The Other McCain

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

One Bright Ray Amid the Gloom

Posted on | October 2, 2010 | 51 Comments

Regular readers are by now aware that (a) my friends got invited to speak at Smart Girl Summit while I did not, and (b) the blog went kablooey today. Things have been going from bad to worse ever since that deer killed my car, and the situation now seems so impossibly hopeless that all I can do is joke about it while each new humiliation is piled atop the Towering Heap o’ Shame.

Yet after calculating the distance to the George Washington Bridge, I decided to check Memeorandum and saw this headline:

Breaking: Rick Sanchez fired from CNN

Thanks for that news, Allah Who Never Links Me. Why was Sanchez fired? Ed Who Links Me Once in a While quotes what Sanchez told a radio talk-show host:

I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like [Jon] Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

Here I am, at that nadir of discouragement where it feels as if the entire universe is conspiring to humiliate me, and never once did I attempt to single out a culprit.

My failure is, alas, entirely my own. Because I suck.

Meanwhile, here’s Mr. Hotshot TV Anchor taking potshots at a comedian and saying, Those Jews Are All In On It!

The beauty of the universe is sometimes so ironic — and the ironies often so beautiful — that some of us detect in it evidence of divine intervention.

God? Yeah, he’s Jewish, too.

And what a comedian!

(BTW, among the features rendered inoperable by the site malfunction: The tip jar, which could use some shekels.)

P.S: If any of our Zionist Media Overlords are looking to hire an award-winning journalist, feel free to drop me an e-mail. This business of being America’s Least-Respected Conservative Blogger™ is beginning to bum me out and, if it helps to establish my credentials as a ger toshav, I’ll point out that I was a finalist for the 2009 Malkin Award.

UPDATE: Pamela Geller reminds us that this isn’t the first such situation for CNN:

Who can forget Octavia Nasr, who was forced to resign after tweeting about weeping over the the death of grand jihadist Hezb’Allah Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah?

Considering the context of Sanchez’s remark, it seems that what he was doing was playing that popular liberal game, “Who’s the Bigger Victim?”

Sanchez pointed out that Stewart had grown up in an affluent suburb by way of disparaging any notion that Jews have a plausible claim to victim status. Whereas Sanchez grew up in a rat-infested slum the suburbs of Miami. Hr was subsequently persecuted prosecuted for being Hispanic driving drunk when he paralyzed a man in a hit-and-run accident.

No doubt, Rick Sanchez is at least the second-biggest victim of his own stupidity.

Category: Celebrities, humor, Media Bias, Shoe Leather Fund

The Site Is Screwed Up

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 33 Comments

In case you didn’t notice, The Other McCain was offline for about two hours in the middle of the day today. It is now back online. We are grateful to the gnomes and elves at the Enchanted Forest of Service Providers for their use of pixie-dust and other magical charms to repair the Rube Goldberg contraption that is our custom-hosted WordPress platform.

Meanwhile, however, the advertisements are MIA, as are several other usual features on the sidebars of the site. Smitty will probably restore these features shortly after I post this message, and will then add an update with some snarktastic commentary on my utter lack of appreciation of the technological gee-whizzery by which all this kind of stuff is accomplished.

Some people like to tinker with computers. I am not one of those people. Rather, I am compelled, by the nature of my occupation, to cope with computers. This puts me at the mercy of computer-tinkerers who, like all my friends who were invited to speak at Smart Girl Summit, get their most pleasant recreation by laughing at me behind my back.

My life’s purpose, it seems at times, was foretold by the title of a George Carlin comedy album, Occupation: Fool.

UPDATE: Smitty is offline, coping with real-world problems at a Chrysler dealership. Meanwhile, I present Portrait of a Blog Disaster:

What you see here is that we began the morning with a promising upward surge of traffic, which increased 26% from the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour. At some point after 10 a.m., however, the magic inside the Enchanted Forest began to go awry. Visitors to the site began to have difficulty getting the page to load properly and, sometime between 11 a.m. and noon, the escalating failure became complete.

