The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Does Conservative Light Suck At Supporting Lefty Darkness?

Posted on | August 28, 2011 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

Look no further than Salon for your daily dose o’ dreck. “Why won’t America embrace the left?” moans Mandy Van Deven, whose name appears just above a picture that answers the mail on why Americans cannot abide propaganda-peddling putzes of the Lefty variety.

The eloquent, conservative, Baptist, Republican image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. placed on the left of a triptych with Michael Moore and FDR? Really? You think that Dr. King would look at the horror of debt and aborted children wrought by the Left in the name of Progress and not join the nearest Tea Party in his indignation?

You think that by co-opting the image of King you can airbrush history, because Americans have not caught on to the the Left’s recreational dishonesty? You’re sadly mistaken, Mandy. Successful propaganda, like a magic show, is predicated upon a willing audience. Apparently there is a Michael Kazin, who does something to history at Georgtown University (some might call it teaching), and has dropped by Salon for an interview. Mandy introduces her topic:

What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR’s New Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In the ’60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement — and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul. But, if you compare the accomplishments of the American left to those of other parts of the world, like Western Europe, its record is remarkably dismal, with a surprising lack of real political and social impact.

At least, that’s the main takeaway from “American Dreamers,” a new book by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, which covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion. His book explores the way the national conversation has been changed by union organizers, gay rights activists and feminists. He also writes about how their techniques have now been adopted by the Tea Party movement. From Michael Moore to “Wall-E,” he argues that, although the left has been successful at transforming American culture, when it comes to practical change, it’s been woefully unsuccessful.

What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR’s New Deal remains one of the great American success stories.
Anyone who’s read Amity Shlaes knows that the FDR’s New Deal, even if you blow by the anti-Constitutional rejection of limited government that it embodied, has proven an economic disaster over the last 75-ish years. So Mandy is either simple, or a propaganda monger.
In the ’60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement — and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul.
I’m about halfway through the latest Ann Coulter, Demonic and she recounts in much detail just how cool the Weathermen, the campus loonies, et al. were.

. . .covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion. His book explores the way the national conversation has been changed by union organizers, gay rights activists and feminists. He also writes about how their techniques have now been adopted by the Tea Party movement.
Kazin doesn’t seem too interested in the struggle for liberty, which is the heart of American Exceptionalism, and predates all of the union/gay/feminist twaddle. If we have liberty, all else follows. It is the sheer genius of the Left to take the teleological point of America, liberty, and obscure it with so much chrome and tailfin (“inter-species economic reproductive voting justice”) that no one can quite figure out what the Left is on about anymore. However, if Noam Chomsky says it, the muddle will be served with erudite-sounding faux authority.

Screw your nonsense, Kazin: the Tea Parties are about burning through your intellectual fog, not adding to it.

I’m going to stop after the first question, for reasons of time. However, I trust other bloggers can get on the fisk train and help out.

In the book, you argue that the left has been very successful at changing American culture — but not at making real economic or political change. Why?

It’s easier to get people to think about things differently than it is to construct institutions that alter the basic building blocks of society. When leftists talk about having a vision of how things might be different, they attract an audience and create a new way of perceiving things. It’s a different issue altogether to go up against entrenched structures of wealth and political power. There are few obstacles to talking differently, singing different kinds of songs, or making a different kind of art, but it takes a sustained movement of millions of people to really change the structures, and that is much harder to organize. Also, most Americans accept the basic ground rules of capitalist society. The ideas are that if you work hard you can get ahead and that it’s better to be self-employed than employed by the people. They believe that the basics of a capitalist society are just or can be made just with small alterations. Americans want capitalism to work well for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and everyone’s not going to be able to do well at the same time. That’s simply not possible.

. . .construct institutions that alter the basic building blocks of society.
First, identify the problem you think you’re about solving. There are few more painful people in life than those who’ve fallen in love with change for change’s sake. They’re either stupid, diabolical, or a fine blend of both.

. . .vision of how things might be different. . .
There is nothing new under the sun, twerp. Among the very old things one can find are pixie dust peddlers, in which ignoble line you stand. Your ‘different’ future boils down to feudalism, and we don’t want it.

. . .it takes a sustained movement of millions of people to really change the structures, and that is much harder to organize. . .
Iron fist, velvet glove.

Americans want capitalism to work well for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and everyone’s not going to be able to do well at the same time. That’s simply not possible.
It really depends on your definition of ‘ahead’, doesn’t it? By the one-dimensional metric of money, you can bin people easily into haves and have-nots, the better to incite the less reflective into class warfare, no? Your attention is drawn to Bill Whittle for any number of excellent rebuttals.

