The Other McCain

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

Allow Me To Disagree With Sen. DeMint

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Cubachi has Senator DeMint’s proposal for three terms for members of the House of Representatives and two terms for those in the Senate.
Here is a better idea: repeal the 17th Amendment. Let the Senate return to representing the States. The States can treat Senate nominations like the President treats Supreme Court nominations. If the citizens want the Senate to change, let them tell their Governor/Legislature when their terms are up.
I submit that admitting that 1913 was an abso-effing-lutely suck-tacular year for the US Constitution, and unwinding the ill deeds undertaken by Woodrow Fascist Wilson is crucial to letting the Progressive State of America experiment die its dismal death.
On a related note, Hot Air wants to know where the 5 minute tax form is. Going back to 1913, we need to repeal the 16th Amendment. There is no hope with the IRS. None. Nothing but byzantine pettifoggery there. We nix the IRS, and let the States figure out how to raise their allotted portion of the Federal tab. Doughty co-blogger Wombat will no doubt find gainful employment in Virginia, whose tax system will also grow burdensome. But the knuckleheads of Richmond are far more accountable than those within the Beltway.

Category: Politics, Virginia

The Other McCain School Of Career Planning: Online Degree In Game Art

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Just in case you are, or know somebody who is young and needs a very little bit of direction in life, as in, not enough to go too far, point them to the Full Sail University, where they can get a degree in Game Art. I have no idea of the price, since I thought the ad too silly even to click.
The chief virtues of this hot growth industry are:

  • Saving yourself from repetitive strain injury by wasting your life helping design the games, instead of wasting your life playing them.
  • Construct fantasy heroines with vast. . .tracts of land.
  • Most importantly, study medieval subsistence farming, since you’ll be doing a lot of that after the economic apocalypse.

Having said all that, if your name is Carmack, you are no doubt laughing at me instead.

Category: humor

The 1970s In NYC: Something Else

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | Comments Off on The 1970s In NYC: Something Else

by Smitty

Ed Driscoll, one of those great bloggers whom we don’t link enough, has a post about people waxing nostalgic for NYC’s seedier days. Admittedly, that was a little before my time, but it did bring to mind a funny bit from Our Dumb Century:

Ah, those days.


Some humorless git seems to have left the funniest page of the book of the tubey-nets: Aug. 20, 1969: Apollo 13 Astronauts Drown as Ted Kennedy Flees Splashdown Site
Oh well, we celebrate our victories where we can.

And then the BlogProf has the video:

Category: Ed Driscoll, humor

Lawrence O’Donnell May Be A Knob, But That’s Not A Crime On Its Own

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

I couldn’t agree less with O’Donnell’s thesis that Americans are Socialists, not rugged individualists.Rather than just reject him entirely, though, we need to allow that there is a healthy chunk of the population with an unhealthy taste for the socialist whip. They exist. Stupid people. Fortunately, their stupidity often extends to their mating habits, with predictable non-results.
To the extent O’Donnell has a point, I submit that arguing the Socialist/individualist question at the national level is itself the problem. Let Massachusetts or California be as Socialist as they want to be, and don’t mess with Texas. We must halt the redistribution of wealth that lets the federal government be the collection agent for fools. O’Donnell may lack the intellectual honesty to deal with the results of prying Socialist states away from the federal tit. Enforcing sanity on O’Donnell is not our task. Protecting our wallets from the idiocy of O’Donnell and his ilk, however, is.

Category: MSNBC

Vodka Pundit Grievously Insults Famed Omega Theta Pi Bluto Blutarsky

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Things have gone way too far in the dextrosphere when the POTUS is compared to John Blutarsky:

Remember in Animal House, when John Belushi’s character yelled “Food fight!” in the cafeteria, got a good one going, then made himself a quick escape from the ensuing chaos? That’s right — we have John Blutarsky as commander-in-chief.

I am sure that the Bob Belvedere Chair of Applied Blogwhoring at Faber College will agree to my objection on the following grounds:

  • Blutarsky represents the finest in the American Falstaffian tradition, and should not be denigrated by comparison to the likes of BHO.
  • Leaders are people with followers. BHO, attempting to start a food fight, would throw like a girl, resorting in much pointing and laughing, but only at him.
  • Blutarsky would never appoint Biden to screw up anything that Bluto couldn’t better tube himself.

In defense of the Vodka Pundit, he may still be in insulin shock over the last speech BHO gave.
Now, while BHO may be less of a leader than Blutarsky, Tim Pawlenty is more:

Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who oversaw a state shutdown during his tenure, said Wednesday that the $38 billion in cuts agreed to in a last-minute compromise isn’t enough. He says that number isn’t accurate and the deal is “wholly unacceptable.”