Blog traffic has a certain momentum. If other bloggers cannot access your site at 11 a.m., they cannot link your posts at noon. Regular readers who discover that your site will not load at noon might try again at 12:30, but if it doesn’t load the second time, they’re unlikely to try again soon. Ergo, the traffic lost during “down time” has a negative impact on every subsequent hour so that, after service was restored around 1 p.m., the level of traffic was lower than the 9 a.m. hour, and the promising momentum of the morning was lost.

Q.E.D.

Every new click onto the blog is an opportunity, you see, and every opportunity missed is a complete loss that can never be remedied. No matter how many thousands of people visit this blog on Saturday, we have lost forever the value of those several hundred would-be visitors who could not reach the site for those two or three hours during which we were not properly accessible. And every minute that the advertisements are “down” represents a loss of potential value to people who pay good money to advertise here.

It is the irreparable nature of these lost opportunities that depress me. A writer naturally wishes to think that his work has value, that his words edify the reader, who somehow benefits — becoming more informed, or at least being pleasantly amused — by the encounter. Who knows what benefit might have been gained by readers, had the site not gone down this morning?

Perhaps my conception of the blog, of its value to readers and advertisers, seems grandiose to some. Yet I occasionally get e-mails from readers who thank me for something I’ve written, making me aware that this project is at times more meaningful than my sarcastic humor may suggest.

To our readers and advertisers, then, I sincerely apologize for the loss represented by our technical problems today. No one regrets this more than I.

Category: Blogging

Shame in a Shameless Culture

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 109 Comments

The tragedy of Tyler Clementi’s suicide has drawn much commentary. We are not surprised that Pam Spaulding seizes the opportunity to lecture us about “homophobia” — the scare-quotes necessitated, as I always note, by the pseudo-diagnostic nature of the term.

Stipulate that such a phenomenon as “homophobia” exists, that there are people who have an irrational and exaggerated fear of homosexuals, to such an extent that we might describe them as suffering from a mental illness. Absent a case-by-case examination of individuals, an analysis of the behaviors and attitudes that constitute “homophobia,” and evidence that this phenomenon causes harm to society, the term is merely an epithet, with no meaningful definition. Read more

Category: Culture, Gays, Sex

Moral Vacuum Strangely Empty Of Moral Understanding

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Ned Resnikoff at Salon trolls beautifully: “The non-existent moral case for tax cuts”

Sure, the right will rend their garments over the Laffer curve and supply-side economics, but there’s a much simpler argument hiding behind the line graphs.

It goes like this: We earned this money. We deserve it. It is therefore immoral to take it from us.

Boiled down to two words, this is called ‘private property’.

The standard liberal response is to quibble over who deserves what. Does a single mother who works three jobs just to make the rent and keep her kids clothed deserve more or less material wealth than the overworked corporate lawyer who’s barely seen his downtown Manhattan studio in the past week? What about the linebacker who is paid millions of dollars to be in peak physical condition all the time and perform under immense emotional and physical pressure? Does he deserve all of his income more than the recently laid off factory worker deserves his unemployment benefits?

In other words, the liberal is comfortable poking into all private property, even without indication of lawbreaking. The liberal with the vestage of morality may prefer to exercise this sort of control by means of the state (protecting his own privacy en passant, no doubt) but the threat to private property is iminent in any case.

The problem with questions like this is that they put far more moral weight on the word “deserve” than its shaky frame can support. This becomes clear once you ask why a billionaire does or does not deserve a tax cut. He does deserve it because he’s a diligent, hard worker. He doesn’t deserve it because his money came to him in large part thanks to a combination of luck and privilege.

Do you perceive the tie between “is” and “deserve” there, Ned? One would think that liberality would be about non-judgmental approaches. The billionaire can slaughter his unborn children and engage in unnatural sex, but there are no moral lines crossed until the bank account becomes too large?

So the question of “deserves” comes down to whether the money came to the billionaire by way of arbitrary factors or as a result of his own efforts and character. And implicit in the argument is the understanding that the difference between these two categories is somehow intelligible, even quantifiable.

No, it really comes down to whether you have a legal system, and can prove in court that the legal system has been abused, i.e. the wealth was acquired illegally. Other than that, Ned, you’re Making Stuff Up.

