Wednesday, October 12. 2005
Barone's election update including his thoughts about the very important California referendums, here. Tough love for those living in flood zones. Cole. King Gillette: his story, via Instapundit via Samizdata, here. Prager: Three ways the Left damaged America this week. A good piece. Anderson gets fired up about Intelligent Design. Why bother? It's a local issue, and schools teach all sorts of silly things. If you doubt it, skim through a recent college catalogue of courses.
Tuesday, October 11. 2005
Kristol on the Miers nomination "But the reaction of conservatives to this deeply disheartening move by a president they otherwise support and admire has been impressive. There has been an extraordinarily energetic and vigorous debate among conservatives as to what stance to take towards the Miers nomination, a debate that does the conservative movement proud. The stern critics of the nomination have, in my admittedly biased judgment, pretty much routed the half-hearted defenders. In the vigor of their arguments, and in their willingness to speak uncomfortable truths, conservatives have shown that they remain a morally serious and intellectually credible force in American politics."
Read entire.
Auster on Miers and Bush "Exactly like his pa, W knew that conservatives’ support was his ticket to the White House, so he set about courting them. He put on a much bigger and better conservative act than his father had done, but, just like his father, he never meant any of it, he never even liked the conservatives, he resented them and their constant demands that he live up to his pledges to them which he had never meant anyway."
Scathing. Read entire.
Monday, October 10. 2005
The Latin Beat An unregistered agent of Chavez at Columbia University? Boyd Chavez' bumbling: "Somebody should create a new international award for economic incompetence -- which could be called the Lebon Prize, or Nobel spelled backward -- and give it to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez." Miami Herald
Thursday, October 6. 2005
Posted March 9, 2004 by Bird Dog
Politics and The Annual Hawk Count Each fall, intrepid, eccentric birders head out to the ridgelines and shores to count migrating hawks along the nation's flyways. Hawks, eagles, and ospreys inhabit the top of their food chains, so hawk populations are an indirect measure of environmental health, plus plenty of folks just dig hawks and eagles for their size and grandeur. A wise pal (MM - thanks) warned me in the Fall, during an Audubon hawk-count, that if the Dems end up without either the House, the Senate, or the White House, they would go berserk and get wierd and dangerous. Man, was he correct. In just a few weeks, we see Teresa Heinz, Bill Moyers, Jimmy Carter, Screamin' Dean, Harry Reid, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, George "Bong-Man" Soros, Teddy "Hic" Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Dan Rather, Barbara "Fang" Boxer, and God knows how many other members of the Liberal Establishment, go bonkers. In public. Plus even the Big Media - the only "Big" anything they don't bitch about - is in trouble. Even if they still have their easy day job, powerlessness makes some folks nuts, especially when they are accustomed to having it. The only one not going nuts is the Man With The Plan - Hillary the Re-Born Conservative. And it's not just the election - it's the fact that Bush is doing well. How can an assumedly idiot (Andover, Yale, Harvard) Republican succeed in anything? When I heard that Kennedy had suddenly removed his famous negative speech (from just before the Iraq election) from his website, I knew these guys were in deep trouble. All they can hope for is a recession, a major reversal in the ME, or really anything bad. The Great Rushbo has been saying for years that if ANYTHING goes right, it hurts the Libs. For years, he has been pointing out how the press can find the one negative statistic out of 100 good ones, but I figured that was his typical hyperbole. It isn't. I believe they hope for trouble, because trouble will help them, and invent crises if they can't find them. Forget the Country, forget Freedom. Dr. Joy Bliss, our Blog Shrink (every blog needs one), always says that power is far more corrupting than money. Power is psychologically intoxicating to weak people - it's a drug - as mind-distorting as heroin or TV. Money just sits there quietly, and it's never enough anyway. (Well, power is what democracy is about. It's the brass ring, along with job security and a pension anyone would envy. I guess we have to be glad that some people are willing to do it. But it's not like the good old days (?) when regular folks would run for elections as a brief public service, an interruption of their normal life. It's become a career, so you get careerists. Will not term them professionals.) Anyway, we are seeing people - a political party - in acute withdrawal. A Detox Ward. People in DTs. But instead of seeing the traditional pink elephants, all they are seeing are Republican elephants. Well, it's been a long hard climb for sanity to enter Washington, DC. We "normal" folks had the power to get it, but do we have the power to keep it?