Last week, Democrats and Republicans narrowly averted a partial shutdown of the government by agreeing on a spending plan for the rest of the current budget year, which ends Sept. 30. Final approval of that plan is expected this week.

Pawlenty has announced a presidential exploratory committee and is scheduled to speak at anti-tax events in Concord, N.H., and Boston on Friday.

I liked T-Paw’s book, and I’m sad to see the haters have driven it down to three stars. However, something at a detail level between that book and the full Paul Ryan plan would be interesting.
These GOP overtures, while not nothing, are still too centrist for my right wing reactionary self.

Category: Barack Obama

A History Lesson for Janelle Harris

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 13 Comments

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.
“That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! . . .
“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. . . .
“On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.
“On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

As soon as I saw Instapundit’s link to a column titled, “Chivalry is dead, and you killed it, ladies,” Burke’s famous eulogy for the Age of Chivalry came to mind.

A great shame of modern education is that Burke’s philosophical reflections are now taught — when taught at all, which probably isn’t often — from excerpts in annotated anthologies, or studied from Cliff Notes. Students are presented with prefabricated interpretations of Burke’s meaning, rather than being required to puzzle it out for themselves. The result is a shallow understanding that deprives them of a full comprehension of Burke’s subtle meaning. It is far better to take the time to read the whole thing, to study the history of the French Revolution (including its philosophical influences), and patiently construe the larger signficance of the intended criticism.

What Burke denounced as a “barbarous philosophy” was the spirit of modern radicalism — Liberté, égalité, fraternité — that rejects all tradition and custom as oppressive superstition. The mob that invaded Versailles in October 1789, insulting the Queen whose honor Burke thought should be avenged by “ten thousand swords,” was acting in accordance with this radical “scheme of things,” wherein “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman [and] a woman is but an animal.”

If a queen deserved no respect from the common rabble of Paris, Burke recognized, why should anyone be expected to obey any law, except the law of brute force? And why should anyone be expected to act on anything other than the most selfish motives? Read more

Category: History

Rush: ‘Cut To The Chase,’ a Tea Party Rallying Cry

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

After about a half-hour outage, the network pipe seemed stable enough to grab some tuneage off of Amazon. Rush’s 1993 Counterparts has this essential cut. No matter how deep the rot revealed inside the Beltway, there just isn’t any excuse to give in to despair.

You may be right, It’s all a waste of time
I guess that’s just a chance I’m prepared to take
A danger I’m prepared to face
Cut to the chase.


‘Cut to the chase’ is my attitude about the bad news. We know it will suck twice as bad as we imagine, even when we double our estimate. That bad news shan’t improve over time. Our leaders are, as a group, a heap of FAIL. Bring it on, so we can be about improving things.
Also rallying a Tea Party: Gov. Sarah Palin. We really have to focus on getting Stacy to the Big Easy again. Just in case Sarah decides, you know, to make a little news or something.

Also rocking the Tea Parties, courtesy of The Blaze:

Category: Music, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin

Trump Is A Tea Party Favorite?

Posted on | April 15, 2011 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Alan Colmes accuses Trump of being a Tea Party favorite. Usefully, Colmes points out that Trump is, at best, an opportunist.
Stacy McCain’s admonition not to let opponents pick candidates for you applies.
The Tea Parties never hired Trump, as far as I heard. Once the media finds the next thing as shiny as Trump’s scalp, he and that risible hairstyle will be fired.
I’m not sure even Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. could make Trump interesting on more than a passing basis.
Oh, and I don’t seriously think West would work for Trump. If that eventually happens, then I have seriously misunderstimated one of two.

Via Lucianne, the NY Sun is predicting a Constitutional crisis over Arizona’s ‘birther bill’.

But it may also be that Arizona — of any one or several of a number of other states — will try to deny a sitting president of America access to the ballot in a campaign for a second term. A spokesman for the Tea Party at Arizona was quoted the other day at by the New York Times saying the Arizona measure is “not a birther bill” and “not about Mr. Obama.” She called it “about preventing any questions from coming up in the future, putting something in place so no one could question it.” So we could be confronted with the basic bargain of the American founding, that it was a contract between the states and the people and the states. And it’s something to imagine how the constitutional sparks would fly.

One fails to understand who is denying whom anything. The President was born in Hawaii, by his own attestation. So it should be as unreasonable as a TSA frisking for Arizona to ask whatever it likes in the way of documentation of any candidate desiring to get on the ballot there.
My prediction: no crisis achieved here. Whether or not that’s due to preemption by another crisis remains to be seen. One wishes for something more boring, despite the desperate cries of some for more excitement.

Category: Donald Trump, Election 2012
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