Category: Instapundit

No, The Homo Bureaucratus Infestation Is Not A Representative Sample

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by Smitty

USA Today is closer to being part of the problem than part of the solution:

Yet to look around the USA is to see fear and anxiety. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a nation of wimps.

Take, for instance, the response to the Ebola outbreak. Millions of people worked themselves into a panic over a disease that has claimed the lives of fewer Americans this year than unsanitary caramel apples.

Or take the many universities so afraid of offending people that they have muzzled the very debate that is reputed to be one of their hallmarks.

You’ve had Godless Commies attacking our institutions for decades, and there are some external effects. The President is incontinent in the face of, well, anything job-related. Brian Williams sounds like a voice of authority, for all he lacks hair #1 anyplace that matters. At UVA, Teresa Sullivan practices fact-free fascism with a Nurse Ratched smile.

However, as Senator Mike Lee noted, the recent shenanigans with CROmnibus aren’t going unnoticed. While it would be silly to think that the country is going to escape at least a partial crash before the No-Talent Rodeo Clown leaves his final mess on the carpet, total collapse seems kind of Chicken Little.

Sure, the Commie twerps are doing everything they can to get a race war going, but pesky facts keep revealing them for liars, right, Sullivan? Lies have a  transient effect at best. The fallout of the lies may take longer to clean up. Indeed, unwinding a century of Progressive collapse is going to be the ultimate test of American Exceptionalism.

via Instapundit

Homo Bureaucratus Is The Problem

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by Smitty

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.–Lord Acton

Over time, even petty amounts of power bring out the Nixon in all of us. Via Instapundit, Mark Fiztgibbons writes:

In America’s first 100 years, federal officials could be sued in state courts for acting beyond their authority. In his book Creating the Administrative Constitution, Yale law professor Jerry Mashaw chronicles how this helped temper bad behavior.

Law professor Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit is among those who believe that government officials need more civil and criminal liability for their bad acts. There are some private remedies on the books, but they are too weak to be effective.

Liability is not nothing, but I think it’s peripheral to the issue of concentrating power. Power makes cocaine look like talcum. Witness Cochran’s cheerful apparent flouting of the rules in the Mississippi GOP senatorial runoff. Likely not a surfeit of altruism in his case.

There still is no work-around for the need to have offices, and for officials to occupy them. However, in our Information Age, there isn’t any excuse for the rules being other than simple, understandable, and open to all. Furthermore, the kind of ball-hogging we see with career bureaucrats is clearly a 20th century holdover. Thus, other than the military, I submit that about a 10 year cap on all civil service positions would make sense. Keep the job simple, let people do the job, and let them get out of the way for someone else.

Let’s term-limit the corruption in our government down to an absolute minimum, say I. Homo bureaucratus is not the solution.

Helping Dr. Helen Sort All This Out

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by Smitty

Let’s lay down a few Lefty assertions that, while not absolutely true, may have some explanatory power:

  1. The federal government, staffed with ‘officials’ and ‘experts’, is your parent.
  2. You are a sheep, lacking free will, and are a sort of hormonal robot.
  3. You are a guilt-free slut-o-matic, or dildo with feet, and should both consider the natural plumbing a mere going-in position (heh), and indulge every hedonistic whim in the name of “liberty”.
  4. All of the traditional moral frameworks are, like, over 100 years old. Who can understand them? If you feel a transient confusion, see #1. In any case, do not keep your hormones to yourself, reach a proper adulthood, and attempt to rise above your 20g chocolate ration.
  5. All women are victims, and all males are oppressors. Building upon #4, the notion of equality before the law, irrespective of the selected gender identity of the moment, is dispatched to the midden-heap of history. (How can Democrats build a permanent political hegemony if treating everyone truly equally?)
  6. You are a victim. You didn’t build that family, you’ll never build that family, but if you give everything to #1, the feddle gummint can ensure that nobody else can, either.
  7. So eat, drink, be merry: for that is the career the feddle gummint has set for you.

Dr. Helen is mystified at the asymmetry of college kids, booze, and sex:

Why is it that women can’t think if drunk but men can? Why is it always about men controlling themselves and being responsible for any sex act while women are treated as children?