Monday, October 3. 2005
Hitchins, Brilliant Trotskyite, But Lost? Indeed, nothing shows Hitchens’s continuing fidelity to the Bolshevik ideal more than his hatred for religion. He told the Guardian on May 31, 2005, “I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity ... I mean, that to me is a horrible, repulsive thing.” But Hitchens is by no means equal in his contempt for religions. He has written favorably of Judaism and described Islam as having been a “civilizing and creative force in many societies.” Hitchens has no such kind words for Christianity, especially as manifested in the Roman Catholic Church. This is hardly surprising: the Roman Catholic Church was Bolshevism’s most consistent and successful adversary, beginning with the 1920 defense of Warsaw from Trotsky’s Red Army, when the future Pius XI, in Norman Davies’s words, “stood on the ramparts of Radzymin and cursed the advancing hordes of Antichrist in person” and the Polish Army—dismissed by Trotsky as being “steeped in priests’ lies”—prevented the Red Army from watering its horses anywhere near Hendon. Read entire.
Friday, September 30. 2005
Random Post Enjoying a nice illegal Commie Cuban and a nice triple scotch tonight, windows open to the cool colonial Connecticut September evening and the wonderful cricket chorus and the occasional bullfrog croak from down in our marsh along the Farmington River, and checking out random blogs while the splendid she-who-must-be-obeyed is working on the elegant evening repast while watching dumb Fox news and sipping a few lady-like chardonnays in the kitchen. Stumbled onto a highly mediocre blog (not because of content - because of quality) and I found these assertions: God forbid that we must endure another three and a half years of his Administration before anything can be changed. Are we going to sit around and keep our fingers crossed, hoping (incorrectly) that we've seen the worst, or are we going to FINALLY get off our fat, lazy butts and realize that we must begin turning this nation around now, because Bush and his band of thugs (in EVERY sense of the word) are not going to sit back and be satisfied with the destruction they have already wrought?
They are going to keep the neocon steamroller fueled and in overdrive until the final hour of his presidency. They are going to stay the course in Iraq, wasting thousands more young American (and Iraqi) lives. They are going to continue the relentless dismantling of our social and security programs/agencies. They are going to continue increasing taxes on the poor and middle classes in order to reduce the same for the wealthy and the corporations. They are going to spread marshall law throughout the nation (New Orleans is only the start, folks).
They are going to persist in ramming through new legislation that benefit petroleum/energy companies, allowing them to continue increasing their unbelievably obscene profits (and thus power). They are going to continue forcing our education system down the toilet by pushing increasingly unreachable standards onto the public school system. They are going to remain incessant in their ruthless attack on the air we breathe and the ground on which we live and from which we grow our food. And finally, they are going to accelerate the dismantling of the independent judicial system such that laws and rulings support only conservative ideology and christian evangelical theology. We are becoming a nazi state before our very own eyes. What's worse, we are all allowing it. We are the masters of our destiny, yet somehow we have decided, as a nation, that our destiny is Hell.
