Saturday, January 31, 2004
COME TO CARACAS, JEAN VALJEAN:
Perhaps the strongest evidence of the philosophical bankruptcy of our age is in the article Country May Decriminalize Theft for the Hungry. "Venezuela ... is considering decriminalizing the theft of food and medicine in cases where a thief is motivated by extreme hunger or need. ... Under [Supreme Court Judge Alejandro Angulo] Fontiveros' proposal to the Supreme Court, those who take food, medicine or inexpensive goods without using violence to ease hunger caused by prolonged, extreme poverty would not be punished." Clearly this is a leftist idea to polarize society.
In 1894 Anatole France wrote "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." This Venezuelan madness would for the first time set up double standards. Only the rich would be prohibited from stealing food. Is that fair to our hard working upper classes? Why must they suffer from this radical form of affirmative action at the supermarket? This is rank discrimination, and I hope that some noble self-sacrificing tycoon will commit an act of civil disobedience by openly stealing a loaf of bread just to heroically test this terrible law in court. I suggest Ken Lay for this, and I'll even volunteer to wave pompoms at his trial.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of the philosophical bankruptcy of our age is in the article Country May Decriminalize Theft for the Hungry. "Venezuela ... is considering decriminalizing the theft of food and medicine in cases where a thief is motivated by extreme hunger or need. ... Under [Supreme Court Judge Alejandro Angulo] Fontiveros' proposal to the Supreme Court, those who take food, medicine or inexpensive goods without using violence to ease hunger caused by prolonged, extreme poverty would not be punished." Clearly this is a leftist idea to polarize society.
In 1894 Anatole France wrote "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." This Venezuelan madness would for the first time set up double standards. Only the rich would be prohibited from stealing food. Is that fair to our hard working upper classes? Why must they suffer from this radical form of affirmative action at the supermarket? This is rank discrimination, and I hope that some noble self-sacrificing tycoon will commit an act of civil disobedience by openly stealing a loaf of bread just to heroically test this terrible law in court. I suggest Ken Lay for this, and I'll even volunteer to wave pompoms at his trial.
DEFENDING THE UNDISCLOSABLE:
It is praiseworthy that, in a spirit of Christian forgiveness, hopeless radical Natalie Davis at her blog All Facts and Opinions showed the thoughtfulness yesterday to wish her own Happy Birthday to Vice President Dick Cheney, and even to help him with his own family problems, by posting a link to the auction site where he is trying to sell one of his children (though there seems to be a typo -- I thought it was "ebay", but this sales item page says she's for sale on "egay", where he has a picture of "My Lesbian Daughter, Mary Cheney").
Now some good conservatives will no doubt accuse the Veep of hypocrisy because he is a Republican, and Lincoln's party's great claim to "human rights" credentials (though why anyone would want those I can't imagine) was ending chattel slavery. Nonsense. This is evidence that those White House Bible study groups the liberals love to mock have borne fruit. Cheney is reinstituting the earliest form of Free Enterprise, the sale of people. I'm sure he is doing so in accord with the holy words of Exodus 21:7, which says "And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do." Having spent so much to raise this offspring, should he not derive some return on his investment?
It is praiseworthy that, in a spirit of Christian forgiveness, hopeless radical Natalie Davis at her blog All Facts and Opinions showed the thoughtfulness yesterday to wish her own Happy Birthday to Vice President Dick Cheney, and even to help him with his own family problems, by posting a link to the auction site where he is trying to sell one of his children (though there seems to be a typo -- I thought it was "ebay", but this sales item page says she's for sale on "egay", where he has a picture of "My Lesbian Daughter, Mary Cheney").
Now some good conservatives will no doubt accuse the Veep of hypocrisy because he is a Republican, and Lincoln's party's great claim to "human rights" credentials (though why anyone would want those I can't imagine) was ending chattel slavery. Nonsense. This is evidence that those White House Bible study groups the liberals love to mock have borne fruit. Cheney is reinstituting the earliest form of Free Enterprise, the sale of people. I'm sure he is doing so in accord with the holy words of Exodus 21:7, which says "And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do." Having spent so much to raise this offspring, should he not derive some return on his investment?
Friday, January 30, 2004
UP IN THE SKY:
It's a Byrd brain, it's a Plame fan, it's a piece of premature anti-fascist propaganda.
Liberals thrive on comparing their enemies to Nazis, but they are often sneaky about it. Tireless conservatives had to stay up all night digging through over one and a half thousand entries in Move-On's ad contest to find the hidden two which tried to paint our Noble Leader as a cut rate Hitler. CBS, having burned its fingers with its attempted trashing of Saint Ronald, has far righteously refused to run any Super Bowl ads from this radical group, even if they don't mention the late Fuhrer. But TV is not the only outlet the leftys have. They hide a lot within popular genre fiction -- especially SF.
Science fiction is inherently subversive. It is based on asking questions about "What if things were different?" Once a person starts such wondering, they are on that infamous "slippery slope" that the ACLU keeps ranting about, sliding toward doubt about everything. Soon they may adopt the slogan of that revolutionary Frenchman Voltaire that "all things are possible", and be wallowing in all of the worst predictions of Senator Santorum. Voltaire himself notoriously attended an orgy of the Marquis De Sade. His refusal to repeat it, saying "Once is curiosity, twice would be perversion", does not lessen his bad example.
This genre of fiction began in a bad way, predictably enough with a Frenchman who wrote about a pirate (the Unabomber of his day) making war against modern civilization with his invention of a submarine, and his English follower, an admitted socialist, proposing Santorum's worst nightmare -- interspecies genetic manipulation. Things could only go downhill from there.
The three so-called Grand Masters of modern science fiction all had suspicious left wing leanings. I have written before (in The Zeroth Commandment) about how their Russian-American icon positively oozes Marxist sociological determinism in his series about a secret conspiracy of "psychohistorians" trying to overthrow the legitimate Galactic Empire. The only native-born American of the trio actually began as a supporter of Upton Sinclair's socialistic "End Poverty In California" campaign, then tried to hide his true colors by years of writing fiction that was patriotic, even pro-military, before uncovering his real hidden agenda, with mystical Sixties "free love", hedonistic sex change operations, and even incest. And the less said the better about that British third world hermit of unknown sexual predilections and recurring sacrilegious themes.
While their most promising inheritor at least teamed up with a good saber rattling computer geek to write of interstellar aristocracy, this was an aberration. (It wasn't even typical for them. They showed their real liberal prejudice by condemning the man who made the trains run on time to their mockery of hell.) Far more representative was the noted anthropologist's daughter's explicit anarchism.
The movies are no better. Someday I may post a long dissection of how Hollywood leftists corrupted the vision of a good former policeman by the explicit anti-individualist collectivism and hatred of reason shown in the sacrifice ending the second film about NCC 1701.
And television? Don't get me started on those wildly slanted propaganda fables of that Emmy-winning hack whose own widow admitted his secret leftist agenda in (of course) a PBS special: "He had said, 'You know, you can put these words into the mouth of a Martian and get away with it'.... If it was a Republican or Democrat they couldn't say it. I mean, he wanted to deal with the issues of the day. We're looking at bigotry, racism, prejudice, nuclear war, ethics, witch-hunts, loneliness. All of these things were verboten."
What reminded me of this catalog of subversive rubbish was a short story some lefty urged me to read. Oh, they gushed, it's beautifully written, and it predicts so well just what will happen here if the Bush administration is reelected. There'll be dictatorship at home and war with Old Europe, they said, and America will be hated around the world -- just like it is today with our Preemptive Self-Defense Actions (TM) and unrestricted incarcerations. Naturally, I had to check out any piece of swill which could provoke such an appeaser to this enthusiasm. (Such sacrifice is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.)