But that’s silly. As the political philosopher John Rawls famously pointed out, factors that we associate with character — such as intelligence and a diligent work ethic — are no less morally arbitrary than factors like inherited wealth or membership in a privileged identity group. If Jane deserves more money than her co-worker Bob because she is naturally smarter and harder working than him, what did she do to deserve her greater intelligence? What about the solid work ethic her parents instilled in her? Did she, at the exact moment of her birth, already deserve better parents than Bob?

The only thing this debate about who deserves what really tells us is that very few people are willing to admit just how insubstantial and malleable our innate character really is. When you control for environmental, genetic, social, historical, and biological factors, what differentiates my own distinguishing features from Charles Manson’s — or, for that matter, Obama’s, Palin’s, Lincoln’s or yours — is either imperceptible or completely nonexistent. And if that’s the case, I don’t see how you can argue that either of us deserve more or less than any of those people.

So, Equality of Opportunity, too, is meaningless. All that matters is Equality of Condition?

What this suggests to me is that the only way you can coherently argue that a person inherently deserves a certain level of privilege or material comfort is to also argue that all persons deserve it, by virtue of their personhood. We already have language to describe these things that all persons innately deserve: we call them rights.

I will speak to you a great truth, Ned: nobody owes you jack.

Beyond rights is where the language of “deserving” falls apart as a morally relevant factor. There are, of course, other morally relevant factors: ownership comes to mind, but nearly everyone, when pressed, will admit that ownership doesn’t carry a great deal of moral weight. (Example: If I need to steal your expensive racing kayak to row out to sea and rescue a drowning child, are you really going to argue that I was behaving badly?) Mostly it falls back to a question of economics: how to balance the state’s ability to provide needed services for all citizens, including its most needy, while preserving a capitalist system which rewards achievement, and therefore (one would hope) innovation, productivity and excellence.

Ned, let me help you with a question: What is your unit of analysis? You’re head seems lodged in a certain sunless location next to Rousseau. You have 23 chromosomes. Half your information came from daddy, half from momma. Zip, zero, zilch, none of that information came from The State. The “state’s ability to provide needed services for all citizens” is convenient hooey for you and your ilk, Ned. Individuals tolerate the construct known as The State to varying degrees, and through various means.
The moral case for tax cuts is that honest people don’t spend money they lack.
Ned, your failure to even raise this as an argument speaks volumes.

No Sheeples Here offers a palate cleansing selection of Gipper and W to help the reader recover:

Category: Progressivism

Noted Economist Rev. Jesse Jackson Declares Depression

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 16 Comments

by Smitty (h/t Lucianne)

It’s hard to tell whether to be cheered or saddened. Rev. Jackson, at least as credible as Paul Krugman on economics, in Detroit declared depression:

“The middle class is under attack,” Jackson told the Free Press on Wednesday. “Detroit, Michigan is ground zero.”

Compared with unemployment and foreclosure rates nationwide, Detroit has been the hardest hit urban area in the country, according to Jackson. He is urging government officials and business leaders to reinvest in the city.

“This is a depression, not a recession when you have 30 to 40% of residents in poverty,” Jackson said in reference to new census data reported Wednesday. “This is a state of emergency.”

You know what would cheer Jesse up? Seeing his son swearing into the Senate. If Illinois doesn’t deliver, Junior can just stand at the door and offer his Blagojevich impersonation. More or less the same.

Category: humor

VA-9: Obama Loves This Democrat!

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 3 Comments

Dumb Democrat Week continues as we highlight Rick Boucher, the Virginia Democrat who voted for cap-and-trade.

Incumbent Problem #1: Boucher represents an Appalachian region of rural southwest Virginia where coal mining is a vital industry and thousands of local jobs would be lost if cap-and-trade becomes law.

Incumbent Problem #2: When the House adjourned without voting to extend tax cuts, guess which Blue Dog decided he could afford to give Nancy Pelosi the key vote for adjournment?

Incumbent Problem #3: The 9th District went 59% for John McCain and Obama loves him some Rick Boucher:

A couple of guys I know are working for the campaign of state Sen. Morgan Griffith, the Republican challenger in the 9th District, and I hope to get down there to cover the campaign on the ground soon. But before you hit my tip jar, hit Griffith’s first, OK? He looks like a winner.

