This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
I've come to the conclusion that Google de-searched this blog for political reasons. I don't care to really get to the bottom of it, even to the point of finding out if it happened or not.
Instead, I'm now blogging at Redstate.com and The Minority Report Blog. I do have a few thought pieces in the works that might go here, but look to Redstate and TMR for your daily fix of me.
Sometimes a tiny detail of daily life, work, or what lies in between will claw its way back from the obscurity of lost memory to intrude once again as the focus of attention.
We read the news on some blog, or in the newspaper, or listen to the radio. Someone wrote that blog post, the wire story, or radio copy. How much work was it? Will they remember it tomorrow?
We drive along the highway, or ride in the bus or train. Who poured the concrete or rolled the asphalt, who laid the rails? Who planned the construction and guided the project along, these many years ago? They may have forgotten doing it by now, or it may be the pride of their life's work, an achievement they tell about to this day.
The sand, gravel, lime, and crushed rock used to make the concrete all came from somewhere. Would anyone remember the day those components were ordered, delivered, or put together?
We dispose of some problem or issue, only to have it return from the grave. The matter is settled, we think, and it leaves our short-term memory, erased from our agenda for all time. But something in the solution to the problem was incorrect, insufficient, or ill-advised. Invisibly, it has clung to existence, waiting for just the wrong moment to spring itself on its erstwhile vanquisher.
A penny lies quietly on the sidewalk. How did it get there? If the penny could write a blog post, would it tell of its glory days as part of the change back from a Happy Meal? Or would it lament that, with the minimum wage what it is, it now would be unprofitable to hire someone to pick up pennies even if the ground were strewn with them?
On November 11, 2008, I said:
Since the Big Three lose money making smaller, more efficient cars, making more of them in itself won't help profitability. Since a big problem with the automakers has been poor management, limits on executive compensation will only cause the best managers to leave for more pastures which are perhaps less green, but more golden.
Having taken a semester off, it's hard to want to start up again. It's much easier to read what others write and make the occasional comment.
John Podhoretz, on Joe Klein on Charles Krauthammer:
He won’t like me saying it, but Charles Krauthammer, who is more than a friendly acquaintance, is far from a tragic figure. He is a miraculous figure. He has, through a combination of raw will and a sagacious mind and a rigorous temperament that, were it possible, he should leave to science so that it can be studied and bottled and sold, lived a life both triumphantly important and triumphantly ordinary. (Although his wife, Robbie, is far from ordinary. For one thing, she is from Tasmania. For another, she is an artist of great skill. For a third, she has the dirtiest and liveliest mouth in either her forsaken hemisphere or her present one.) If you are his friend, in a fashion that I can’t quite explain, you come to have no sense whatever that he is in that chair. He may be right about what he argues (obviously, I think so, most of the time). He may be wrong. But whatever he is or is not, to argue that Charles’s views are restricted by the restrictions on his physical form is do violence to the most basic notions of civil discussion.
For clear-headed, outside-the-box thinking to diagnose the troubles currently befuddling his Party, his country, and indeed the very human race, FrankJ of IMAO has won the Socrates' Academy Wisdom and Sobriety "Really Smart Blogger Award" award.
Rick Moran, writing at The Next Right:
I will say frankly that this is the nuttiest part of Limbaugh's speech. There is probably no one answer to what ails conservatism but there is widespread agreement among profressionals (sic) that people like Rush, who wish to repeal not only the Great Society but also the New Deal, are anachronisms. It is not going to happen - ever. The question then becomes do conservatives chase a will o' the wisp goal that guarantees them permanent minority status or do they apply conservative principles to government as it is and not as we would wish it to be?
From many, one. From many of us in flyover country to whomever inside the beltway would continue to disparage the Voice Crying In The Wilderness:
Rush Limbaugh is a formidable force. Do you know why? Because he says what conservatives believe, and he is extraordinarily articulate, witty, insightful, and yes, courageous. There is a very large portion of Americans that still strongly believe what the Founding Fathers believed, and don’t care much for what Alinsky and Marx believed. You might think Rush (and his 20 million listeners) gauche, obtuse, obvious, unsophisticated, and ignorant. That’s OK, because we think you are self-important gas-bag idiots without a lick of common sense, with DC-centric tunnel vision and no idea what real America and real Americans are. When pressed, we can do disdain better than you can too.Read the whole thing, and understand that it's not about Rush Limbaugh: it's about us.
It's from a whole blue-on-blue essay.
You're not a coward merely because you're afraid to seek the truth when it might not conform to your views ... rather your chickensh** views are shaped by the fact you're a coward.
Sometimes people are successful at what they do. Others are not. Sometimes people succeed, sometimes they fail. Having failed, we learn (or not) and try again.
When we see other people who are more successful, we have really only two options, though a third lingers: we can resent them, or we can emulate them. The lingering third is what most people end up doing, which is observing from afar and doing nothing. On some level we pass judgment, either in favor of or against the more successful. From the corrupt.org link above:
Some people assume that if any person they don't like is more successful than someone they like it is primarily or solely due to moral inferiority - a greater willingness to lie, cheat and steal. This mindset is common in underground subcultures, though some mainstream progressives also think this way. A more advanced version of this mentality adds the assumption that anyone who is successful in the "wrong" areas - for example dating or country music - must be a despicable and morally inferior individual.There is a danger in giving up, in deciding that your sweat and diligence are no match for the world. But there is no higher virtue than working, being paid for it, and saving for a better future in which you no longer work for money, but money works for you. That, and not mere home ownership, is the American Dream.
It's going to be a difficult semester at the Academy, so I'm not going to blog much. I do have some longer thought pieces in the pipe, but I don't know if I'll get to any of those.
Josh Treviño is a terrific writer who confidently strides the ridgeline of his own convictions, while maintaining the vision to change his path when seeing a better way.
If the rumors are true and Josh gets picked to write in the New York Times, I would read the opinion section, at least on the days his columns appeared.
That would be an awful thing to say. So why are people trying to say that Barack Obama is a miserable failure? It isn't right. It isn't fair.
OK, so maybe it's fair.
As Todd at VC reminds us, today is the traditional celebration of Festivus.
So let the airing of grievances begin. I myself have no grievances, preferring to hold all of my troubles inside and finally melt down one day outside a Kroger.
Dave Burge has a way with satire:
"After the 1982 strike SantaCorp offered the UET a generous pension plan promising free lifetime candy canes and unicorns," explained Kessler. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the company accountants forgot to factor in elf immortality."
Over at Power and Control, M. Simon asks:
How do you enforce traditional values and at the same time promote limited government? Until Republicans resolve that question neither the traditional values people nor the limited government people are going to trust the party.
While Dan Collins doesn't say it, a study showing that people incompetent in some area believe themselves highly skilled while the truly skilled think themselves less so shows two things.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo writes that Democrats may use their majority to do away with the filibuster in the Senate. I agree with Marshall that they should not do that, that having a minority with some power to act is good for the republic.
But then, there is this:
I don't think Josh understands Republicans at all, or perhaps prefers his narratives to be untarnished with the stain of reality. There is no "payback" involved, either against a labor union or especially against the voters of any State. That's just stupid. Payback?Finally, this issue now goes well beyond the fate of the American automakers. Senate Republicans are following this course for three key reasons -- first is payback against a major industrial union; second is payback against states like Michigan and Ohio who have been moving away from the GOP; third is the desire to advantage Japanese auto manufacturers who disproportionately do business in their southern states.
What even the White House can see at this point is that having one or more of these companies go under right now will rapidly accelerate the economic crisis, and in unpredictable ways.