Yikes - Bush is attacking our very "ground." And aw, gee, not those dang "obscene profits" again. Try running a business sometime, cousin blogger, and ride a bike to work. The above is a quote from a blog in the Flappy Bird category, which means that it receives a fair amount of attention but is far from a star blog. Neither are we - yet. Up-and-coming, with a readership IQ I would be willing to put up against any other blog's. Notice the "marshall"? No, I will not make the effort to refute the statements. Too boring. Sounds kind of like a govt union employee of some sort, no? A teacher who cannot spell, angry about being evaluated? Feels entitled to a free lunch? I am not surprised that there are benighted humans out there who are so fearful and so distressed. I only want to tell them that it will be OK - no-one will take away your baby-bottle. Even the evil, evil Bush. Unemployment has never been this low in our lifetime, and the admin. doesn't even talk about it. Their PR stinks - right now, there is not a functional soul in American who wants to work who is not working at something. That is a wonderful thing - work is a blessing, and no honest work is ignoble. But I will offer one thought: Bush's legacy will be the Court. It is hard as hell to move the US govt. in any direction, and correcting our renegade courts may be all he can really do to make a lasting difference. (Is anything more important than our Constitution?) Plus getting rid of a bunch of fascist jihadists whose religious mission is to kill us all. How bad is that? Go ahead, read the blog I quoted, just to get a sense of how some Americans feel, however irrational and unfounded and sad their emotion may be. I wish they would read us. They would feel much better. But they won't. Ahh, I hear the dinner bell. Pavlov's Dog cometh on four furry feet and with salivating jowls. Update: Great dinner, of course. Just chatted with our vet on the phone. He and his wife have been in Louisiana for the past ten days, taking care of lost and abandoned animals. What a great country we live in, in which even the animals receive our concern and effort.
Bush needs to be taken to the woodshed No doubt. Apparently his lousy polls are due to losing conservative support. He never had much liberal support to lose, did he? Hoagland at WaPo: Click here: A President in Need of a Blunt Friend
Thursday, September 29. 2005
Anti-War, or Pro-War? Hitchins on the "anti-war movement:" It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.
Please read entire.
The National Review turns 50 Excellent piece in Claremont Inst., by Uhlmann, reviewing the past 50 years of the conservative movement, and especially the role of William F. Buckley, now 80: (The NR's) subsequent success, which within 20 years had moved the center of American politics noticeably to the right, tends to obscure the audacious, some might say quixotic, character of the original program. The cultural and political milieu of the 1950s, after all, offered little evidence to sustain the hope that an explicitly conservative movement was necessary, desirable, or even possible. Did anyone besides the Buckleyites seriously believe that socialism would come creeping in on the little cat feet of Eisenhower Republicanism? Undaunted, the new conservatives responded with the cheerful determination of The Little Engine That Could. If the body politic was ignorant of or indifferent to threats deemed palpably dangerous by the editors of National Review, it would simply have to be instructed.
Read entire.
More on the Moonbats
"The media have pushed the idea that the demonstration this weekend at the White House was an 'anti-war' gathering. What they didn't say was who was behind it... For the record, the lead organizer [was] ANSWER, which the media routinely refer to as an 'antiwar group.' It is nothing of the sort. In fact, ANSWER is a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party. And any group that qualifies for that epithet in front of its name deserves special scrutiny, since Josef Stalin was responsible for the murder of as many as 25 million human beings... So why do communists—particularly those who march under Stalin's flag—get different treatment? And why do thousands of average people feel comfortable marching arm in arm with them? It's a puzzle. After all, according to the 'Black Book of Communism' —a widely cited and respected compendium of communism's crimes in the 20th century—communist regimes murdered as many as 100 million people over the last century. That's quite a record. Indeed, all the century's great mass murders—Mao Zedong (65 million), Stalin (25 million), Hitler (21 million), Pol Pot (2 million)—were communists or socialists. Yet many well-meaning people who marched this weekend perhaps didn't know all this. Or perhaps they don't mind having their cause besmirched by people who aren't really anti-war at all, but anti-America, anti-West, anti-freedom and anti-capitalist... Maybe it proves the old adage: Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas." —Investor's Business Daily
Wednesday, September 28. 2005
Steyn: US out of UN? Hard headed, strong stuff from Steyn: Transnationalism is the mechanism by which the world’s most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It’s a largely unconscious alliance but not an illogical one. Western proponents of ‘sustainable consumption’ and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-concepts up for debate in New York this week have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: both groups find it hard to win free elections, both regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and neither is unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions.
