other side of my official Sgt. Mom desk for a nice discussion of principles. And those would be principles which would apply to both of them, and yes, I expect to be the one doing the talking.
Yes, there is nothing in this supposedly free country which would prevent the Reverend Jones from incinerating copies of the Koran, as a demonstration of his lack of appreciation for Islam and his ingratitude for the many blessings that the strict practice of Salafist Islam brings to the modern cultural table. And yes, there is also nothing which would legally prevent a mosque/community/cultural center from being established adjacent to that place where there were 5,000 people (give or take) crushed or incinerated when a pair of hijacked airplanes were deliberately crashed into two tall and shining skyscrapers nine years ago to the day by representatives of the Religion of Peace.
So, established – they each can do this thing which they want to do, for whatever reasons. And Andres Serrano can take pictures of a crucifix in a vial of his own pee, and Chris O-whatever can adorn a painting of the Virgin with mounds of elephant dung, and Danish cartoonists can do cartoons about how fear of drawing a picture of Mohammad leads to self-censorship, and Salman Rushdie can joke around with Satanic Versifying and all of that is perfectly OK in a free country, or it ought to be.
But where is the line to be drawn, then? And if you are offended by one or the other, than what is the acceptable response? Letter to the editor, an angry post on a blog, a boycott? Threatening violence? Should the fear of violence lead one to self-censor? What about a fear of offending people? Why is it OK to offend one particular class of people by your actions in support of religion or art, but tip-toe around giving offense to the other? Exactly what is the standard at work here, and who decides to apply it? And hey, isn’t the poor old bourgeois getting a little tired of being constantly epatered?
Been kind of amusing, surfing the blogosphere in the wake of the Beck rally last weekend – the usual quibble over how many people were actually there, as if a threshold of so many people crammed elbow to elbow at the Lincoln Memorial actually will confer legitimacy/credibility in the eyes of our so-called bettors, looking down their lorgnettes from the lofty heights and sniffing “Oh, honestly, who do those plebs think they are?†Still, 300,000 or half a million, sweating in the hot sun in a crowded venue; for every one who actually attended, how many would have been there, but couldn’t afford it in these economic hard times, or had obligations elsewhere. How many watched it on television, or on streaming video, and wished they had been there?
How many more will come to the 9/12 rally – more than last year? I know very well that the Restore Honor rally was more of Glenn Beck’s ecumenical religious revival thing, whereas this years’ 9/12 march from the Washington Monument to the Capitol is intended as a tax-payer’s protest and organized by a far wider coalition of groups generally lumped together under the heading “Party of Tea.†In a fair number of so-called elite minds, though, the two are pretty much conflated, if only because it’s pretty much the same kind of citizen participation in both. There is a lot of overlap – no sense or utility in pretending otherwise, but the difference in focus is a subtle one. I’d have to say that generally the Tea Partiers I knew put the fiscally-sound, strict Constitutionalist and free-market principles first, and then the socio-religious principles standing about a half-step behind. Which means that they’ll make common political cause with the gay atheist libertarian any day of the week, and probably enjoy each others’ company enormously to boot, especially if beer and tuna hot-dish is involved.
This might have the common run of moderately-leftishly-liberal bloggers would be quivering in their boots as well, if they ever cared to look beyond the grotesque caricature they have created of a Tea Partier. Now and again, a commentator on Open Salon (and in other places) will venture out among Tea Partiers, rather in the sense of an Anglican arch-bishop venturing among the cannibals, and return either startled at being treated politely and respectfully, and how very . . . very nice they all are. Usually, they are jumped upon by their peers, and brought back around to the correct way of thinking toot-sweet. But they are worried on some level – I would guess, just from the level of vituperative comment.
There will be a great many attending 9/12 rallies; there maybe even more than the Beck revival at the Washington one, or so I am presuming, given the level of deep unhappiness welling up. Not uncontrolled lynch-mob anger as the elites of our political/media/academic class keep assuming, picturing something like a rightist version of anarchists protesting at the G-8 summit. The anger is real, but it’s cold and focused, not easily baited into acting or speaking foolishly, and somewhat beneath the surface of things, rather like a deep ocean current. The very existence of that current must have a lot of other people – in media, and in politics-as-they-are waking up in a cold sweat at night. Because November 2010 is coming, and after that, November 2012 – and I just don’t see things improving for our very own established professional political class in the next two years. If I have observed anything of the current administration over the last year or so – it’s that everything they have tried to do to fix a problem area has just resulted in making it infinitely worse. Even the redecorated Oval Office looks worse than it did before. (Yikes – 70ies earth tones, back again!)
