Maureen Dowd's "man-caused disasters"

I suppose as a writer, Maureen Dowd doesn’t suck, but as a thinker… that’s another story. And, of course, she is a poster-child for Ronald Reagan’s observation that, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.”

In her perennial defense of government and the malefactors who use it to impose their will on us, Dowd starts with a slimy Red Herring: “Should those whose job it is to prepare for the worst be punished because the worst didn’t happen?”

Of course not!, we reply without thinking. But think a little bit more about the question and the answer is obvious: Yes, they should be punished when they do a poor job; when the decisions they are empowered to make are bad decisions.

Dowd continues: “The Republican (Gov Christie) said he didn’t think that Democrats and Republicans were debating this: “Protecting the safety of our citizens is one of the bedrock roles of government.”

Not so bedrock for some of the Flintstones types in Washington who are now hotly debating austerity versus salvation.”

Since when are tax increases synonymous with ‘salvation’? Since when was government the source of our salvation? Dowd has strange gods indeed. Those “Flintstones” recognize something Dowd refuses to: austerity is essential to the salvation of our government and the society that has grown to depend on it.

“The impressively hands-on performances of Christie, Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York were not enough to make Tea Partiers, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor root for big government against rampaging nature.”

No matter how impressively hands-on your government overseers might be, in a contest between them and ‘rampaging nature’, bet on nature.

“Though his state of Virginia was the epicenter of an earthquake before being hit by Irene, Cantor has insisted that additional money for cash-strapped FEMA must be offset by spending cuts, echoing his remarks in May that money sent to traumatized tornado victims in Joplin, Mo., would mean cuts somewhere else.”

The logical fallacies come hot and heavy in a Dowd piece, and sometimes they jumble all together. This one, I think, is either a false dichotomy or more likely a non sequitur. See, Cantor isn’t proposing that the federal government skimp on disaster relief – which to a certain extent is a proper role for government. Just the opposite. He is rationally prioritizing limited resources by taking money away from lower federal priorities to pay for the higher priority of disaster recovery. Something an adult might consider. Something Dowd, Bernie Sanders and well, Democrats in general, never think of. Maybe families, businesses, and local governments flooded out of the Midwest or burned out in Texas or blown out on the East Coast are a greater priority than Big Bird, Dewey Cheatem and How, or that billion dollar enterprise, PPFA. Maybe so, says Mo and Bernie, but they are all more important than current and future tax payers every time.

“In a briefing at the White House Monday, FEMA Director Craig Fugate said that the lesson of Katrina is for the federal government to “get things going earlier” and not wait until an overwhelmed state “says we’re going to need help.”

Too bad that didn’t occur to W. in 2005. He met with Gov. Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Air Force One and correctly assessed that they were not up to the job but then retreated behind clinical states’ rights arguments as a great American city drowned.”

Ah, the Constitution is now “clinical states’ rights arguments” just as the Global War on Terror is now an “Overseas Contingency Operation” and a battle is a ‘kinetic military action’. Perhaps Dowd would have preferred if W. had determined that Nagin and Blanco weren’t up to the job and deposed them both.

Wiki hacked

It appears that the notorious website, Wikileaks, has been hacked while in the process of publishing US State Department communications. The article indicates that the info dump contained the identities of intelligence sources and information damaging or embarrassing to the US and other governments. I haven't seen the documents. And I have a healthy mistrust of the government as well as of what I read in the news.

On the one hand, I’d like to think that our intelligence community still has what it takes to pull off something like this to defend National Security. On the other hand - well, Wikileaks ain't American so that other hand doesn’t matter. But, I am concerned who else may sometime become a victim of this capability, given the state of the Rule of Law these days.

But really, the most likely perps were from another state who acted to protect their citizens or government from being exposed by the hapless US State department and a few publicity hogging freaks.

bumper sticker philosophy

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html?src=me&ref=general

The New York Times must realize they are merely an echo chamber. Otherwise, they wouldn't allow this sort of truthfulness in their navel-gazing editorialists.

"When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.

Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.

But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all."

Brian Morton, the director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of the novels “Starting Out in the Evening” and “Breakable You.”

I love that closing paragraph. Dr. Morton calls out the falseness, shallowness and cheapness of the narcissistic post-modern mush taken for wisdom on the Left today. Maybe there are misattributed or malformed quotations wafting through the conservative blogosphere and email distro lists. But probably not. And certainly not that are so thoroughly drained of meaning. And DEFINITELY not affixed to a Prius.

Is Al Gore Brighter than the Sun?

No.


Sun Causes Climate Change Shock


By James Delingpole

If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these scientists have failed to realise just how many people – alarmist scientists, huckster politicians, rent-seeking landowners like (the late Michael Crichton’s brilliant and, of course, entirely fictional creation) the absurd, pompous Sir Reginald Leeds Bt, green activists, eco-fund managers, EU technocrats, MSM environmental correspondents – stand to gain from the Man Made “Climate Change” industry. Their discovery must be suppressed at all costs.

