No Morality Is Better

Op-Ed Columnist - Genius in the Bottle - NYTimes.com

Maureen makes it clear, the problem is "sanctimony and Republicans", certainly not bad behavior.

The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.

So why is it that Palin is hypocrite? Daughter getting pregnant? I really don't know, but actually, I agree, she IS a hypocrite and Maureen is not. Maureen has successfully subscribed to that difficult position of absolute amorality -- there is nothing she could do that would show she has somehow acted against her principles, since she has none! It is a solution that certainly "works", yet I fail to see that it is the superior one.

The alternative is as Maureen points out -- to have morals, standards and principles and to almost certainly fall short of them -- sometimes horribly and publicly, sometimes in small and private ways. All those with standards bear that burden of hypocrasy, and usually not all that lightly.

I see the benefit of Maureens position relative to ease, but somehow it seems that it has it's own price. Sure, there is the enjoyment of bashing those with standards when they fail, but where is the joy in your own libertine existance? Is it only that vicarious pleasure in pointing the failings of others relative to their standards? or do you take joy at pushing some new boundary in your own unfettered world? Is it even "cheating" when one has no morals at all? Does breaking some old tired standard held by prudish (and almost certainly hypocritical) others gain the standard of "virtue"?

I'm sure I lack the sophistication that it takes to even understand that liberal thought nirvana where no standards reign and those that hold any are cretins whose failings are to be gloated over with a sort of joy in the misfortune of others that is in itself enough to give human nature a bad name to those of us too small minded to leave all thought of morals behind.

BO's Persian Education

Obama's Persian Tutorial - WSJ.com

Good article, I found the ending to particularly insightful. First paragraph is very important. If the MSM isn't going to make sure that our new failed community organizer gets educated on world affairs, he is just going to go on being a fool. What history is it that BO thinks he remembers? The one in the first paragraph is the one I lived through. If only the BO problem was as soluble as the Jimmuh problem. Wishful thinking. Carter was a simpleton from Plains, the elite didn't revere him as a messiah and there isn't a Reagan waiting in the wings that I can see. No, this debacle has already far exceeded the Jimmuh disaster economically -- I just pray it doesn't result in the loss of 100's of thousands or worse of American lives in a nuke or chemical attack.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," and to put aside its concern with "traditional issues of war and peace" in favor of "new global issues of justice, equity and human rights." We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, "fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water." The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.

People Who Disagree are Crazy and Dangerous

Roger’s Rules » Announcing the Save Frank Rich Society

I've commented on the left view that there is only one sane and intelligent view of the universe (theirs) and those that disagree are by definition either incredibly foolish/uninformed, or flat out insane. Here we have more of that from slightly different sources.

Safer With BO?

Gates: U.S. ready for North Korea missile - CNN.com

There are few stories getting less air play than the North Korean threat to put an ICBM "close to Hawaii' sometime in the July 4-10 period,  but at least CNN is acknowledging that "something is up". It is hard to imagine how the North Korean government could show much less respect for BO than if they just nuke Honolulu -- I'm nearly sure he would find that "unhelpful" and he might given them a "stern warning", or potentially go so far as to have the UN give them another "stern warning". Say what you want, that BO is one tough cookie!

Nice to have a media so much enslaved to you that even when the military is deploying missle defense systems that they have been consistently against and claimed to be useless (as has BO), they don't point out the foolishness of that!!Why deploy what you swear doesn't work, and what would not exist at all if you have your way?

Punish Success, Regulate Risk, Reward Failure

Too Big to Fail, or Succeed - WSJ.com

Those of the unconstrained mental model believe that a centrally managed beauracracy can produce "moderate everything" -- no success that is too big, no risks that are too scary, and no failures that harm any.

His plan, if adopted, will fundamentally change the nature of our financial system and economy. The underlying concerns and assumptions are clear, and they are made clearer by considering other ways that his administration has dealt with the consequences of competition -- particularly the faux bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler and the impending change in antitrust policy. Although the president said in his speech that he supports free markets, these initiatives confirm that the administration fears the "creative destruction" that free markets produce, preferring stability over innovation, competition and change.

In the lefty BO world, nobody would love and lose, death would certainly be outlawed and all our children would be "above average". True, we would need to regulate out the Jordans, Woods, and Favres, but "small price" for a "fairer, blander, better managed" world.

But what about BO? Would not the world be a less wonderful place in the lefty's eyes without the brilliance and startling leadership of their blessed BO? Certainly they have to allow for SOME to rise above the grayish plain of post-leveling "fair existence"?

Cheerleading for Red Ink

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Media's Mask Is Slipping As Deficits Surge

The "media's mask is SLIPPING?" ... ha. When did they have any "mask" other than complete cheerleaders for the BO National Socialist parade?? While the MSM provides hours and hours of supportive time for the leftward slide into a deep deep ditch, the Democrats flirt with the idea that ANY opposition voice is too much! Get rid of Fox News, get rid of Rush Limbaugh! ANY voice of anything but the party line is just too DANGEROUS!