I am, praise be to certain workaholic habits of mine (the one which goes into hyper-space warp-speed drive when faced with an impending deadline) actually able to come up for air today. One large chunk o’impending deadline all but finished but for the polishing and tweaking, and the other all but finished save for the author getting back to me to answer some questions about her MS. Life is good. And so is that 12-ounce bottle of Shiner Bohemian Black Lager that I have drunk about half of, as a reward to myself. Nice burnt-sugar overtones. I’m writing this Sunday evening at about 5:45 PM Sunday, so no need to go all interventionish on me.
Of course, I still have about three other big projects hanging over me – but the largest are out of the way, so I can come up for air and take note of some of the weirdness around me.
OK, so it looks like America’s next top model . . . is six foot something and so impossibly thin that a man’s hands can span her waist: Which was a charmingly old-fashioned standard of feminine beauty in the 19th century, when it was achieved only by the use of a fierce whale-bone corset and a couple of strong maids, hauling away. Dear god, the girl looks like she is morphing into a praying mantis. So, if this is what the fashion designers want to hang their clothes on, just animate a wire hanger and be done with it, and leave the rest of us alone with our cellulite.
So, the same breed of statist limpd**ks that tried to launch the Coffee Party and are trying yet again, with yet an amazingly stupid tee shirt and mug with the logo ‘f*ck tea’. Apparently that’s all you have to do, to get a movement really going. Print up some tee shirts and get your friends in the juice-box mafia (aka whatever has taken the place of JournoList) to push the meme. Hey, boys and girls, we can put on a show ourselves, around in back in the barn!
Apparently, they insist they are trying to bring about a serious discussion of serious issues and
the something like 54% of citizens who approve and support Tea Party principles should just . . . I dunno, sit down and shut up and be ruled over unquestioningly by the new aristos. OK, one more time: strict interpretation of the Constitution, fiscally responsible, free markets. The Tea Party is a distributed, leaderless insurgency, based on a few core principles, not one person. I don’t know how I can make it any more plain than that. Aside from that, boys and girls, if it looks like bought n’paid for Astroturf, smells like Astroturf, feels like Astroturf and is being rolled out there by the same ol’ Astroturf purveyors . . . then it probably is indeed, Astroturf. Here’s hoping that not too many of the ‘f*ck tea’ ‘tards don’t get stuck with a garage full of un-sellable tee shirts . . . oh, f*ck that – I hope they do.
So, the Mighty O’s approval ratings continue to crater. Time to take another vacation. Look, Mr. Hopey-Changey, coming out with support of a mosque/community/center/arms bunker whatever in the neighborhood of New York’s Ground Zero on one day, then walking back the next – not a good idea. Indecisive, duplicitous, or just plain old telling-the-audience-what-they-wanna-hear? I don’t know, I’m not a licensed political professional, or a mind-reader, but you are getting bad advice from someone. Or if you are getting good advice . . . oh, f*ck it . . . take the bad advice. No one will ever notice. Really. November is a little more than a month and a half away. Kick back, you and the wife and kids take another vay-cay. It’s all on us, I insist.
Yes, freedom of religion in America technically would permit the mosque/whatever to be built wherever . . . good taste and a sense of tact would argue that Ground Zero is perhaps a good place. Sorta like a museum of the Confederacy would not be a good fit in downtown Harlem. (But it might give Cholly Rangel a case of the vapors, so it wouldn’t be a wasted effort to suggest it.)
Ah well – enough of a rant. Blondie and I went up to Boerne yesterday, and brought back some smoked ribs and BBQ sauce from (I kid you not) a Shell gas station quickie-mart on the corner of Main Street and SH-46, which has a meat counter and a BBQ stand which has the best BBQ around. It’s called the Riverside Market. We stopped in for some soft drinks, and it smelled so enticing that we stopped in on our way home from Boerne Market Days and bought some for take out. Remember – Boerne, Shell Station, on Main Street, and SH-46, just as you cross the river. The place was wall to wall with local people. And the BBQ smelt like the food of the gods.
Apparently, our own very dear royals are having a wonderful time in Spain. Kinda makes GWB chopping brush on the ranch in Crawford look positively plebian.