Given the aforementioned assertions, what we have in modern college is a cultural grinder whose chief product is Democrat sheep who will do several things:

  • make a lot of money, as they are rendered too stupid to grasp heterosexuality and the joy of parenting, and
  • give that money to the Democratic party, and finally,
  • never question what their Progressive Overlords say, as they’re too intellectually stunted.

Of course, that’s idiotic. It’s a purely myopic, culturally destructive, near-term approach. Following such an approach would lead to things like a “knockout game”, and holiday shopping spectacles indistinguishable from a rugby scrum. What country would be stupid enough to buy into all that?

via Instapundit

Obama Administration Gets Its Benghazi On Over In Afghanistan

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by Smitty

This is just despicable:

KABUL — A growing number of Afghan interpreters who worked alongside American troops are being denied U.S. visas allotted by Congress because the State Department says there is no serious threat against their lives.
But the interpreters, many of whom served in Taliban havens for years, say U.S. officials are drastically underestimating the danger they face. Immigration attorneys and Afghan interpreters say the denials are occurring just as concerns about Taliban retribution are mounting due to the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Not only is our rodeo clown administration laying a death sentence on everybody who ever provided any assistance to the U.S., it’s worse than that. Stand by, once these guys are certain that they’ve been sold out, we can expect some unexpected, tragic news. If you take a really bad inner-city gang warfare scene, throw in a religious twist and kitchen sink explosives, you have an idea of Afghanistan. It’s a land of highland Inigo Montoyas, and we’ll never live down this sort of backstabbing.

I guess if we didn’t have the travesty of Benghazi to reflect upon, this dishonorable idiocy might seem startling.

via Insty

Obvious Truths of the Obama Age

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Professor Glenn Reynolds, who knows a thing or two about effective Internet sites, discusses the HealthCare.gov debacle:

So the Obamacare website doesn’t work, and nobody knows when it’ll be fixed. Administration officials are pointing toward late November, but they’ve had more than three years to work on it. In about the same amount of time after John F. Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech, we’d already put people into orbit and brought them safely to earth. It was obviously the signature effort of the Obama administration, but it was a flop. Forget launching to the moon; we can’t even launch a website now. What does that tell us?

It tells us that Obama was elected because a majority of voters are stupid, but we already knew that. Next question, Professor?

 

You Disagree With @Instapundit At Your Peril, But I’m Going With Nicolaitanism Over Oikophobia

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by Smitty

Pondering why we can’t talk about guns, Insty quotes Barry Snell

. . .we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. . .

and concludes:

As with most lefty causes, the key driver is a craving for moral superiority, usually driven by oikophobia.

Now, I’ve only been pondering modern political evil for a few years, but I’ll opt for Nicolaitanism as an explanation:

Nico-, combinatory form of n?k?, “victory” in Greek, and laos means people, or more specifically, the laity; hence, the word may be taken to mean “lay conquerors” or “conquerors of the lay people”. However, “Nicolaitan” is the name ostensibly given to followers of the heretic Nicolas —the name itself meaning “victorious over people,” or “victory of the people,” which he would have been given at birth.

An informal definition of Nicolaitanism could be: “Bossy little power-monger”. That is, somebody who’s life’s quest is to acquire and exert as much authority over others as possible. Impediments to amassing power, such as freedom of speech and the right self-defense, must be obliterated.

The exact meaning of Nicolaitanism in the Revelation isn’t known. But it’s always been a mind-blower that Christianity, which was born in an atmosphere of heavy Roman/Pharisaic oppression, replicates that oppressiveness in so many instances.

So it’s not clear to what degree our modern, elite, liberal, lefty, Socialist, Postmodern, Politically Correct, Godless, Commie, blue state, critical theorist, Democrat, Alinskyite, union, baby boomer, polysexual, abortion-on-demand, #Occupy-loving, group-thinking, anti-Enlightenment, crypto-Marxist overlords conform to the original Nicolaitan heresy. Probably not much at all.

Nevertheless, I submit that recreational overlording has more explanatory power than a simple fear-based label.

Wrong Headline, Professor

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Glenn Greenwald spent the Bush years in a constant state of hysteria about war and infringements of civil liberties. It’s hard to think of a commentator who more typifies the anti-war Left of that era. It is therefore a shock to see Greenwald now grumbling this way:

I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?

Greenwald’s complaint was quoted by Professor Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, but he missed the obvious headline:

If Obama Has Lost Glenn Greenwald . . .

Fixed that for you.