The Wilderness

The Claremont Institute - The Wilderness Years Begin

The whole article is well worth a read, but this paragraph is a nice summary of why what is commonly (and mistakenly) called "liberalism" in America is as damaging as all forms of wishful thinking and irresponsibility.

The danger liberalism poses to the American experiment comes from its disposition to deplete rather than replenish the capital required for self-government. Entitlement programs overextend not only financial but political capital. They proffer new "rights," goad people to demand and expand those rights aggressively, and disdain truth in advertising about the nature or scope of the new debts and obligations those rights will engender. The experiment in self-government requires the cultivation, against the grain of a democratic age, of the virtues of self-reliance, patience, sacrifice, and restraint. The people who have this moral and social capital understand and accept that there "will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out," according to David Brooks. Instead, liberalism promotes snarling but unrugged individualism, combining an absolute right "to the lifestyle of one's choice (regardless of the social cost) with an equally fundamental right to be supported at state expense," as the Manhattan Institute's Fred Siegel once described it. Finally, the capital bestowed by vigilance against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is squandered when liberals insist on approaching street gangs, illegal immigrants, and terrorist regimes in the hopeful belief that, to quote the political scientist Joseph Cropsey, "trust edifies and absolute trust edifies absolutely."

The Threat of Another View

Op-Ed Columnist - The Big Hate - NYTimes.com

Nazi Germany, the USSR, European Socialism and the American left have the common thread of only one way to be successful. Eliminate the opposition. The only totalitarian program that has ever "worked" is the elimination of your opposition -- by muzzling them, getting them to move away, or if all else fails, shooting them.

Folks on the left ALWAYS know better -- about what kind of car you should drive, food you should eat, healthcare you should like, books you should read -- the list goes on and on ad nauseum. The fact that very nearly 100% of the time not only are their pronouncements and actions designed to remove your freedom to choose most anything, they they are also just as often very wrong -- meaning that what they demand you do doesn't work (if it did, free people would be doing it!). Their economies are less prosperous, their healthcare causes them to flee to the US if they actually get sick, and their cars are either exhorbantly priced, or reasonably priced but nothing you would want in your garage.

The key to left wing success is to destroy the opposition and to remove any sort of civil dialogue -- people that disagree with you are "haters", "religious nuts", "racists", "naive fools" ... and on and on and on. The bottom line -- people that disagree with their views are dangerous and need to be censored. Here is Paul Krugman on the horror of Fox news not bowing at scraping to BO 100% of the time. NOTE -- remember how the MSM treated Bush. Of course, the difference is that in Krugman's eyes, that was FAIR treatement of Bush, and anything less than complete boot licking for BO is "racist".

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the
analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even
worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an
African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small
terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And
that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in
our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second
worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American
lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at
their, and our, peril.

BO Relativism

RealClearPolitics - Hovering on High: Obama Surveys the World

The essence of fascism is the equivalence of all on a moral and very earthly plane, so that the brilliant leader of day -- Hitler 70 years ago in Germany, BO here today can make their Olympian pronouncements as the nearest thing in a godless world to holy writ.

Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see. Traveling the world, he brings the gospel of understanding and godly forbearance. We have all sinned against each other. We must now look beyond that and walk together to the sunny uplands of comity and understanding. He shall guide you.

The sheep are prepared, be it a foreign policy of bowing scraping profuse apology, buying the car companies to force Americans to buy the cars that BO and the climate Nazis approve of, or providing us with a health care system as as soulless as the post office, the fascists are on the march.

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds -- while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well -- but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge? 

That's the problem with Obama's transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professorial sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in all human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn't mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

The sheep become so used to the dialectic of "on one hand this and the other ...", while the supposed comparisons are more like "in one universe thus, and in some other, not related universe ...". It seems that with media support, the level of critical thought for many is nil.

Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership, but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one's own country.

Actually, distorting history is far worse than that. Along with the constant false equivalence rhetoric it prepares the weak minded for the removal of the "other side" as "too dangerous". Some 88 year old crackpot shoots someone in the holocaust museum, a lone gunman shoots a late term abortionist ... Rush Limbaugh says something controversial -- how long can we "put up with this dangerous hate"?? The preparation for the complete destruction of any opposition to BO is now being sown in earnest.

The Paygo Joke

The 'Paygo' Coverup - WSJ.com

All politicians lie, the problem is that Democrats usually get away with it:

The truth is that paygo is the kind of budget gimmick that gives gimmickry a bad name. As Mr. Obama knows but won't tell voters, paygo only applies to new or expanded entitlement programs, not to existing programs such as Medicare, this year growing at a 9.2% annual rate. Nor does paygo apply to discretionary spending, set to hit $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2010, or 40% of the budget.

Paygo isn't even really a "gimmick" -- it is just a flat out ruse to say one thing and do another. The other cool thing about being a Democrat is that you can "stack your lies".

The President also revived the myth that paygo was somehow responsible for eliminating budget deficits during the Clinton years. In fact, that brief era of balanced budgets was due to: mid-decade spending reductions by a GOP Congress elected on a balanced-budget pledge; an excessive cut in defense spending to 3% from 5% of GDP across the decade; and an unsustainable revenue boom due to the dot-com bubble. But harking back to the 1990s lets Mr. Obama avoid having to defend his own spending record.