The first day of August, in South Texas. It’s hot. I should probably not have to reiterate this; it should go without saying, like the North and South Poles are cold, Saudi Arabia has oil, Russians drink a lot of vodka and NY Rep. Charles Rangel is as corrupt as the day is long.
Speaking of good ol’ Chollie Rangel, I guess that he is the next one under the Obama-bus, he and Maxine Walters both. What brought that on that spot of Capitol Hill Cleanup, BTW – a bit of pre-emptive housecleaning against a turnover in November? Ah, well – enjoy the view of the axles and transmission. Heck, there are so many others under that bus it must be jacked up like one of those monster off-road vehicles that you need a 16-foot ladder to get into.
I see – mostly through noting the Yahoo News cliplets which come up whenever I access my email – that Chelsea Clinton got married this last weekend, in a lavish, celebrity-studded, ultra-high end round of festivities at some grand estate in scenic upstate New York. Two or three million is the price-tag . . . which I presume has stimulated some segment of the economy, at least the bridal-industrial complex portion of it. Oh, and air traffic over that part of NY was cut off – security concerns, of course, and between the guests, their entourages, the news crews and the rubberneckers, I presume the related traffic has been a nightmare for the ordinary residents. Three million. On a wedding. While the peasants watch from the sidewalk, tugging their forelocks in obeisance to their betters. Look, I don’t mind weddings, and even wish the presumably happy couple the best, and all that . . . but wasn’t this exercise a little . . . I don’t know – vulgar? Unnecessarily ostentatious, kind of Marie Antoinettish, in time of severe economic downturn? Again, the two or three million wasn’t flushed down the john, I am sure a lot of people got a nice few days or weeks of work out of it, from the waiters hired by the caterer, the flower-arrangers, the owners of local hotels and motels, the limo-drivers and the extra security . . . but still – it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth – it smacks of royalty putting on a show. Jenna Bush’s wedding, and John F. Kennedy’s wedding just seem comparatively more sensible, suitable and tasteful.
Where in the world is Shirley Sherrod, the Mouth from the South – and are her fifteen minutes of fame over? Is she still planning to sue Andrew Breitbart – and on what grounds? You know, PBS could make a kid’s show out of this, a la Carmen Sandiego, with Shirley zipping around to racial hotspots, and dropping clues to the audience. Hey, they could even do an international edition. If any producers want to discuss this concept with me, drop me a private message.
And speaking of the NAACP – how come their president, Ben Jealous looks about as white as my brother JP? No kidding, he looks a lot like my brother – dark hair and eyes, gets a decent tan in the summer.
And finally – JournoList. So I wasn’t having a tin-foil hat moment, wondering why suddenly some news stories, such as that about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Fred Phelps of the Chicago area mega-church scene – just seemed to suddenly vanish down the memory hole during that 2008 campaign season. Here I was thinking that having listened to that nutcase in the pulpit for twenty years would surely have been the kiss of death for a candidate for any office, let alone the highest in the land. My bad – here came the JournoListers to save the day for their guy! Note to self – memorize the lists of members, and consider with a handful of fleur de sel anything they write which I happen to come across. Give them a ration of &$#@! in any comments permitted about having aided in the corruption of the newsgathering process – and the political process.
Posting’s been light, because . . . I have a platter full of work right in front of me. And three-quarters of it will be for pay. The remaining quarter is split between providing good a few spoonfuls of good bloggy ice cream, and trying to finish the next book. I was alternating between two – one set during the early days of Anglo settlement in Texas, and up through the Republic of Texas days, tentatively entitled Gone to Texas, and another set fifty years later, in the cattle boom and barbed wire days. Write a chapter or two on one, set it aside, write a chapter or two on the other. Kept from getting bored or blocked, y’see.
But – and that is a Michael Moore sized butt, right there – I had to pull full steam ahead on the Gone to Texas – which may wind up being called Daughter of Texas, having made a decision to have the official launch/release date on the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, April 21. The senior partner in the Tiny Publishing Bidness loves my stuff and we are setting up an account with the printer “Lightning Source†so we can do POD books, as an alternative to litho print. So – my book will be the test run for us. With luck I can scrape some local media interest, since that will be the start of Fiesta. A release date late in April means I have to start sending out advance review copies in late September. Working backwards from that deadline means I have to finish the five or six chapters in the next month, so . . . yes, the personal work schedule is full. I’ll set up to take orders in December, though – for copies to be delivered in early April.