Carefully, I checked out the biography of the author first. You will be astonished to know that his radical background is openly posted on the web, since the liberals figure no one will bother to look. He was born in that socialist hotbed, Canada, and started his subversion young, kicked out of high school for "Red" ideas. It was no surprise that he worked for that taxpayer-funded FDR propaganda tool, the Soviet style Federal Writer's Project. Nor was the short story in question his only piece of traitorous fiction. He may have thought like a commie, but his first priority was always to hate the United States, so his best known novel has the South winning the Civil War. You can find the truth about this dangerous lefty's life here.
The story is forty years old, but that doesn't stop Bush haters from claiming it predicts tomorrow. In this tale's imaginary and absurdly impossible world, the U.S. has been taken over by a fascist dictatorship (led by the typically cutely named "Defenders of the Constitution", as though the Second Amendment was a bad thing), and their agent uses all the usual leftist scare phrases like "Sure, they lynched a few coloreds and booted out a few Jews, but what's that between you and me?" The Americans, in a typical leftist fantasy, have already lost a war with Europe after trying to conquer other nations, as though the wimps of the old continent could ever defeat anyone. As a U.S. spy says well, "The U.S. isn't a two-bit country to be policed. If there's policing to be done, we do it. Policing nations, Third Force! Who do they think they are?"
It should be a giveaway of the writer's intentions from the very first that this story is set in France. He shows how those snail eating haters of us because of our Freedom from their decadent innovations like month-long vacations were filled with gall (yes, that's a pun, just for those who claim I have no sense of humor), even back when the first French-speaking wife of a rich white male liberal U.S. Senator from Massachusetts who sought the Presidency was supposedly almost as wildly popular there as Jerry Lewis. But I digress.
The author does correctly depict the sort of muddled thinking typical of liberals who like to play Hamlet. The protagonist is a woman whose husband was killed by the dictatorship, and the U.S. agent is trying to get her to spy on other exiles. Yet when an America-hating French mob (in what really is a good prediction) tries to get her to spit on a U.S. flag, her old emotional ties to that term of mockery for left-wingers, the Homeland, resurface again. Silly radicals can't even be consistent about their own national self-hatred.
The whole story is just the kind of thing leftists use to scare each other with and reinforce their paranoia. They will claim it is chilling and moving. Good conservatives will know very well that this really "can't happen here". To spare you the agony of starting to read this, only to discover how treasonous it is, you should be aware of where this story is posted on the web, just so that you won't be fooled into even beginning it. Beware of the thankfully dead radical author, Ward Moore, and this particular vile tale of his, called It Becomes Necessary.
It's a Byrd brain, it's a Plame fan, it's a piece of premature anti-fascist propaganda.
Liberals thrive on comparing their enemies to Nazis, but they are often sneaky about it. Tireless conservatives had to stay up all night digging through over one and a half thousand entries in Move-On's ad contest to find the hidden two which tried to paint our Noble Leader as a cut rate Hitler. CBS, having burned its fingers with its attempted trashing of Saint Ronald, has far righteously refused to run any Super Bowl ads from this radical group, even if they don't mention the late Fuhrer. But TV is not the only outlet the leftys have. They hide a lot within popular genre fiction -- especially SF.
Science fiction is inherently subversive. It is based on asking questions about "What if things were different?" Once a person starts such wondering, they are on that infamous "slippery slope" that the ACLU keeps ranting about, sliding toward doubt about everything. Soon they may adopt the slogan of that revolutionary Frenchman Voltaire that "all things are possible", and be wallowing in all of the worst predictions of Senator Santorum. Voltaire himself notoriously attended an orgy of the Marquis De Sade. His refusal to repeat it, saying "Once is curiosity, twice would be perversion", does not lessen his bad example.
This genre of fiction began in a bad way, predictably enough with a Frenchman who wrote about a pirate (the Unabomber of his day) making war against modern civilization with his invention of a submarine, and his English follower, an admitted socialist, proposing Santorum's worst nightmare -- interspecies genetic manipulation. Things could only go downhill from there.
The three so-called Grand Masters of modern science fiction all had suspicious left wing leanings. I have written before (in The Zeroth Commandment) about how their Russian-American icon positively oozes Marxist sociological determinism in his series about a secret conspiracy of "psychohistorians" trying to overthrow the legitimate Galactic Empire. The only native-born American of the trio actually began as a supporter of Upton Sinclair's socialistic "End Poverty In California" campaign, then tried to hide his true colors by years of writing fiction that was patriotic, even pro-military, before uncovering his real hidden agenda, with mystical Sixties "free love", hedonistic sex change operations, and even incest. And the less said the better about that British third world hermit of unknown sexual predilections and recurring sacrilegious themes.
While their most promising inheritor at least teamed up with a good saber rattling computer geek to write of interstellar aristocracy, this was an aberration. (It wasn't even typical for them. They showed their real liberal prejudice by condemning the man who made the trains run on time to their mockery of hell.) Far more representative was the noted anthropologist's daughter's explicit anarchism.
The movies are no better. Someday I may post a long dissection of how Hollywood leftists corrupted the vision of a good former policeman by the explicit anti-individualist collectivism and hatred of reason shown in the sacrifice ending the second film about NCC 1701.
And television? Don't get me started on those wildly slanted propaganda fables of that Emmy-winning hack whose own widow admitted his secret leftist agenda in (of course) a PBS special: "He had said, 'You know, you can put these words into the mouth of a Martian and get away with it'.... If it was a Republican or Democrat they couldn't say it. I mean, he wanted to deal with the issues of the day. We're looking at bigotry, racism, prejudice, nuclear war, ethics, witch-hunts, loneliness. All of these things were verboten."
What reminded me of this catalog of subversive rubbish was a short story some lefty urged me to read. Oh, they gushed, it's beautifully written, and it predicts so well just what will happen here if the Bush administration is reelected. There'll be dictatorship at home and war with Old Europe, they said, and America will be hated around the world -- just like it is today with our Preemptive Self-Defense Actions (TM) and unrestricted incarcerations. Naturally, I had to check out any piece of swill which could provoke such an appeaser to this enthusiasm. (Such sacrifice is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.)
Carefully, I checked out the biography of the author first. You will be astonished to know that his radical background is openly posted on the web, since the liberals figure no one will bother to look. He was born in that socialist hotbed, Canada, and started his subversion young, kicked out of high school for "Red" ideas. It was no surprise that he worked for that taxpayer-funded FDR propaganda tool, the Soviet style Federal Writer's Project. Nor was the short story in question his only piece of traitorous fiction. He may have thought like a commie, but his first priority was always to hate the United States, so his best known novel has the South winning the Civil War. You can find the truth about this dangerous lefty's life here.
The story is forty years old, but that doesn't stop Bush haters from claiming it predicts tomorrow. In this tale's imaginary and absurdly impossible world, the U.S. has been taken over by a fascist dictatorship (led by the typically cutely named "Defenders of the Constitution", as though the Second Amendment was a bad thing), and their agent uses all the usual leftist scare phrases like "Sure, they lynched a few coloreds and booted out a few Jews, but what's that between you and me?" The Americans, in a typical leftist fantasy, have already lost a war with Europe after trying to conquer other nations, as though the wimps of the old continent could ever defeat anyone. As a U.S. spy says well, "The U.S. isn't a two-bit country to be policed. If there's policing to be done, we do it. Policing nations, Third Force! Who do they think they are?"