Read entire.
Tuesday, September 27. 2005
Hillary Concerned about Free Speech on Internet From Drudge: "I don't have any clue about what we're going to do legally, regulatorily, technologically -- I don't have a clue. But I do think we always have to keep competing interests in balance." Meaning her interests, no doubt. Honestly, I do not like the sound of this. Wonder whether she might like the Chinese approach.
Monday, September 26. 2005
Gimme Some Money Trying to leverage the Katrina coverage into some cash. Star Parker: More than $7 trillion has been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson declared his "war on poverty" 40 years ago, with effectively zero impact on overall black poverty. Yet 40 years of failure doesn't seem to be enough to suggest to liberals, black and white, that their approach to poverty might be wrong. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, among others, riding the post-Katrina poverty-in-America theme, are making predictable speeches calling for yet more government poverty programs. I'm not sure I want to let these folks off with an insanity plea, but you really have to wonder what it takes for liberals to add one and one and get two. It's a bit hard to buy the claim that Katrina suddenly made Americans aware of poverty.
Read entire.
Saturday, September 24. 2005
Cancelling the New York Times I read the Times since a kid (yeah, one of those uncool kids), and I have gotten my own daily NYT since a callow youth in prep school. It arrived on a huge library table, labeled by name, each morning as you entered the main building on the way from morning Chapel to the dining hall. (Back then, about half of us got the NY Herald Tribune and half the NYT, and each half viewed the other half as benighted.) It has been part of my daily morning life ever since, wherever I have lived. But I have had enough of their propaganda, their selective choice of facts, their tilting of front page stories, their condescension, the smugly virtuous attitude, their preference for sentiment over economic facts, the predictably party-line editorials, their writers' total ignorance of even introductory statistics (they seem to hire people who can write, but who don't know anything about history, math, economics, science, warfare, or anything else), and, finally, their embarassing op-ed team which is as deficient in common sense and in respect for the USA as it is in testosterone. The NYT is no longer the "newspaper of record," but a loyal agent (or "useful idiot"?) of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, stuck in a combination of moldy rhetoric of the 1960s, the moldy statist politics of the 1930s, the cocktail party anti-American "radical chic" of the goofy, cocaine-addled NYC of the 1970s, and adolescent-style reflexive anti-traditionalism. Test it for yourself: How long has it been since you have been surprised by a NYT editorial? How long since a NYT editorial has provoked you to thought? Q.E.D.
For this post, I had saved about ten recent examples of the above, but decided that would be beating a dead horse, and their editorial on John Roberts pushed me over the edge: it was indistinguishable from a Scrapple Face satire of the NYT. They have a socio-political agenda, and do not let confusing facts or intellectual integrity get in their way...I guess they imagine that they are in the noble vanguard of something wonderful (!), but sometimes I think they aren't even aware of what they are doing, because their prejudice is second nature. They have become a joke, but they don't know it yet. I hope they are beginning to get the joke, because newspapers are fine things. "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"
I kept putting the deed off, like delaying putting down a sick old dog, but I finally I cut the cord this week. But I cheat a little: I can read the Tuesday Science Times online, and I kept the delivery of the Sunday for the Book Review, etc. Plus folks email me pieces I should see. For those who need a New York newspaper to survive, try The New York Sun. They are equally good at letting you know what music, dance, gallery shows, restaurants, etc. you are missing, and they do not throw curve balls.
Well, I am not alone. I had an elegant dinner at the home of long-time NYC Democrats last night, prominent in NYC business and politics and charity, supporters of the arts, but old-style Dems - Moynihan Dems, JFK Dems. Smart, lovely, gracious, refined people who would not consider the Clintons to be socially appropriate, but might vote for them. The hostess confessed to me that she had cancelled their NYT too, and replaced it with the Sun. I was amazed. The same week, this story comes out. Other newspapers may blame their circulation declines on a number of causes, but everyone I know who has quit it has done so for the same reasons I have, and with a similar reluctance and a similar feeling of abandoning an old companion - but why begin one's day agitated by a newspaper's transparently biased and manipulative decisions?