MORGAN GRIFFITH for U.S. CONGRESS

Category: Congress, Election, Virginia

Come On, Meg, Where’s Your Sense Of Humor?

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 34 Comments

by Smitty

Put the godforsaken letter up on eBay, with the proceeds going to some suitable charity. Then look at Brown campaign and say “Is that all ya got? ‘Cause I can go all day.”
And speaking of the humor, why isn’t anyone delivering Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, for that old-time Governor Jerry Brown feeling?

Oh, why not?

Jane Fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals, it’s okay
So let’s get dressed and dance away the night


Stacy will be apoplectic over this post, no doubt.

Category: Hot Air

Al Gore Answers Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on | October 1, 2010 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

Yes! The toil of making a transcript of Gore’s remarks last weekend in support of “Gentleman” Jim Moran pays off.

Victor Davis Hanson has one of his excellent ruminations (RTWT) over at Pajamas Media, and poses a question:

4. The Plutocratic Party?

I cannot fathom how the Democratic Party became run by those who live lives nothing remotely similar to what they profess. Yes, I know the Roosevelt-Kennedy tradition of limousine liberals, but today’s chasm between word and deed is stunning—and never remarked on. Are we to believe that prep-schooled and Ivy Leagued, millionaire Barack Obama is the blue-collar face of the Democratic Party, while one of twelve children John Boehner is some sort of J.P. Morgan insider rich man? No wonder that Obama must fake his cadences, bowl, and try to eat cabbage instead of arugula.

The Al Gore, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros phenomenon is baffling. The best I can make of it goes something like this. Once someone makes enough money truly to be exempt from worries over taxation (but even Kerry proved that $1 billion dollars does not quite end the impulse to dodge sales taxes), or is deeply burrowed within government so that almost everything is free or subsidized, then some sort of human desire to help the “other” kicks in as a sort of penance for the enjoyment of privilege.

What did Gore say last weekend? (emphasis mine):

[Jim Moran is] a very, very respected voice on issues from the environment and energy, to civil rights and equal justice for all Americans. And of course, that’s core to who we are as Americans. And each successive generation has its own new challenges to expand the tremendous dream and vision that led to the founding of this country in the first place. Jim has been true to the American spirit all the way along the line.

The Progressive belief system, per the advertising slogans, seems a modern attempt to unify the State with some fuzzy pseudo-Christian, Socialized belief system. The notion that the several States retain any rights, and the Constitution was a means of delegating limited powers to a Federal government is nothing but a speed bump along the road to creating a shiny future.

Liberty is an absolute. You can argue well that the 15th Amendment put the teeth in the Constitutional guarantee. Fine. But how, exactly, have the decadence of newly discovered ‘rights’ from the bench, and multi-ream colostomy bags of legislation extended the absolute of liberty in any way?

Past the advertising slogans like the one Al Gore spouted for his little pack of robots in Northern Virginia comes the question: does the man subscribe to that tripe? When not in front of the ‘bots, but rather chillin’ with the beautiful people in Davos, does he really sound like that?

I don’t think so either. So then, why all the recreational hypocrisy? My answer is that it’s a natural outgrowth of having allowed a Ruling Class to grow. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, requires regular turning, and for the same reason. The random collection of intellectual mushrooms currently unafraid to announce they are our leaders are there Because We’ve Permitted It.

Thus, we’ve 33 days to convince people to load-shed these idiots.

Next Spring, after the new Congress is sworn in, we’ll get into the details of just how bare the pantry is. I assume an order of magnitude worse than currently discussed, just as a going-in position. Then we’ll begin to get a real idea of just what an execrable pack of (perhaps well-intentioned) swine all of these Progressives have proven.

Via Insty, here is a better historical overview. This article is valuable for its global scope and historical depth. A subsequent article, I think, should talk about how central banking has been the leaven of Socialism, until now, when it is so globally inflated as to be unaffordable, and how technology like Al Gore’s Internet has allowed the people to rise instead.

Category: Blogging, Instapundit, ManBearPig, Progressivism
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