It should be a giveaway of the writer's intentions from the very first that this story is set in France. He shows how those snail eating haters of us because of our Freedom from their decadent innovations like month-long vacations were filled with gall (yes, that's a pun, just for those who claim I have no sense of humor), even back when the first French-speaking wife of a rich white male liberal U.S. Senator from Massachusetts who sought the Presidency was supposedly almost as wildly popular there as Jerry Lewis. But I digress.
The author does correctly depict the sort of muddled thinking typical of liberals who like to play Hamlet. The protagonist is a woman whose husband was killed by the dictatorship, and the U.S. agent is trying to get her to spy on other exiles. Yet when an America-hating French mob (in what really is a good prediction) tries to get her to spit on a U.S. flag, her old emotional ties to that term of mockery for left-wingers, the Homeland, resurface again. Silly radicals can't even be consistent about their own national self-hatred.
The whole story is just the kind of thing leftists use to scare each other with and reinforce their paranoia. They will claim it is chilling and moving. Good conservatives will know very well that this really "can't happen here". To spare you the agony of starting to read this, only to discover how treasonous it is, you should be aware of where this story is posted on the web, just so that you won't be fooled into even beginning it. Beware of the thankfully dead radical author, Ward Moore, and this particular vile tale of his, called It Becomes Necessary.
Saturday, January 24, 2004
MISSING THE POINT:
You have to be on guard all the time about loony leftists mocking their betters. Turquoise Waffle Irons in the Back Yard, a member of that vile radical conspiracy the "League of Liberals", is pointing their deluded readers to an uncompassionate list of suggestions for ways Howard Dean can demonstrate that he really is capable of Presidential leadership, found at August J. Pollak's Helpful hints for Howard Dean. As you might expect, it's really an excuse to make snide cheap shots at our Noble Leader in the White House now, with items like "Dress up in a crotch-accentuating flight suit and land a jet on an aircraft carrier." (Does this remind anyone else of penis envy?)
I can't sit back and let one of these points escape unscathed. Pollak includes "Trade away Sammy Sosa." This is so wrong on two counts. First, the lefties delight in claiming Bush's ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team was really only a phony front, set up by wealthy friends of his father to make our Leader rich and make him famous so he could run for Governor. If that's true, then he can't be blamed for a bad management decision. You radicals can't have it both ways!!
Second, if he really was calling the shots, then trading away Sosa should be seen as one of the most long range far thinking steps he's ever taken to Clean Up Our Nation's Locker Rooms (TM). As he said in the recent State of Union address, performance enhancing drugs are one of the greatest blights on America. The terrorists can't serve as bad role models for our youth -- only star athletes can do that. Just look at those musclebound homer swatters like Smashing Sammy. Do you believe for a second that is all just from scarfing down several prime ribs a day?
No, George even then knew he would prefer to lose playing clean instead of encouraging one more minority to be a victim of the hedonistic drug culture, so he punished the player by exiling him to a team where he would never, ever, have a chance to be in a World Series. Take that, you epicurean applause seeker!! George did this even though he knew it would hurt the chances of his own team to make a future series. And he was right -- they've never come close since. Greater love hath few men than a team owner who will throw his chances in the trash just to make a point for puritanism. Our Leader should be applauded, not condemned. Silly liberals just don't get the point.
You have to be on guard all the time about loony leftists mocking their betters. Turquoise Waffle Irons in the Back Yard, a member of that vile radical conspiracy the "League of Liberals", is pointing their deluded readers to an uncompassionate list of suggestions for ways Howard Dean can demonstrate that he really is capable of Presidential leadership, found at August J. Pollak's Helpful hints for Howard Dean. As you might expect, it's really an excuse to make snide cheap shots at our Noble Leader in the White House now, with items like "Dress up in a crotch-accentuating flight suit and land a jet on an aircraft carrier." (Does this remind anyone else of penis envy?)
I can't sit back and let one of these points escape unscathed. Pollak includes "Trade away Sammy Sosa." This is so wrong on two counts. First, the lefties delight in claiming Bush's ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team was really only a phony front, set up by wealthy friends of his father to make our Leader rich and make him famous so he could run for Governor. If that's true, then he can't be blamed for a bad management decision. You radicals can't have it both ways!!
Second, if he really was calling the shots, then trading away Sosa should be seen as one of the most long range far thinking steps he's ever taken to Clean Up Our Nation's Locker Rooms (TM). As he said in the recent State of Union address, performance enhancing drugs are one of the greatest blights on America. The terrorists can't serve as bad role models for our youth -- only star athletes can do that. Just look at those musclebound homer swatters like Smashing Sammy. Do you believe for a second that is all just from scarfing down several prime ribs a day?
No, George even then knew he would prefer to lose playing clean instead of encouraging one more minority to be a victim of the hedonistic drug culture, so he punished the player by exiling him to a team where he would never, ever, have a chance to be in a World Series. Take that, you epicurean applause seeker!! George did this even though he knew it would hurt the chances of his own team to make a future series. And he was right -- they've never come close since. Greater love hath few men than a team owner who will throw his chances in the trash just to make a point for puritanism. Our Leader should be applauded, not condemned. Silly liberals just don't get the point.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE HOG WALLOW?:
Why the surprises in the Iowa caucuses? Why did the liberal media's anointed darling Howard Dean come crashing to a third place loss? The simple answer is that Democrats there are (1) illiterate, (2) wimpy, (3) doddering, (4) sore losers, and (5) pig farmers.
(5) Iowans grow lots of hogs. Kucinich never got off the ground because any vegetarian is automatically suspected of trying to put the pig farmers out of work, so Shorty was never in contention there. His stunning rejection won't bother him, since the urban public power promoter is really only running to publicize his search for a power groupie mate. The profligate liaisons of JFK, imitation of which nearly did in the Clenis, still tempt promiscuous leftys.
(4) Democrats have never gotten over Gore's failure to steal the election in Florida. These sore losers are still insanely angry over that at Al's intended victim, George Bush, because he's the one that got away. They also rage at him because of his brother Jeb's Preemptive Election Fraud Prevention Program (TM), which purged voter rolls of any possible felon under the theory that "it is better to deny fifty thousand innocent people the right to vote, just to make sure that five hundred guilty ones don't illegally cast a ballot for traitors like the Clenis's vice man".
Dean skyrocketed to the top last year because, out of all the candidates, he expressed the most anger at Bush. He collapsed within the last two weeks because of the heavy media attention just before the caucus. Suddenly the voters saw just how much Dean and Bush were alike as people -- both born in the northeast to wealthy Wall Street families, both Yale educated, both carpetbagging migrants to more rural states with more easily manipulated voters, both reformed drinkers who became teetotalers, both Governors of their states, both better at expressing anger (at liberals by Bush, or at Bush by Dean) than at being positive, both with brothers involved in mysterious activities which brought them crashing down.
Unfortunately for Dean, the Iowans, ignorantly unaware of the Wall Street parallel with Bush's grandfather, were reminded of it just before the vote by publication of a new book, Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. (This book pushed the usual liberal spin about how the founding Bush's bank was seized by the U.S. government during World War II for trading with Nazi Germany. The truth, of course, is that it was confiscated by that sneaky socialist FDR as part of his ongoing anti-business crusade.) The timing was terrible for the would-be Robespierre from Vermont. Not wanting to vote for anyone so much like the hated Bush, the pig farmers looked to other contenders.
(3) Iowa has a large number of older voters. Dean himself said this week that the biggest export of both Iowa and Vermont was young people. (He also spoke unfavorably of the only Presidents from those two states, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Actually those two gave America a still unappreciated gift -- a huge reduction in wage costs and a buyer's market for cheap labor. Democratic demagogues, not seeing the great opportunity this presented for factory owners, denounced this as a so-called "depression", and proceeded to artificially prop up wage rates with dangerous laws forcing owners to negotiate with evil Labor Unions. Fortunately Reagan and the two Bushes have so packed the NLRB with management advocates that those laws are largely dead letters now. But I digress.)