To paraphrase Reagan, I did not leave the NYT; the NYT left me. I do not miss it, yet, anyway. Give me the whole truth, people of the NYT, with knowledge and fact rather than partisan opinion and propaganda behind it, and I will come back home to you, old gal.
Here's the hard part - Stop the ACLU's Trackback Party.
Friday, September 23. 2005
Freddie Ferrar is a Goner Why? Dinkins just endorsed him. A death sentence. Bloomberg wins in a landslide.
Thursday, September 22. 2005
Brewton does State Power Our neighbor blogger Tom takes no prisoners when it comes to defending the power of the individual in relation to the State, and, given human history, he is rightfully mindful that States, however well-intentioned or paternalistic, always absorb power from people : In an earlier article the point was made that both German voters and American liberals have affirmed their allegiance to the National-State collectivism of socialism. More than coincidence is involved. It was in Germany that the world’s first welfare state was inaugurated. The history of socialistic welfare systems makes clear that, while for public relations purposes intended to benefit the people, they are in fact merely power instruments for the collectivized National State. Tom G. Palmer, a Fellow at the Cato Institute, noted in his February 3, 2000, letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal: “Bismarck considered the creation of Germany’s social security system his greatest accomplishment..... He defended compulsory social security in 1881 on the grounds that it made people dependent on the state: “Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect...” Bertrand Russell, one of the world’s most prominent socialist theoreticians, much earlier had made the same point. In “German Social Democracy,” his 1896 study of socialism in Germany, Lord Russell wrote: “.... Bismarck’s measures of ‘social reform.’ These measures, which provided insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were, so far as they went, socialistic. It was Bismarck’s aim, first to muzzle the official Social Democrats [socialists], and then, by a series of small bribes, to wean the proletariat from their adherence to revolutionary principles. Bismarck’s State Socialism has excited the admiration of many critics, and it is often supposed that the Socialists have been ungrateful in not supporting it more cordially. But in reality the name is very misleading, for there is much more State than Socialism in his policy. This policy may be briefly described as military and bureaucratic despotism, tempered by almsgiving.” Lord Russell’s depiction is completely in congruence with Alexis de Tocqueville’s descriptions, in his 1835 “Democracy in America,” and in his 1856 “The Old Regime and the French Revolution,” of the effects of socialism on the French citizenry. Tocqueville’s summation was that Frenchmen became largely self-centered, concerned only about their share of government largesse and indifferent to their neighbors or to the greater national interests. So long as they received their benefits and the rulers gave lip service to the Revolutionary slogan of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, French citizens were prepared to accept any degree of political despotism. This picture obviously applies to the welfare-dependent populations in New Orleans and most of our other cities. The effect of dependency is servility and indifference, coupled with resentment that benefits are not larger, boiling over into aggressive hostility at any provocation, as we have seen in repeated riots, burning, and looting across the nation since enactment of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Read the rest.
Wednesday, September 21. 2005
More Tax Revenue Since our so-called conservatives have become big-govt conservatives, Kudlow offers the solution.
A Festival of Excellent Essays 1. Star Parker takes issue with Bush's blaming racial discrimination for black poverty, here. One sentence: The truth about black poverty today, as Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has aptly put it, is that it is "intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city."
2. Leftist Taboos - What we are not allowed to say (except on blogs), where we say what we think. And the Presumption of Incompetence, coming from our betters. Chantrill at American Thinker: The taboos of the welfare state mount a bodyguard of silence to protect this sacred totem, the Presumption of Helplessness. When Barbara Bush incautiously observes that the helpless refugees of New Orleans are doing fine in Houston, she is suggesting they might be able to shift for themselves. When John Roberts equivocates on Roe v. Wade he is genuflecting before the power of the sisters. When candidate Angela Merkel proposes a flat tax, she disturbs the tangled system that guides the German people in making life choices approved by their betters. As long as the liberal taboos on race and abortion still have the power to shame, then liberals are still ahead in the culture war.