Note also that none of those things had anything to do with Clinton, other than he signed the budgets. CONGRESS shall appropriate -- then and now, and guess what has been happening to deficits (not to mention the economy) since Pelosi and the Democrats took over in 2006:

That's what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that "the first thing" House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that "Republicans had let lapse." By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.

Again, the WSJ is being optimistic -- they are assuming that the economy is going to recover and GROW in order to have the huge deficits account for "merely" 4-5% for years to come. That remains to be seen.

The Dark Future is Today

RealClearPolitics - Growth's Rapidly Diminishing Prospects

The nation now is 17 months into the demographic deluge that began in January 2008 when the leading edge of the wave of 78 million baby boomers began exercising the preposterous entitlement to collect Social Security at age 62, as most Social Security recipients do. In 1935, when Social Security was enacted, no one envisioned it supporting most retirees for a third of their adult lives. So, should Americans shop until the boomers drop?

We have been talking about "what will we do in the future when the Boomers retire" -- the future is now. We are having a nice recession.

Recently, Standard and Poor's noted that Britain's ballooning need to borrow might cost the country its AAA credit rating, which would raise its cost of borrowing. Britain's deficit this year is expected to be at least 12.4 percent of GDP. America's is scheduled to be more than 13 percent. Years of such government borrowing might crowd private sector borrowers out of credit markets and raise long-term interest rates.

So after years of the press talking of the US being "A banana republic" for borrowing mere 100's of billions, now that we are actually borrowing like a banana republic with TRILLIONS being borrowed and 13% of our GDP, they are applauding it!

The president's astonishing risk-taking satisfies the yearning of a presidency-fixated nation for a great man to solve its problems. But as Coolidge said, "It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man." What the country needs today in order to shrink its problems is not presidential greatness. Rather, it needs individuals to do what they know they ought to do, and government to stop doing what it should know causes or prolongs problems.

If only BO could figure out that he is not a great man before he completes the great bankruptcy!

The Good In Fox News

HOW FOX NEWS OPENED AMERICA - New York Post

Charles is always good, this is critical:

A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by
the rise of Fox News.

What left me slack-jawed was the fact that she, like the cohort of mainstream journalists she represented so perfectly, was so ideologically blinkered that she could not fathom the plain fact that the liberal media were presenting the news and the world through a particular lens. The idea that it was particular, and that there might
be competing ones, perhaps even superior ones, was beyond her ken.

Get that? What is the use of "freedom" if everyone thinks there is only one "true" view of the world. That is what Fox News gave us -- it, along with National Review and Rush Limbaugh gave a lot of Americans the courage to no longer bleat in unison with the view of the MSM.

Letterman Civility

So Palin's 14 year old daughter having sex in the stands with a Yankee player is "funny"? In his top ten list he also talks about Sarah Palin's "slutty flight attendant look". BO has a daughter that will turn 14 while he is in office -- is it OK to have a joke about her having sex then? After all, black teens have a much higher incidence of teen pregnancy than whites, so it is "statistical". How about Michelle as a "Crack Ho"? Humorous with no MSM outcry? If not, why not? Are we a reverse rascist nation, an anti-Republican nation, or both.

Conservatism is Dead

RealClearPolitics - The Collapsing Global Left

The MSM is largely ignoring the drubbing that the parties of the left continue to take around the world. Why? Because socialist centralized governments can't "deliver the goods" -- the countries that have handed the keys to those governments have health care systems that are not only costly, they are in complete shambles. Declining standards of living and no outlook for improvement. In short, they already have what now seem to be intent to garner for our own nation.

Why is this? The last paragraph of the article gives the main point:

American voters are bombarded by their media with the message that
conservatism is dead, because a Democrat got 52 perecent of the
presidential vote. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Left proceeds apace
elsewhere in the world.

At some point, the US sheep will turn away from the media and look at the reality of the real world. Until that time, we will continue to decline.

Saved or Created

McGurn: The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims - WSJ.com

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

I find that the national sheep are so attuned to the MSM these days that they believe what they hear more than what they see. As late as Sept of 2008, the market was at 12K and unemployment was 6%, yet the MSM was screaming "depression" and the man in the street was as mad as hell at the "horrible" economy. They ignored what they were living and went with what the news told them.

Now unemployment is at 9.4%, when it was promised that if we followed the BO plan would not exceed 8%, but "things are better" -- the market is under $9K.

I'm waiting for some bogus statistic on debt and deficits. Maybe "Net Invested Surplus" or something ... assume some nice solid rate of return on deficit spending ... like the old saws about 2-4x return on deficit spending. Just flat out count it was "income" as if all that investment came in as tax revenues, and all of a sudden, massive real deficits become charming "NIS Surpluses" ... in the trillions of dollars. BO ends up with a "booming" economy when running for election with 10's of millions of "Save Or Created" jobs and trillions of "NIS Surplus".

Maybe we could have the "happy days index" -- sort of the inverse of the old Carter "misery index". Forget any real numbers, this is the age of BO -- make them up and get happy!