This doddering electorate, bordering on senility (or they wouldn't be liberals), caring only about cashing as many government checks as possible, was ripe for the heavy attacks on Dean by Gephardt for his old criticism of Medicare. Those ads, typically (for a Democrat) misrepresenting the doctor's actual position, helped drag him down. Unfortunately, they failed to help the man from Missouri because of the next factor.
(2) Democrats are wimps who always prefer to run from a fight, as they showed over Vietnam and Iraq. Even though Dean was anti-war, he was forcefully anti-war. He looked suspiciously like he might stand up and fight back. This bulldog truculence scared off the pacifists. After all, what if Saddam were set free by those appeasing international courts and once again attacked the rebuilt World Trade center like he did on September 11? Someone like Dean might actually go to war again instead of turning the other cheek. Better not take the chance on him, or on a scrapper like Gephardt either. Better to find someone who doesn't attack other Democrats, thus showing they are really a spineless pacifist at heart when it really matters. Why not that new guy who refused to run negative ads, John Edwards? On caucus day the Iowans awoke to find the truth about Edwards in a Boondocks strip which revealed that, if the Democratic candidates were the characters in the old Justice League comic book, then John Edwards was Wonder Woman. That was all the wimpy Democratic voters needed to hear, and the man from Carolina bolted to second place. But why not first?
(1) Over and over conservatives keep warning how the Democrats try to appeal to the ignorant unwashed masses who have no idea what economic nonsense their candidates spout. (To paraphrase Emerson, a foolish balanced budget is the hobgoblin of small minds.) Many of those illiterate voters, victims of our failed "public" schools which Bush is thankfully defunding as quickly as possible, can just barely mark an "X" in order to vote. They suffer from liberal propaganda passing as history, including the myth that JFK, that adulterous tyrant who had his agents wake up steel company presidents in the middle of the night when they raised prices (yes, our memory is long), was a great President. Hardly even conscious of who holds office, they only noticed that one candidate was a rich white male liberal U.S. Senator from Massachusetts with a French-speaking wife and named John K-something. That was close enough for them. Isn't he the one our teachers told us is such a wonderful leader, they thought, and signed in for John Kerry.
Let me say that I knew John Kennedy (or at least I saw him on TV). John Kennedy, despite being a liberal traitor to his class, was a hero of mine (for giving us a great war in Vietnam and a huge corporate subsidy with the space program, which Bush is now trying to imitate). If I'd been past the age of puberty and anywhere near him, I'm sure I would have been bedded by John Kennedy, like everyone else in his sight. And Senator Kerry is no John Kennedy. The Democrats have made their bed with illiterates, and now they will have to lie in it with (as well as to) them. Karma does come back in politics.
Why the surprises in the Iowa caucuses? Why did the liberal media's anointed darling Howard Dean come crashing to a third place loss? The simple answer is that Democrats there are (1) illiterate, (2) wimpy, (3) doddering, (4) sore losers, and (5) pig farmers.
(5) Iowans grow lots of hogs. Kucinich never got off the ground because any vegetarian is automatically suspected of trying to put the pig farmers out of work, so Shorty was never in contention there. His stunning rejection won't bother him, since the urban public power promoter is really only running to publicize his search for a power groupie mate. The profligate liaisons of JFK, imitation of which nearly did in the Clenis, still tempt promiscuous leftys.
(4) Democrats have never gotten over Gore's failure to steal the election in Florida. These sore losers are still insanely angry over that at Al's intended victim, George Bush, because he's the one that got away. They also rage at him because of his brother Jeb's Preemptive Election Fraud Prevention Program (TM), which purged voter rolls of any possible felon under the theory that "it is better to deny fifty thousand innocent people the right to vote, just to make sure that five hundred guilty ones don't illegally cast a ballot for traitors like the Clenis's vice man".
Dean skyrocketed to the top last year because, out of all the candidates, he expressed the most anger at Bush. He collapsed within the last two weeks because of the heavy media attention just before the caucus. Suddenly the voters saw just how much Dean and Bush were alike as people -- both born in the northeast to wealthy Wall Street families, both Yale educated, both carpetbagging migrants to more rural states with more easily manipulated voters, both reformed drinkers who became teetotalers, both Governors of their states, both better at expressing anger (at liberals by Bush, or at Bush by Dean) than at being positive, both with brothers involved in mysterious activities which brought them crashing down.
Unfortunately for Dean, the Iowans, ignorantly unaware of the Wall Street parallel with Bush's grandfather, were reminded of it just before the vote by publication of a new book, Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. (This book pushed the usual liberal spin about how the founding Bush's bank was seized by the U.S. government during World War II for trading with Nazi Germany. The truth, of course, is that it was confiscated by that sneaky socialist FDR as part of his ongoing anti-business crusade.) The timing was terrible for the would-be Robespierre from Vermont. Not wanting to vote for anyone so much like the hated Bush, the pig farmers looked to other contenders.
(3) Iowa has a large number of older voters. Dean himself said this week that the biggest export of both Iowa and Vermont was young people. (He also spoke unfavorably of the only Presidents from those two states, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Actually those two gave America a still unappreciated gift -- a huge reduction in wage costs and a buyer's market for cheap labor. Democratic demagogues, not seeing the great opportunity this presented for factory owners, denounced this as a so-called "depression", and proceeded to artificially prop up wage rates with dangerous laws forcing owners to negotiate with evil Labor Unions. Fortunately Reagan and the two Bushes have so packed the NLRB with management advocates that those laws are largely dead letters now. But I digress.)
This doddering electorate, bordering on senility (or they wouldn't be liberals), caring only about cashing as many government checks as possible, was ripe for the heavy attacks on Dean by Gephardt for his old criticism of Medicare. Those ads, typically (for a Democrat) misrepresenting the doctor's actual position, helped drag him down. Unfortunately, they failed to help the man from Missouri because of the next factor.
(2) Democrats are wimps who always prefer to run from a fight, as they showed over Vietnam and Iraq. Even though Dean was anti-war, he was forcefully anti-war. He looked suspiciously like he might stand up and fight back. This bulldog truculence scared off the pacifists. After all, what if Saddam were set free by those appeasing international courts and once again attacked the rebuilt World Trade center like he did on September 11? Someone like Dean might actually go to war again instead of turning the other cheek. Better not take the chance on him, or on a scrapper like Gephardt either. Better to find someone who doesn't attack other Democrats, thus showing they are really a spineless pacifist at heart when it really matters. Why not that new guy who refused to run negative ads, John Edwards? On caucus day the Iowans awoke to find the truth about Edwards in a Boondocks strip which revealed that, if the Democratic candidates were the characters in the old Justice League comic book, then John Edwards was Wonder Woman. That was all the wimpy Democratic voters needed to hear, and the man from Carolina bolted to second place. But why not first?
(1) Over and over conservatives keep warning how the Democrats try to appeal to the ignorant unwashed masses who have no idea what economic nonsense their candidates spout. (To paraphrase Emerson, a foolish balanced budget is the hobgoblin of small minds.) Many of those illiterate voters, victims of our failed "public" schools which Bush is thankfully defunding as quickly as possible, can just barely mark an "X" in order to vote. They suffer from liberal propaganda passing as history, including the myth that JFK, that adulterous tyrant who had his agents wake up steel company presidents in the middle of the night when they raised prices (yes, our memory is long), was a great President. Hardly even conscious of who holds office, they only noticed that one candidate was a rich white male liberal U.S. Senator from Massachusetts with a French-speaking wife and named John K-something. That was close enough for them. Isn't he the one our teachers told us is such a wonderful leader, they thought, and signed in for John Kerry.