Love is an act of the will

Love is an act of the will. It isn't a feeling or an emotion or an attraction or something one falls into. It is an action verb if it is anything at all.

To love is to exert a constant act of your will, to continually and repeatedly decide and to act toward the good of the other person.

Actual love is first a response to something worthy of love. GK Chesterton said, "Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant. That leaves out chocolate (sorry ladies) and football (sorry guys).

So, perhaps our properly ordered feelings of attraction that prompt emotions of affection are natural responses to our recognition of something that is worthy of love. But those feelings aren't love. We must choose to respond to the object to be loved. And we must choose the nature of our response. The best hint I know of to how to respond it the fact that the Latin word for love is Caritas, from which we get the word, charity. I may want to possess something I like, but I should wish to give to that which I love.

One of the possible difficulties that flow from that dichotomy is that I usually (but not always) like what I love. So, it seems to me sometimes perfectly reasonable to want to possess the object of my love. That's natural and most often good, as long as my desire is held in check by my desire for the good of the object of my love.

Another difficulty is confusing like and love; so that if, for some reason I mistake a temporary dislike for a "loss of love", I mistakenly stop actively loving - I quit willing myself to love that which is worthy of love. "I don't love you anymore" doesn't describe something that's happened to you, but rather to a decision you have made.

Vacation from Reality

It looks like the Obama’s weekly rental at Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard cost somewhere between $35-50K.

Meanwhile back in the real world, the New Republic asks: Is There Anything That Can Be Done?

Obama's Filmaker

Kathryn "Leni" Bigelow chronicles the "Dear Leader's" Triumph of the Will over Osama bin Laden. Fortunately, the MiniTrue made sure she had unprecedented access to the "facts" from political commissars in the department formerly known as Defense. Anyone doubt that the State educlatura will schedule class trips?

Conspiracy Theory: The Curious Case of the Obama-Osama Movie

What Can be Done - On Vacation?

It looks like the Obama’s weekly rental at Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard cost somewhere between $35-50K.

http://www.plumtv.com/blogs/vineyard-insider/the-obamas-to-vacation-on-the-vineyard/index.html

Meanwhile back in the real world, the New Republic asks: Is There Anything That Can Be Done?

http://www.tnr.com/article/economy/93966/tnr-symposium-economy

EJ Dionne's Distorted View of Reality

Perhaps it's projection. Maybe it's partisan rhetoric. Maybe from the hole Dionne views the world from, reality really is distorted and he is only calling things as he (mistakenly) sees them.

Can America still lead?

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: August 7


The first week of August 2011 will be remembered as a singularly irrational, wasteful and shameful moment in the political and economic history of the United States. It reflected much of what is wrong with the priorities of our political elites and the obsessions of those who now hold effective veto power over our government.

Does anyone else find it curious that Dionne believes that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives and 60 Members of the House of Representatives are NOT part of "our government". Sort of makes me wonder who "our" refers to.


It began with the world hanging on to every development in the debt-ceiling negotiations as it fretted over whether Washington’s dysfunction would lead to American default and global calamity. Even robustly pro-American commentators and politicians wondered aloud if the United States could still govern itself.

Sentient Americans have long wondered if the United States had ceased governing themselves. Clearly, Dionne mistakes the malfeasance of the tools currently mucking up the works as the United States. He fails to realize that DC is NOT a state itself and that its denizens don't constitute the United States. Likewise, he confused a default of the central government's debt to be identical with "American default".

And it goes on from there. I haven't the time to correct every disconnected line - which is almost every line in the piece.

What China thinks about the debt ceiling debate

Niall Ferguson is maybe the smartest guy at Harvard: "China has its own economic problems, to be sure. But they are the problems of a rising power. From Beijing’s standpoint, America’s problems are plainly those of a power in decline. We didn’t just raise a ceiling last week. In Chinese eyes, we also fell through a floor."

Read the whole article.

Then read what Janet Daley thinks in the Daily Telegraph
"Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive."

The orderly chaos within the Rule of Law of American politics is far better - morally, economically and in every other way - than the chaotic order under the Rule of Men operative in Communist China. The opinions of the president, Tom Friedman and Van Johnson notwithstanding.

How is defending a 100 year-old bad idea "Progressive"?

Michael Barone says: "
"The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth-grade education or less," Mead writes. That is still the mindset of the Obama Democrats. Ordinary people are treated as victims who need government programs like Obamacare to help them out.

But Americans prefer to see themselves as doers rather than victims. They do not see themselves, as the masses in the Progressive Era a century ago may have done, as helpless victims of large corporations and financial interests.

They want public policies that enable them to earn success, and they resent policies that channel money to the politically well positioned or to those who have not made decisions and taken actions necessary for earned success. They want to be empowered, not patronized.

That's why voters here and, as Greenberg notes, in other advanced countries are rejecting policies that give more power to the mandarins who run government and provide less leeway for ordinary people to work for earn success."

Truly Carteresque

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

"The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19 "

There remains the 25% who don't know enough to disapprove of his performance.