Read entire. 3. Ben Stein wrote about the Katrina media riot. VDH does it, without humor: For all the media's efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into either a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about preempting their rivals with an ever more hysterical story, all in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the war.
Read entire. 4. Powerline's Mirengoff and Johnson take on the influence of Hegel, via Wilson, on the Supreme Court and the Fed Govt in general: How did the metaphysical speculation of a 19th century German historicist, whose teachings were congenial to Marxists but are anathema to modern analytic and positivist philosophers--as well as proponents of the Constitution as originally understood--come to influence our constitutional law? The answer lies in the concept of the "living constitution"--and in the influence of Woodrow Wilson.
Worth reading.
Tuesday, September 20. 2005
Bush Hates Texas With his nefarious Pentagon Racist Hurricane Joy-stick, he is aiming Rita towards Texas. I guess Rove - Bush's Brain - is trying to make amends for aiming Katrina towards black New Orleans. What a sneaky guy that Rove is to aim a minor storm at the whites. Like he can fool us.
Peddlers of Paranoid Rumor, Lie, Fairy Tale, Urban Legend, and Distortion I have never thought, for a second, that those who peddle leftist or nihilistic rumors, such as the ones that surrounded the Katrina story, believe them. It's common for the non-psychotic among us to imagine that they are nuts, but they aren't. They are cynical manipulators, and know that there is a market of the ignorant and of the conspiracy-friendly who will be influenced by this stuff, such as the notion that the government blew up the levees to destroy blacks because Bush hates blacks. To label these low-life jerks as crazy morons is to greatly underestimate their calculated propaganda. They have an agenda - personal or political - which, to them, justifies tricks and deception. They know that a story, repeated often, will enter people's brains as an idea, regardless of its likelihood or believability. Once planted, ideas and images have a life of their own in our minds - hence literature, art, movies, dance and song. And propaganda. This is why lying and deception are mortal sins in the Christian world. "Mortal sin" is a very big deal, and extremely important (you are written out of the Kingdom of God, and fated to Gehenna, without true repentence, and amends satisfactory to God, prior to death) for good reason: mortal sins have great power for evil, and these mortal sins have the power to usher people into false realities against their will or even their awareness. Thus lies and deception are a "theft of life." Because words and stories are very powerful, we count on people, in our civilization, to identify them as either fiction or fact. Some other cultures and sub-cultures do not count on this at all and make no distinction between the two. Some people hardly know the difference, and some do not care. In our culture, we label this as sociopathy, and liars, sneaks, tricksters, and manipulators as sociopaths or sociopathic narcissists - probably somewhat genetically 3-6% of the population, and many of such are attracted to politics as a no-skills, no-heavy-knowledge, no-heavy-lifting arena for deception and narcissistic gratification (ie weak-ego-building, plus generous benefits). Some cultures, sub-cultures, and personality types regard such behavior as "normal vigorous self-interest." As a very experienced lawyer, I can say this: You always need to know what culture, or what type of personality, you are dealing with, before you let them inside the gates of your personal or civic perimeter, or "boundary," as the shrinks would say. You can take their money to do a job, but your personal perimeter needs to be sacred and your civic perimeter needs good guards. For us regular, boring, wholesome Americans for whom honor and integrity are sacred, if difficult, ideals, fiction masquerading as fact is a tool of Satan, used against the "children of Jesus": the innocent, the trusting, the naive, the ignorant, and those solid, earnest souls who refuse to permit their spirits to be broken or their souls contaminated by cruelty, dishonesty and ruthless self-interest and self-aggrandizement. More on this when I have a little time.
Friday, September 16. 2005
 9th Court of Appeals finds Pledge unconstitutional.