Let me say that I knew John Kennedy (or at least I saw him on TV). John Kennedy, despite being a liberal traitor to his class, was a hero of mine (for giving us a great war in Vietnam and a huge corporate subsidy with the space program, which Bush is now trying to imitate). If I'd been past the age of puberty and anywhere near him, I'm sure I would have been bedded by John Kennedy, like everyone else in his sight. And Senator Kerry is no John Kennedy. The Democrats have made their bed with illiterates, and now they will have to lie in it with (as well as to) them. Karma does come back in politics.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
NEW AGE PENOLOGY:
Trust those socialist Scandinavians to try this silly liberal experiment. In Nuuk, Greenland, inmates of the prison are not even locked up. "The jail has no fences and no bars, but plenty of television sets, DVD players and computers. Inmates hold regular jobs around town, earning about $2,800 a month, a living wage in this country of 53,000 people. In the summer they're given shotguns and allowed to hunt reindeer and seals. The only requirement for such hunting trips: They must be accompanied by armed guards, says Soeren Soedergaard Hansen, chief judge of Greenland. "And they cannot be drunk." There's little incentive to escape. "Where can they run?" says Joergen Nord, the Danish head of Greenland's prison system. "It's cold outside." Well, at least their gun rights are protected. Maybe Charlton Heston could hide out from Michael Moore there. Read more at Doing Hard Time In Greenland Isn't Really That Hard. "Do you want me to send you back to where you were, unemployed ... in Greenland?"
Trust those socialist Scandinavians to try this silly liberal experiment. In Nuuk, Greenland, inmates of the prison are not even locked up. "The jail has no fences and no bars, but plenty of television sets, DVD players and computers. Inmates hold regular jobs around town, earning about $2,800 a month, a living wage in this country of 53,000 people. In the summer they're given shotguns and allowed to hunt reindeer and seals. The only requirement for such hunting trips: They must be accompanied by armed guards, says Soeren Soedergaard Hansen, chief judge of Greenland. "And they cannot be drunk." There's little incentive to escape. "Where can they run?" says Joergen Nord, the Danish head of Greenland's prison system. "It's cold outside." Well, at least their gun rights are protected. Maybe Charlton Heston could hide out from Michael Moore there. Read more at Doing Hard Time In Greenland Isn't Really That Hard. "Do you want me to send you back to where you were, unemployed ... in Greenland?"
FOR YOUR READING LIST:
Who knew? One of the heroes of all far right thinking Americans, a principal architect of the wonderful new doctrine of Preemptive Self Defense (TM), the Prince of Darkness himself, is an author!! "Richard Perle's out-of-print 1992 novel, "Hard Line," is notable for its chastity. There is no sex at all -- which is merciful, since this is the most thinly veiled of romans clef. ... But it prefigures, in detail, the Bush administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq. ... It describes an imaginary arms-control summit in Helsinki, where Waterman/Perle prevents the dim, genial, and unnamed president (Reagan right down to the California ranch and the 3x5 cue cards) from being suckered by the Soviets." Of course we'll have to excuse his youthful prosaic license in dumbing down the sainted Ronald just to make his protagonist look good. He does focus on the real enemy. ""And do we get to screw the exalted Department of State?" "Whenever possible." "Then it's irresistible."" Just ignore the columnist's snarking in passing at the soft core S and M in Newt Gingrich's novel ("Tell me or I will make you do terrible things."), and enjoy the review at Perle's pulp fiction.
Who knew? One of the heroes of all far right thinking Americans, a principal architect of the wonderful new doctrine of Preemptive Self Defense (TM), the Prince of Darkness himself, is an author!! "Richard Perle's out-of-print 1992 novel, "Hard Line," is notable for its chastity. There is no sex at all -- which is merciful, since this is the most thinly veiled of romans clef. ... But it prefigures, in detail, the Bush administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq. ... It describes an imaginary arms-control summit in Helsinki, where Waterman/Perle prevents the dim, genial, and unnamed president (Reagan right down to the California ranch and the 3x5 cue cards) from being suckered by the Soviets." Of course we'll have to excuse his youthful prosaic license in dumbing down the sainted Ronald just to make his protagonist look good. He does focus on the real enemy. ""And do we get to screw the exalted Department of State?" "Whenever possible." "Then it's irresistible."" Just ignore the columnist's snarking in passing at the soft core S and M in Newt Gingrich's novel ("Tell me or I will make you do terrible things."), and enjoy the review at Perle's pulp fiction.
NO NEWS HERE:
"US officials here on Saturday stated that the country’s military presence in Georgia will now become permanent as the American military has been training and equipping the Georgian army since the spring of 2002." Well, I'm sure we can expect to hear liberals denounce this, but we simply can't abandon one of our major states to terrorists or Democrats. As far as I'm concerned our good Republican generals settled this issue on July 22, 1864.
"US officials here on Saturday stated that the country’s military presence in Georgia will now become permanent as the American military has been training and equipping the Georgian army since the spring of 2002." Well, I'm sure we can expect to hear liberals denounce this, but we simply can't abandon one of our major states to terrorists or Democrats. As far as I'm concerned our good Republican generals settled this issue on July 22, 1864.
NO, NO -- THE TARGET IS FRANCE:
"A US Air Force fighter jet dropped an inert training bomb by accident last week over a sparsely populated area of northern England, causing no damage or injury, the British Ministry of Defence said." Maybe this is Rumsfeld sending a justified warning to the Brits. If you won't let our snipers have free fire rights to protect our visiting Noble Leader, you can't expect us to be too careful about strapping down that extra armament. Fair is fair. (I utterly reject the theory, no doubt popular among the appeasers at the Vatican, that it's all a message from even higher up to George's doggedly loyal Tony Blair about Matthew 26:52.)
"A US Air Force fighter jet dropped an inert training bomb by accident last week over a sparsely populated area of northern England, causing no damage or injury, the British Ministry of Defence said." Maybe this is Rumsfeld sending a justified warning to the Brits. If you won't let our snipers have free fire rights to protect our visiting Noble Leader, you can't expect us to be too careful about strapping down that extra armament. Fair is fair. (I utterly reject the theory, no doubt popular among the appeasers at the Vatican, that it's all a message from even higher up to George's doggedly loyal Tony Blair about Matthew 26:52.)
SETTLE DOWN NOW:
It is good to see that President W. wants to spend one and a half billion dollars for "programs trying to increase marriage rates in poor neighborhoods. "The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches, and he's very good at it," a White House aide said." I'm sure they'll love him there. After all, he's giving them a helping hand, just like the Australians are lovingly acting to control wild unchecked population growth in their eucalyptus ghettoes.
Of course, there are leftist doubters in one of our most socialist enclaves. "The state's $5 million abstinence-only sex education program isn't working, according to an independent study commissioned by the Minnesota Department of Health. The study found that sexual activity among junior high kids at three schools where the program was taught doubled between 2001 and 2002 -- a pattern similar to that exhibited by kids statewide -- and that the number who said they would probably have sex during high school nearly doubled, as well." You know what really happened. Those hopelessly liberal Scandinavian bureaucrats probably sabotaged the abstinence program with comments like "Don't try this position from the Kama Sutra, because it delays orgasms and stretches them over a longer period, so that you might get hooked on that evil sex." Could this have possibly been a fair test?