The Progressive Left is withering under the weight of conservative dialogue in the information age. The more the American people talk to each other, the more they realize the Left are nothing but theives, albeit well-dressed. They want to steal our liberty and replace it with lame substitutes.

(via Memeorandum)

Category: Uncategorized

Storm Center Commander-in-Chief?

Posted on | August 28, 2011 | 19 Comments

So I saw this headline at Memeorandum:

Obama takes charge at hurricane command center

And my natural reaction is, “Ri-iiiight.”

Like he’s being the anti-Bush, scoring some image points by playing against the perception of his predecessor as having bungled Katrina. But what happened in New Orleans in 2005 — a Category 4 storm slamming into a city sitting below sea level, protected by earthen levees — was such a disaster beyond what anyone could have prepared for, the Blame-Bush perception was grossly unfair. Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco clearly were more responsible for the failure to provide for evacuation, et cetera, but they were both Democrats. The media pounced on the Blame-Bush theme and never let up.

Obama? The media are his “enablers,” as Fred Barnes says. And so we get the whole set-piece feature about Obama the Great Commander:

Killed bin Laden. Beat Qaddafi. Kicked a hurricane’s ass. Whatever.

Category: Barack Obama

Blog Ads Get Results!

Posted on | August 27, 2011 | 4 Comments

If you look over in the top right-hand corner of the page, you see where our BlogAds run. Our rates are pretty cheap, and people who have advertised with us say that they were impressed with the results compared to some other sites. I’ve kind of taken the BlogAds for granted in recent months, but some of you may remember when PETA had an ad with Pamela Anderson’s boobs that used to get some negative comments. Being a greedy capitalist, my attiude was: Hey, they buy the space, I need the money, I’m not complaining.

Anyway, for a while we’ve had an ad from BetOnIraq.com, which sells the Iraqi dinar to U.S. investors, and I finally got curious enough to click and check it out. Their site has this 2007 CNBC interview with Erin Burnett:

Whether or not this affects your decision to check out BetOnIraq.com, I think we can all agree on one thing: Erin Burnett is totally hot.

Meanwhile, we recently picked up a new advertiser offering custom 2″x3.5″ magnet business cards. This ad is from Business Printing Company (BPC), which is running a 2-for-1 special. You could, for example, get 500 magnets for $160, which is 32 cents per magnet, or 1,000 magnets for $240, which is 24 cents per magnet. They do all kinds of printing, and even have a cool design-it-yourself online feature, so if you need some printing — business cards, whatever — you should check out BPC.

And if you have a business to promote, check out BlogAds.

Category: Blogging

Al-Qaeda Leader Atiyah Abd al-Rahman Suffers From Embarrassing Foot Odor and Fatal U.S. Predator Drone Missile Strike

Posted on | August 27, 2011 | 12 Comments

But mainly it was the drone attack:

Al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, has been killed in Pakistan, delivering another big blow to a terrorist group that the U.S. believes to be on the verge of defeat, U.S. officials said Saturday.
The Libyan national had been the network’s operational leader before rising to al-Qaida’s No. 2 spot after the U.S. killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden during a raid on his Pakistan compound in May. . . .
Al-Rahman was killed Aug. 22 in the lawless Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, according to a senior administration who also insisted on anonymity to discuss intelligence issues.
The official would not say how al-Rahman was killed. But his death came on the same day that a CIA drone strike was reported in Waziristan. Such strikes by unmanned aircraft are Washington’s weapon of choice for killing terrorists in the mountainous, hard-to-reach area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

On the bright side, he won’t have to worry about foot odor anymore.

Also, I stole Ace’s classic headline riff, but that’s OK because Drew M. forgot it when he blogged al-Rahman’s death.

I steal all my good stuff from Ace. The bad stuff? All original, baby.

Category: Pakistan, Terrorism

Global Warming Kills Florida Surfer UPDATE: Thousands Without Electricity or WiFi; Bloggers Hardest Hit by Storm UPDATE: New York Braces for Irene; Women, Minorites, NFL Fans Hardest Hit

Posted on | August 27, 2011 | 33 Comments

The past couple of days, I became irritated by non-stop TV hurricane hype, which depicted Irene as a cataclysmic danger to the East Coast. However, just because the cable-news hysteria was absurdly disproportionate to the actual threat didn’t mean Irene was harmless:

Six people, including an 11-year-old boy and a surfer, were dead and the East Coast was a solid wall of red hurricane warnings Saturday as Hurricane Irene began lashing the Virginia coast on its way to what forecasters and authorities warned could be a catastrophic run north.