God just doesn't seem to get the message that He is unconstitutional, and unwelcome in the Modern America of the ACLU and California's 9th Court. Isn't it true what they used to say, that "A gentleman always knows where he is not wanted"? Can't God tell that they just want him to go away? God is a downer, man. Obsolete Creator. Creation is done. Now it's our turn, right, Brother Cain? But why doesn't the 9th just go all the way and declare America unconstitutional? Then they can declare the Constitution unconstitutional (or has that already been done by the Supreme Court?), at which point they will have achieved their goal.
Never did this before But I have to post the entire Scrapple-Dude piece, here: September 14, 2005 Responsibility Missing from Gulf Coast, Bush Took It
by Scott Ott(2005-09-14) -- After two weeks of speculation about what happened to personal responsibility on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President George Bush finally admitted yesterday that he has taken it. "...to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," the president told reporters at a news conference as he stood next to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who first alerted Americans to the absence of responsibility, issued a joint statement downplaying the significance of the Bush announcement. "Now that the president has taken responsibility, he can keep it," the Democrat leaders said. "We don't have much use for it in state and local government. After years of benevolent Democrat leadership, most of our constituents think that it all lies in Washington anyway, so they won't even notice it was taken." Meanwhile, some members of Congress called for an investigation. "Bush's announcement that he takes responsibility is being spun to sound like something new," said one unnamed Democrat senator. "But we can see from his actions that he's been on-the-take for years. He didn't just take responsibility yesterday. He had it all along. I can certainly confirm that it was nowhere to be found in Congress. Our hands are clean."
Disaster Politics, etc. I have already done my rant. Better writers have written better on the subject of using a natural disaster as material for a low-life political gotcha game, below. 1. Jack Wheeler has it right: What’s the difference between a disaster and an election in New Orleans?
-The buses run during an election.
Why isn’t New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin worried about all the dead people being found in Katrina’s aftermath?
-Because they’ll keep right on voting anyway.
Tasteless? Here’s what really tasteless: Cleaning up New Orleans physically without cleaning it up politically. Not draining New Orleans’ political cesspool of organized crime and corruption. Not evacuating Mayor Ray Nagin and every city official and police officer on the take before they get their greasy hands on all those billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild the place.
Read the whole amusing thing at To The Point 2. And neo-neocon has a thoughtful take on the cynicism of journalists, who assume self-interest is all conservatives have in mind: I don't recall any of the newspapers of my youth ever taking a Katrina-like tragedy or an attack and analyzing either of them in terms of how they affected the rise and fall of each party, and how each party was deciding to use the disaster/attack to its political advantage. It seems to be something that has cropped up in the last few decades only. When did we become so strategic in our thinking; when did journalists begin to resemble sports commentators, concentrating on ongoing play-by-play analyses of who is going to win the game?
Read her whole piece here. 3. And the masterful Steyn: These days, the Republicans are the party of small government and the party of big government, and the party of all points in between. The Democrats, meanwhile, are the party of emotive know-nothings, the go-to guys for soap-operatic sobbing and righteous histrionics. You can understand why the 24-hour cable-news networks love the Dems. Just stick a camera in front of New Orleans's Mayor Nagin: "To those who would criticise, where the hell were you?" he roared the other day. "Where the hell were you?" In a town you're not the mayor of, happily. That's how most Americans react. But the media think, wow, this is great television, he really socks it to Bush. And, if life were an especially bad daytime soap, he would. But ask Democrats for specifics and they're either as blank as Mrs Pelosi or as mired in their ancient tropes as Jesse Jackson, who demanded Bush appoint more high-ranking blacks to the hurricane relief effort. Charges of Republican "racism" rang particularly hollow in the context of New Orleans, where sodden blacks might be better advised to ponder what they have to show for being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party for four decades.
His entire humorous and penetrating piece here.
Thursday, September 15. 2005
 Hispanic Heritage Month at the METFor those who might happen to be in New York this month, go check out the lectures on Goya, and Frieda and Guatemalan Marimba and much more: (Goya, Self-Portrait, 1815)
|