And the need is urgent. Senator Santorum's penultimate warning is already coming true. Not "man on dog" yet, but legal group marriage. "A civil rights attorney challenged Utah's ban on polygamy Monday, citing a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas sodomy law. The lawsuit says Salt Lake County clerks refused a marriage license to a couple because the man was already married to another woman, who had consented to the additional marriage. In denying the marriage license, the county violated the plaintiffs' First Amendment right to practice their religion, attorney Brian Barnard said in the complaint ." They are always calling for polygamy, but never for polyandry. Why aren't the liberal feminists up in arms over this call for sexist unfair treatment? Where's their consistency?
It is good to see that President W. wants to spend one and a half billion dollars for "programs trying to increase marriage rates in poor neighborhoods. "The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches, and he's very good at it," a White House aide said." I'm sure they'll love him there. After all, he's giving them a helping hand, just like the Australians are lovingly acting to control wild unchecked population growth in their eucalyptus ghettoes.
Of course, there are leftist doubters in one of our most socialist enclaves. "The state's $5 million abstinence-only sex education program isn't working, according to an independent study commissioned by the Minnesota Department of Health. The study found that sexual activity among junior high kids at three schools where the program was taught doubled between 2001 and 2002 -- a pattern similar to that exhibited by kids statewide -- and that the number who said they would probably have sex during high school nearly doubled, as well." You know what really happened. Those hopelessly liberal Scandinavian bureaucrats probably sabotaged the abstinence program with comments like "Don't try this position from the Kama Sutra, because it delays orgasms and stretches them over a longer period, so that you might get hooked on that evil sex." Could this have possibly been a fair test?
And the need is urgent. Senator Santorum's penultimate warning is already coming true. Not "man on dog" yet, but legal group marriage. "A civil rights attorney challenged Utah's ban on polygamy Monday, citing a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas sodomy law. The lawsuit says Salt Lake County clerks refused a marriage license to a couple because the man was already married to another woman, who had consented to the additional marriage. In denying the marriage license, the county violated the plaintiffs' First Amendment right to practice their religion, attorney Brian Barnard said in the complaint ." They are always calling for polygamy, but never for polyandry. Why aren't the liberal feminists up in arms over this call for sexist unfair treatment? Where's their consistency?
PUTTING THE BLAME WHERE IT BELONGS:
Despite the traitorous claims of that turncoat Paul O'Neill, that "Bush was already planning to oust Saddam within days of taking office", our Noble Leader has admitted that it was really all the fault of the Clenis (TM). ""The stated policy of my administration towards Saddam Hussein was very clear. Like the previous administration, we were for regime change," Bush said." Meanwhile, we can hope O'Neill has been added to that non-existent No Flying Allowed list by the minions of Tom Ridge. We wouldn't want him to flee the country before his unfortunate accident.
Despite the traitorous claims of that turncoat Paul O'Neill, that "Bush was already planning to oust Saddam within days of taking office", our Noble Leader has admitted that it was really all the fault of the Clenis (TM). ""The stated policy of my administration towards Saddam Hussein was very clear. Like the previous administration, we were for regime change," Bush said." Meanwhile, we can hope O'Neill has been added to that non-existent No Flying Allowed list by the minions of Tom Ridge. We wouldn't want him to flee the country before his unfortunate accident.
THE OCHLOCRACY MEETS:
Good conservative Americans have been embarassed by the failure of our law enforcement organizations to protect those noble delegates meeting here for globalization conferences in Seattle and Miami. Of course the liberals have the gall to claim the failure was in not protecting the protesters from what in 1968 was termed "a police riot". Those bleeding hearts even stole a perfectly good conservative insult like "globaloney" and misused it for their own purposes. Now we have a chance to see how the other half wits live. One hundred thousand deluded fools have been meeting at the World Social Forum, appropriately among the slums of India, to gushing reports from the usual suspects, like Amnesty International [sic]. Notice there are no riots, no looting, no violence at all. Why would the radicals disrupt their own? But the lefties show their hypocrisy when they are the ones in control. Half a hundred activists in wheelchairs showed up holding candles to chant "Shame, shame, shame" for not helping the handicapped even more. Guess they've got bare feet of clay in Mumbai.
They got in plenty of licks though, unleashing a leftist prize winning writer, Arundhati Roy, to curse The Great Satan Bush in what she hoped were scathing terms, saying "she hoped President George W Bush would share the fate of the captured Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. "If Saddam Hussein deserves to be humiliated and have his fillings counted and his hair checked for lice on primetime TV, then so does George Bush ... Saddam Hussein surely ought to be tried for crimes against humanity. But so should all his accomplices in the US and Europe," she said. "To applaud the US army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler," Roy said." Later in this same Times of India story the reporter reveals how typically disorganized these sewer-eyed idealists are. Roy's words were not even said to the WSF itself, but to a splinter group at "'Mumbai Resistance', an alternative convention in Bombay of around 2,000 leftists who view the World Social Forum as too moderate." The mind boggles.
Good conservative Americans have been embarassed by the failure of our law enforcement organizations to protect those noble delegates meeting here for globalization conferences in Seattle and Miami. Of course the liberals have the gall to claim the failure was in not protecting the protesters from what in 1968 was termed "a police riot". Those bleeding hearts even stole a perfectly good conservative insult like "globaloney" and misused it for their own purposes. Now we have a chance to see how the other half wits live. One hundred thousand deluded fools have been meeting at the World Social Forum, appropriately among the slums of India, to gushing reports from the usual suspects, like Amnesty International [sic]. Notice there are no riots, no looting, no violence at all. Why would the radicals disrupt their own? But the lefties show their hypocrisy when they are the ones in control. Half a hundred activists in wheelchairs showed up holding candles to chant "Shame, shame, shame" for not helping the handicapped even more. Guess they've got bare feet of clay in Mumbai.
They got in plenty of licks though, unleashing a leftist prize winning writer, Arundhati Roy, to curse The Great Satan Bush in what she hoped were scathing terms, saying "she hoped President George W Bush would share the fate of the captured Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. "If Saddam Hussein deserves to be humiliated and have his fillings counted and his hair checked for lice on primetime TV, then so does George Bush ... Saddam Hussein surely ought to be tried for crimes against humanity. But so should all his accomplices in the US and Europe," she said. "To applaud the US army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler," Roy said." Later in this same Times of India story the reporter reveals how typically disorganized these sewer-eyed idealists are. Roy's words were not even said to the WSF itself, but to a splinter group at "'Mumbai Resistance', an alternative convention in Bombay of around 2,000 leftists who view the World Social Forum as too moderate." The mind boggles.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
SEABISCUIT AND CAESAR:
Two pieces of propaganda I encountered over the holidays have already caused glee among liberals. Good conservatives should be warned to avoid the typical left wing misrepresentations in the movie Seabiscuit and the book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti. I have bravely perused them to spare my readers.
Naturally I don't expose myself to the unwashed masses in actual theaters, and only now have I had time in my busy schedule of exposing liberalism to rent this film. We definitely need to look this gift horse in the mouth, because it is just as full of danger as the one the Greeks left for Troy. The movie is made with great skill in all technical aspects -- more to be regretted, since it is misused for a bad end. For instance, this is one of the least padded films I have ever seen. Every scene cuts right to the point. Since the director also wrote the screenplay it stayed focussed throughout on his goal of warping our minds.
The movie cynically plays up the angle exploited by the real horse's owner in the depression years of the 1930's. Seabiscuit was supposedly a neglected, ugly animal written off by the racing establishment, who became a national hero as an underdog. Much is made of the crowds of hopeless suffering people cheering on this symbolic champion of the "little people", with narration by a man who usually does those left wing tax-supported PBS documentaries, no doubt to help remind viewers those same crowds were turning to FDR and the Democrats for economic hope. The film also throws in the usual lefty feel-good junk about personal struggles to triumph over adversity by the horse owner, trainer, and jocky (a literal "little guy"). This new age fluff works in making the viewers feel uplifted and happy about the triumph over the powers that be. As the early Scrooge would say, Humbug.