Wait — what? A surfer?

In Florida, the Volusia County Beach Patrol confirmed that a surfer was killed Saturday when he was knocked off his board at New Smyrna Beach, where surfers flocked to take advantage of 10-foot waves kicked up in the wake of Irene.
“It appears he went over a wave and might have gone head first into the ground,” Tammy Marris, a spokeswoman for the agency, told the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

The dead surfer was a popular high-school math teacher, but the Daytona story concludes:

The National Weather Service and local officials continue to warn that dangerous rip currents are present all along the Atlantic Coast beaches.  “If you are a weak swimmer, you should stay out of the surf,” the weather service stated in an advisory. “Even experienced ocean swimmers should check with lifeguards about where rip currents are occurring before going into the water.”

Ten-foot waves killing innocent surfers? I blame global warming.

UPDATE: Linked by the Lonely Conservative — thanks!

This storm has caused a lot of concern for our environmentalist friends. However, according to the latest reports, no polar bears have been killed by the hurricane. So we can be thankful for that.

UPDATE II: This morning, I was worried because traffic on the blog was kinda slow, even for a Saturday. Then I checked the Wall Street Journal‘s special Irene blog and found out that the storm has knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes in North Carolina and Virginia. This means that many of our regular readers in those states probably don’t have WiFi and can’t even check the blog today — another tragic consequence of global warming.

UPDATE III: Irene’s tragic toll continues:

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Like the rest of the East Coast, the New York Giants were adjusting their lives around Hurricane Irene on Saturday.
After having their preseason game against the Jets postponed from Saturday to Monday, the Giants held a practice on Saturday morning. Tom Coughlin then sent his team home to be with their families and gave them an off day Sunday, when Irene is expected to hit New Jersey and New York hard.

So if the Giants don’t cover the spread? Right: Global warming.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Global Warming

‘The Relationship Soured After They Came to Doubt His Reincarnation Credentials’

Posted on | August 27, 2011 | 11 Comments

That weird sentence was buried in a New York Times story about a Twitter “stalking” case involving an intra-Buddhist dispute:

Born in Canarsie, Brooklyn, Ms. Zeoli is considered to be a reincarnated master in the Tibetan Buddhist religious tradition, and is known to her followers as Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. She is an avid Twitter user, with 23,000 followers. A representative for Ms. Zeoli said she declined to be interviewed for this article.
According to the F.B.I. and Ms. Zeoli’s lawyer, Mr. Cassidy also claimed to be a reincarnated Buddhist when he joined Ms. Zeoli’s organization, Kunzang Palyul Choling, in 2007. He signed up using a false name and claimed to have had lung cancer, they said. Ms. Zeoli’s organization cared for him and, briefly, even appointed him to its executive team. The relationship soured after they came to doubt his reincarnation credentials and found that his claims of cancer were false. Mr. Cassidy left. Then came the relentless tweets, they said.

The article quotes eminent law-blogger Eugene Volokh on the First Amendment issues involved.

My advice? Don’t ever doubt a Buddhist’s reincarnation credentials!

Category: Religion

The Politics of Fear

Posted on | August 27, 2011 | 57 Comments

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

In February, the National Interest published an article by Ian Kershaw called “The Ghosts of Fascists Past“:

A prominent British government minister, Baroness Warsi, herself a Muslim, claimed just recently that Islamophobia has “passed the dinner-table test” in Britain and is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial. She warned of growing intolerance, prejudice and bigotry toward the Muslim faith and its adherents. . . .
If we add to the mix the anti-immigrant feeling that is widespread in many parts of the Continent, then racism, it has to be admitted, is far from eradicated. How dangerous is it, given these countries’ baleful histories of racism and fascism in the not-too-distant past? Not surprisingly, some have asked whether Europe is moving toward political extremes. Do the signs point that way? Is Europe indeed on the road to new racial intolerance that could give succor to the extremist Right and even offer it new, promising prospects? . . .

Perhaps some would point toward last month’s Oslo massacre as evidence of such a trend, but I think that’s misleading. Anders Breivik was a lone wolf, a one-off like Timothy McVeigh. Recall that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was at the time heralded as a symbol of an alleged menace — right-wing militias — that never really developed into anything. And likewise we have no evidence that Breivik’s murder spree was the leading edge of a mass movement.