With all this going on, I had to step back from certain other activities, including volunteering for the local Tea Party – but there are so many people getting into it all, I don’t think my absence will be missed. And I certainly will continue blogging about Tea Party matters, and perhaps even a little more freely, since what I now say will reflect only on myself, not the local org. Hey, I might even get to go to a rally or two, and not have to stay afterwards for hours, cleaning up!
I’d write something about the ongoing revelations about the JournoList . . . except that what I’d have to say boils down to two statements: “Yeah, I thought there was something strange about how some stories had legs from here to there and back again, and others vanished into a black hole,†and “Oh, boy – bring on the popcorn! This is gonna be fun!â€
Simply wonderful stuff bubbling up from other bloggers over the last couple of days – rich, creamy bloggy goodness that I simply have to share … that is, if you have not already found it yourself.
The pretensions of our new aristocratic class, dissected for your pleasure, here
I think what has happened is that over the past few decades, the more traditional forms of conspicuous consumption have become less and less effective for wealthy snobs who wish to ostentatiously parade their privilege. It used to be that the rich could be content with having lots of fancy toys and whatnot. But nowadays, when basically anyone above lower-lower class can head to Wal-Mart and pick up a plasma TV, drive a nice SUV, or even get a mortgage to ‘buy’ a McMansion somewhere (at least before ’07), it gets harder and harder for the wealthy to parade their specialness and privilege in front of the rest of us. So it’s only natural that they have increasingly turned to the realm of political postures as their method of choice for distinguishing themselves from the masses. Indeed, in this light it makes perfect sense that leftist policies would be the ones most likely to harm, constrain and impoverish folks who are merely middle class (but not upper middle class).
Where our new aristos came from, and what they want. Power, basically. But you already knew that.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
(Link found first through da Blogfadda, but this essay is now being linked everywhere, including a fascinating discussion at The Belmont Club)
From the Department of Take a Number and Get in Line – thoughts on hating Obama…
If anyone during the 2008 had implied, or even speculated, that Obama was capable of anything of the sort, he’d have been dismissed as a demagogue, a hater, even a lunatic. But today, after his abandonment of the state of Tennessee (also wracked by flooding), his betrayal of the Georgians, his pulling the rug out from under the Poles and Czechs, his dragging and cold response to the Gulf blowout, his insults to the UK, the GOP, the Supreme Court, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Dalai Lama, it scarcely raises a shrug. That’s Obama. That’s how he acts — with arrogance, superciliousness, and indifference. We can search the entire roster of American presidents, and we will not find a match. This is not the behavior of an elected chief executive; it’s the conduct of a divine right monarch, and a pretty inadequate one as well.
And finally, those poor, suffering, starving and water-deprived Palestinians of Gaza – they only just now got a new shopping mall.
In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West.
(Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.â€
To: The NAACP and others Re: The Events of This Week WRT the Tea Party From: Sgt Mom
1. To the NAACP – Well, thanks. Just thanks. After god-knows-how-many years of being carefully schooled – by the public school system, the military and by the mainstream media (to include the TV and motion picture establishment) to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin – and obediently taking every word of four decades of lectures about racial equality to heart, now I confess to being rather whipsawed by the discovery that you all are just another squalid, money and vote-grubbing racially-based faction seeking political advantage, fearful about loosing what little control you have over events, and doing the bidding of one particular political splinter of one particular political party. So much for appealing to justice, honor, equality before the law, and all the rest of it; that rumbling sound you hear – that must be MLK revolving in his grave with sufficient RPMs – that if hooked up to a generator would power a small city. In my eyes, your crime this week is that you have basically bought into a Big Lie. You have essentially joined a political lynch mob, in accusing the Tea Party (a widely spread and officially disorganized popular insurgency based upon fiscal responsibility, free markets and strict adherence to the founding tenants of the Constitution) of being something akin to the KKK sans white sheets. Duly noted; I thought one of your own founding tenets was opposition to things like lynch mobs, inflamed by thin and unsubstantiated rumor and the bigoted vaporings of press reports with a naked agenda. How does it feel, joining the rush of easy and facile judgment – enjoy the nice glow of satisfaction? What fun, to join in on the wilding of an officially-approved target! Waiting for a pat on the head, for having been obedient to your master?