The horse owner is portrayed as a struggling bicycle mechanic who just stumbled into the car business by chance. According to the book, he really owned the biggest auto distributorship in the world. Was he selling cheap cars for the masses, like Chevys or Fords? No, he got rich selling Buicks. Some popular champion!! And of course the movie tries to emphasize the determined virtue of the characters as the reason for the success of the horse, instead of the real truth -- Seabiscuit finally beat War Admiral only because the owner's wife "had pinned her medal of Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers" onto the saddlecloth. Secular leftys wouldn't ever want to emphasize any religious connection!!
The worst shell game played by this film is about the horse itself. They want us to believe it was just a useness nag who couldn't win until he was treated with love by a caring trainer. One reviewer in the New York Times (of course) called it a "Cinderella story". In fact, the horse was more like "Michael Hastings, a forklift driver living in a country town in New South Wales", that one historian has now determined to be "the rightful heir to the British throne". (Read about him at Briton living in Australia claims his right to the Windsors' throne.)
Seabiscuit's grandsire was actually Man o' War, a champion of both the Preakness and Belmont two decades before. The equine so-called champion of the underdogs was just as much of an inheritor as George W. Bush and just as phony a "little guy" as that Yale son of Wall Street, Howard Dean. If you want more evidence of what a public relations scam this "anti-establishment" hero was, consider that the villain of the movie, the awful rich owner of War Admiral, was himself the owner of Man 0' War. He knew full well Seabiscuit was not a nothing from nowhere. Fortunately, Karl Rove has no similar incentive to pretend his candidate is facing a nobody just to sell tickets.
This liberal attempt to cash in on the popularity of someone of good breeding is not a new con game (though usually it involves people, not animals). Parenti's new book tries to claim for the left a man who can't defend himself because he has been dead for over two thousand years. If the reader hadn't been warned already by the book's subtitle, or by the favorable quote on the back from notorious radical Howard Zinn, this author is kind enough to set forth his agenda in the introduction:
"The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. ... In this book I present an alternative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests. By this view, the deed was more an act of treason than tyrannicide, one incident in a line of political murders dating back across the better part of a century, a dramatic manifestation of a long-standing struggle between opulent conservatives and popularly elected reformers."
Caesar was indeed part and parcel of the ruling crowd of his day, and of noble birth, not some new rich up from the grass roots. But the truth has never deterred leftys from trying to portray their betters as populists, nor has the hypocrisy of ignoring Caesar's ownership of slaves. (Consider how they have ignored Jefferson's crude sexual exploitation of his own helpless human property.)
The author, wearing his liberal-colored glasses, constantly attacks centuries of historians for being slanted advocates of a long-dead establisment. He ties it all to "land reform", which he says the good guys were for and the awful conservatives in the Senate were against. Why do poor people need land anyway? Haven't we heard this tired radical refrain before about the traditional elite in Latin America? Were the assassinated Gracchi brothers the Kennedys of their day? Was Julius Caesar, who sought to circumvent the old political system, the Howard Dean of his time? The poison here is not just insidious but very subtle. He never actually makes those comparisons, but he sets up the syllogisms so that the readers will jump to those conclusions on their own.
This is most clear with his attacks on Cicero, praised by conservatives for saving the republic from subversive conspiracies. In a chaper called "Cicero's Witch-hunt" Parenti portrays him as a cross between Joe McCarthy and John Ashcroft, condemning proto-leftists in show trials with trumped up phony evidence. He never actually ties the Roman to the modern examples, but it's clear what he wants you to think.
Parenti also denounces Cato, portrayed here as a drunk who traded his wife back and forth "like so many game pieces", described as nominally "devoted to the public, but "the public that counted was Cato's own class, the hereditary nobility"". This, again, is so he can swipe at his real modern day target. "Today, the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, is named after the illustrious reactionary because he resisted Caesar's rule and supposedly championed liberty. Needless to say, the narrow class nature of that liberty remains unacknowledged by Cato's admirers."
But to quote more of these left-wing rants would be self-abuse. Stay away from this liberal propaganda unless you want to risk having your whole view of history corrupted, with possibly dangerous effects on your vote in this current vital political year.
Two pieces of propaganda I encountered over the holidays have already caused glee among liberals. Good conservatives should be warned to avoid the typical left wing misrepresentations in the movie Seabiscuit and the book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti. I have bravely perused them to spare my readers.
Naturally I don't expose myself to the unwashed masses in actual theaters, and only now have I had time in my busy schedule of exposing liberalism to rent this film. We definitely need to look this gift horse in the mouth, because it is just as full of danger as the one the Greeks left for Troy. The movie is made with great skill in all technical aspects -- more to be regretted, since it is misused for a bad end. For instance, this is one of the least padded films I have ever seen. Every scene cuts right to the point. Since the director also wrote the screenplay it stayed focussed throughout on his goal of warping our minds.
The movie cynically plays up the angle exploited by the real horse's owner in the depression years of the 1930's. Seabiscuit was supposedly a neglected, ugly animal written off by the racing establishment, who became a national hero as an underdog. Much is made of the crowds of hopeless suffering people cheering on this symbolic champion of the "little people", with narration by a man who usually does those left wing tax-supported PBS documentaries, no doubt to help remind viewers those same crowds were turning to FDR and the Democrats for economic hope. The film also throws in the usual lefty feel-good junk about personal struggles to triumph over adversity by the horse owner, trainer, and jocky (a literal "little guy"). This new age fluff works in making the viewers feel uplifted and happy about the triumph over the powers that be. As the early Scrooge would say, Humbug.
The horse owner is portrayed as a struggling bicycle mechanic who just stumbled into the car business by chance. According to the book, he really owned the biggest auto distributorship in the world. Was he selling cheap cars for the masses, like Chevys or Fords? No, he got rich selling Buicks. Some popular champion!! And of course the movie tries to emphasize the determined virtue of the characters as the reason for the success of the horse, instead of the real truth -- Seabiscuit finally beat War Admiral only because the owner's wife "had pinned her medal of Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers" onto the saddlecloth. Secular leftys wouldn't ever want to emphasize any religious connection!!
The worst shell game played by this film is about the horse itself. They want us to believe it was just a useness nag who couldn't win until he was treated with love by a caring trainer. One reviewer in the New York Times (of course) called it a "Cinderella story". In fact, the horse was more like "Michael Hastings, a forklift driver living in a country town in New South Wales", that one historian has now determined to be "the rightful heir to the British throne". (Read about him at Briton living in Australia claims his right to the Windsors' throne.)
Seabiscuit's grandsire was actually Man o' War, a champion of both the Preakness and Belmont two decades before. The equine so-called champion of the underdogs was just as much of an inheritor as George W. Bush and just as phony a "little guy" as that Yale son of Wall Street, Howard Dean. If you want more evidence of what a public relations scam this "anti-establishment" hero was, consider that the villain of the movie, the awful rich owner of War Admiral, was himself the owner of Man 0' War. He knew full well Seabiscuit was not a nothing from nowhere. Fortunately, Karl Rove has no similar incentive to pretend his candidate is facing a nobody just to sell tickets.
This liberal attempt to cash in on the popularity of someone of good breeding is not a new con game (though usually it involves people, not animals). Parenti's new book tries to claim for the left a man who can't defend himself because he has been dead for over two thousand years. If the reader hadn't been warned already by the book's subtitle, or by the favorable quote on the back from notorious radical Howard Zinn, this author is kind enough to set forth his agenda in the introduction:
"The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. ... In this book I present an alternative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests. By this view, the deed was more an act of treason than tyrannicide, one incident in a line of political murders dating back across the better part of a century, a dramatic manifestation of a long-standing struggle between opulent conservatives and popularly elected reformers."