This is not to minimize the extent or significance of Breivik’s (or McVeigh’s) association with the Right, but rather to illustrate that even the most extreme elements of the Right seldom resort to terrorist violence, and such violence never serves to advance the cause on behalf of which its perpetrators purport to act. In democratic societies, political violence tends to be self-defeating, discrediting those who employ it. Yet there is an industry devoted to conjuring fear of right-wing extremism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (with a tax-free bank account of $175 million) routinely floods the mailboxes of elderly rich liberals with scary solicitations conveying the impression that, unless they send a generous check to fund the SPLC’s efforts, the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street next week.

My point is that this fear is misplaced and irrational, and yet the Department of Homeland Security’s infamous “right-wing extremism” report of 2009 shows how such foolishness is taken seriously in high places. If the DHS report was directed at the Tea Party movement (as most believe), what are they afraid of? People holding rallies to protest against deficit spending? Mass opposition to a government takeover of the health-care system? A Republican electoral landslide?

Unjustified fear of “right-wing extremism” is fomented simply as a way of demonizing Republicans who, the liberals would have us believe, are on the one hand beholden to dangerous crackpots while, on the other hand, are also tacitly encouraging violent extremists. So if some nut commits a heinous crime and is then alleged to have been a Rush Limbaugh listener — vote Democrat!

Because if you don’t vote Democrat, the Republicans will take charge and then the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street next week.

It sounds silly when put in such simple terms, of course, but what exactly do the fearmongers want their audiences to fear?

If the danger is psychos with explosives, OK — let the FBI investigate and arrest them. But the fearmongers would have us believe that there is a Continuum of Hate, an uninterrupted chain of causality by which the Hutaree Militia is ultimately connected to the Republican National Committee. And it just ain’t so. Read more

Category: Culture, History, Hollywood, Intellectuals, Liberals, Media Bias, Religion, Tea Party

Is The GOP Hopelessly Nixonian?

Posted on | August 27, 2011 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Insty links to Bret Jacobson in Forbes. Jacobson starts with the obvious JFK/Nixon debate point, enumerates the various major new media channels, and concludes:

So successful campaigns using digital tools well should always be congratulated, sometimes emulated (never duplicated), and always topped. Showing up is a great first step. Then it’s time to understand how to win in an emerging medium.

I don’t think that the GOP’s Nixonian problem has to do with a Luddite view of technology. The wrecking of George Allen in 2006 and the ludicrous $ haul of BHO in 2008 are two searing examples among thousands of why technology mastery goes without saying.

The view of Nixon’s character, as seen in Frost/Nixon suggests another parallel between the GOP gestalt and Nixon; that of the Ruling Class Overlord confronted with the hoi polloi. The elder statesman is too burdened with his weighty matters of state to condescend to explain himself to a commoner. But, as with the JFK/Nixon debate issue, this is superficial.

The problem is not the GOP inside the beltway looking out to the lumpen proletariat. Rather, the American citizens looking into the beltway having trouble telling apart the GOP and Democrat ends of the Ruling Class. In a twisted way, the Democrats are more forthright: they explicitly believe that there are no problems, only government solutions. No bones about it. No faux capitalist bleating, and then another bureaucracy (TSA) or ream of legislation up the stern tube.

Now, I understand that all the GOP candidates, in contrast to the Democrat one, have got to be moderate for a few reasons:

  • The Independent third of the electorate decides who gets control.
  • People will cheerfully ride the economic bus they know off a cliff rather than consider things like eliminating the Federal Reserve, with the attendant uncertainty about who will pick our pockets and shower them with economic ruin, if not Bernanke.
  • Nobody wants to upset the rice bowls. The amazingly torpid homo bureaucratus who works within the beltway can become agitated, and release a storm of PowerPoint slides, if his meeting room habitat is disturbed. Candidates are wise to take a mellow tack, and promise spending cuts, but no staffing cuts.

That’s all campaigning, which is a different beast than holding office, unless your name sounds similar to origami.

Which is the crux of the matter for the GOP. Doing the right, proper, conservative, common-sense thing involves a refudiation of their entire Ruling Class approach for the last century. It’s one thing for a lone drunk to go cold turkey, but sobering an entire political party is like trying to get Jimmy Carter not to be a milquetoast: easier said than dried.

Answering the question posed in the title, the GOP is hopelessly Nixonian by nature. It is also going to have as much change beaten into it as necessary by the Tea Party to overcome the hopeless part. The Radtke/Allen kerfuffle is a case in point; look for further entertainment as the primary season unfolds, Virginians.

Category: Uncategorized
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