2. Which brings me to the second part of this rant; the folly of having joined your socio-political fortunes to someone whose skin is (at a squint) of color, but whose life-experience seems only distantly American, whose resume of actual managerial experience in any enterprise (military, commercial or governmental) is cobweb-insubstantial, and whose actual skill at what is required of him as POTUS and therefore ostensible leader of the so-called Free World (insert brutally skeptical quotes wherever you see fit) is sub-par. Heroically, mind-bogglingly sub-par . . . and what is the saddest part of all is that there were and are good solid candidates of color, with real-world experience, and undoubted abilities who would have been fairly able to excellent Chief Executives. How sad that you could not bring yourselves to examine the content of character rather than color of skin. Might have saved yourself the embarrassment of metaphorically chaining yourself to a political disaster.
3. As for demanding that a broadly based and distributed, leaderless, volunteer, non-formal-membership, non-dues-paying movement stressing fiscal responsibility and a strict adherence to the Constitution . . . well, what is it that you want us to do about so-called racists who might or might not be informally associated with us? Tell you what – you all formally disassociate yourself from the New Black Panther Party, and race-mongering bigots like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. You first. I’ll wait.
You know, out of all of the things that I was afraid might happen, after the presidential coronation of Obama, the Fresh Prince of Chicago . . . I never considered that race relations might be one of those things which would worsen. Hey – lots of fairly thoughtful and well-intentioned people of pallor voted for him, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, or at least in some expectation of him being a fairly well adjusted and centrist politician, or at least a fast learner. Wasn’t that what all the top pundits, and the mainstream media were insisting, all during the 2008 campaign . . . well, once they got up from their knees and wiped the drool off their chins.
And when he won the election by a respectable although not an overwhelming margin – hardly a crushing mandate – I am sure there were other bloggers thinking as I did, and looking on the bright side; hey, can we finally get past this “AmeriKKA is the most racist nation evah!†crap. Here I was hoping – even as I knew full well that the man had spent twenty years sitting in the Reverend Jeremiah’s mega-church. I could tell myself that maybe he went to that church for street cred and connections within the black community – no, Obama couldn’t possibly give credence to the sewage-spew of racial hatred that the good Reverend spouted like a fountain, every Sunday, to tumultuous applause from the pews – no, not when he moved on from grubby Chicago politics, and was running to be the president of this country – a country in which the race that Obama identified with is only 13-15% of the population. No, better to think (assume, pray!) that his membership there was a grubby political square-filling, in the Chicago political machine.
If I have known anything at all in my life, I know that a politician who is a minority hoping to get elected to any office get anywhere at all with a racially or sexually diverse electorate had best not be identified strictly as representing only that minority, to the exclusion of all others. In plain words, a seeker for an elected office, being a racial minority, or female had a better chance of success in downplaying their minority-hood, generally, in being seen to represent larger values than just their membership in a relatively small segment of the electorate. This was plain to me, as I grew up in Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The mayor – Tom Bradley, who seemed to have been mayor for ever, demonstrated exactly that: he was black, but black with a small ‘b’ – in that he had the year-round dark tan, but actually seemed to be more motivated in being an effective mayor for the good of the entire community – rather than just catering to the racial special interests. Tom Bradley got elected, over and over again, without any particular fuss that I recall, in a racially diverse and wealthy city in which the color of his skin mattered less – much less – than the content of his character or his ability to administer to the interests of all of his constituents.
I had so hoped – against any evidence produced by the mainstream media and bloggers alike during that campaign season – that Obama would prove to be more of the Tom Bradley-variety of politician/administrator. That he would live up to the generous advance billing provided by the press . . . but alas. False hope, that. As if it weren’t annoying enough that any criticism of his policies is dismissed with a swipe of the race card through the electronic dispenser o’ sweet creamy diversity pablum, now it looks like justice is to be administered – not in a color-blind fashion, but according to the color of the skin of the person accused. It is perfectly acceptable to the current top administrators of the Department of Justice to have representatives of the New Black Panther Party, swaggering up and down at a polling place, intimidating voters. Nice. So, what are we to expect out of this new, post-racial, Obama Administration? Not having a pundit-approved crystal ball at my disposal, I couldn’t begin to guess – but I will venture one small prophecy: that the Icecapades will be hosted in Hell before another small-time, relatively obscure and totally inexperienced – yet somehow charismatic minor pol, spat up from the unsavory bowels of a big-city political combine will be elected to such a high office. Not all the efforts of all the media punditocracy will be able to make that happen again . . . and we’d better do more than pray it doesn’t. We can probably endure another two and half years of the Won, but I don’t think we could survive another of his ilk, or the rank stupidity of those who put him there in the first place.