Caesar was indeed part and parcel of the ruling crowd of his day, and of noble birth, not some new rich up from the grass roots. But the truth has never deterred leftys from trying to portray their betters as populists, nor has the hypocrisy of ignoring Caesar's ownership of slaves. (Consider how they have ignored Jefferson's crude sexual exploitation of his own helpless human property.)
The author, wearing his liberal-colored glasses, constantly attacks centuries of historians for being slanted advocates of a long-dead establisment. He ties it all to "land reform", which he says the good guys were for and the awful conservatives in the Senate were against. Why do poor people need land anyway? Haven't we heard this tired radical refrain before about the traditional elite in Latin America? Were the assassinated Gracchi brothers the Kennedys of their day? Was Julius Caesar, who sought to circumvent the old political system, the Howard Dean of his time? The poison here is not just insidious but very subtle. He never actually makes those comparisons, but he sets up the syllogisms so that the readers will jump to those conclusions on their own.
This is most clear with his attacks on Cicero, praised by conservatives for saving the republic from subversive conspiracies. In a chaper called "Cicero's Witch-hunt" Parenti portrays him as a cross between Joe McCarthy and John Ashcroft, condemning proto-leftists in show trials with trumped up phony evidence. He never actually ties the Roman to the modern examples, but it's clear what he wants you to think.
Parenti also denounces Cato, portrayed here as a drunk who traded his wife back and forth "like so many game pieces", described as nominally "devoted to the public, but "the public that counted was Cato's own class, the hereditary nobility"". This, again, is so he can swipe at his real modern day target. "Today, the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, is named after the illustrious reactionary because he resisted Caesar's rule and supposedly championed liberty. Needless to say, the narrow class nature of that liberty remains unacknowledged by Cato's admirers."
But to quote more of these left-wing rants would be self-abuse. Stay away from this liberal propaganda unless you want to risk having your whole view of history corrupted, with possibly dangerous effects on your vote in this current vital political year.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
VOX DEI:
"Pat Robertson said Friday that God told him President Bush will be re-elected in a landslide. "I think George Bush is going to win in a walk," the religious broadcaster said on his "700 Club" program ... "I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It's shaping up that way," Robertson said." This story means that it's all over and we don't even have to bother to vote now. Of course some liberal dared to question whether it was God's voice or just Karl Rove's. I think he just got inside information that God is using Diebold as his instument on earth.
"Pat Robertson said Friday that God told him President Bush will be re-elected in a landslide. "I think George Bush is going to win in a walk," the religious broadcaster said on his "700 Club" program ... "I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It's shaping up that way," Robertson said." This story means that it's all over and we don't even have to bother to vote now. Of course some liberal dared to question whether it was God's voice or just Karl Rove's. I think he just got inside information that God is using Diebold as his instument on earth.
DEMOCRACY MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY "DUCK":
According to MP calls Radio 4 listeners 'bastards' over vigilante vote, "Listeners to BBC Radio 4's Today programme were asked to suggest a piece of legislation to improve life in Britain, with the promise that an MP would then attempt to get it onto the statute books. But yesterday, 26,000 votes later, the winning proposal was denounced as a "ludicrous, brutal, unworkable blood-stained piece of legislation" - by Stephen Pound, the very MP whose job it is to try to push it through Parliament. Mr Pound's reaction was provoked by the news that the winner of Today's "Listeners' Law" poll was a plan to allow homeowners "to use any means to defend their home from intruders" - a prospect that could see householders free to kill burglars, without question. "The people have spoken," the Labour MP replied to the programme, "... the bastards. ... Do we really want a law that says you can slaughter anyone who climbs in your window?"" Why yes, that's exactly what we do want. Trust a liberal to claim they are for democracy, then back down when he doesn't like the results. Yes, the voting was obviously "hijacked by supporters of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for shooting a burglar. The winning proposal enjoyed a late surge in support in the final 24 hours of the poll", but hey, if organizing over the internet is good for Howard Dean, then why not for those of us who get all hot and bothered over firearms?
According to MP calls Radio 4 listeners 'bastards' over vigilante vote, "Listeners to BBC Radio 4's Today programme were asked to suggest a piece of legislation to improve life in Britain, with the promise that an MP would then attempt to get it onto the statute books. But yesterday, 26,000 votes later, the winning proposal was denounced as a "ludicrous, brutal, unworkable blood-stained piece of legislation" - by Stephen Pound, the very MP whose job it is to try to push it through Parliament. Mr Pound's reaction was provoked by the news that the winner of Today's "Listeners' Law" poll was a plan to allow homeowners "to use any means to defend their home from intruders" - a prospect that could see householders free to kill burglars, without question. "The people have spoken," the Labour MP replied to the programme, "... the bastards. ... Do we really want a law that says you can slaughter anyone who climbs in your window?"" Why yes, that's exactly what we do want. Trust a liberal to claim they are for democracy, then back down when he doesn't like the results. Yes, the voting was obviously "hijacked by supporters of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for shooting a burglar. The winning proposal enjoyed a late surge in support in the final 24 hours of the poll", but hey, if organizing over the internet is good for Howard Dean, then why not for those of us who get all hot and bothered over firearms?
PAGING SENATOR SANTORUM:
The Pennsylvania Republican was more wise than we knew when he warned us of the consequences of the Supreme Court's striking down sodomy laws. Pop icons now seem to feel free to take up with other species. See the shocking evidence for yourself. The typically liberal Cosmic Iguana has engaged in locker room bragging by posting an alleged picture of Britney Spears dallying with him in the bath. Be astounded at Britney Annuls Marriage, Gets Kinky With Iguana.
The Pennsylvania Republican was more wise than we knew when he warned us of the consequences of the Supreme Court's striking down sodomy laws. Pop icons now seem to feel free to take up with other species. See the shocking evidence for yourself. The typically liberal Cosmic Iguana has engaged in locker room bragging by posting an alleged picture of Britney Spears dallying with him in the bath. Be astounded at Britney Annuls Marriage, Gets Kinky With Iguana.
VACATION BOOK REPORT, PART ONE:
I didn't spend all the last two weeks skiing, sunning, and swimming. I also read, beginning with "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills. (You can also find an excerpt from this on the web in The New York Review of Books.) Wills explains how the "three-fifths" compromise in the Constitution, which counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for Congressional representation, and therefore for Presidential electoral votes, made Jefferson's victory in 1800 possible despite his getting fewer votes. (Don't mention Florida 2000 to me again!) He claims the logic of this so-called corrupt bargain between Southern slave owners and northern democrats led them to further tyranny to protect slavery, including censorship and destruction of civil liberties in the northern states, and even politically motivated attempted impeachments. Now my faithful readers will no doubt expect me to point to all this as an example of the hypocrisy of current Democrats, who claim to represent the will of the majority and stand for judicial independence. No, I'm going to denounce this book instead, no matter how well written and researched it is.
Jefferson is praised as an icon by today's liberals, mostly for his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Naturally they like it, since it espoused virtual anarchy and was literally treasonous under British law at the time. Wills, cowering before Political Correctness, felt he had to appease liberal conventional wisdom by writing gushingly "I have admired Jefferson all my life, and still do. ...there is much else I revere in him." He adds that of his criticism here "that fact does not mean that I would prefer that John Adams had won." We should be suspicious of any symbol people dare not question without such apologies. Why, even Jefferson's sex life was an example of "affirmative action".
Twisting the Constitution to preserving the slave power was almost the only good thing Jefferson did in his long career. This is not because he was protecting ownership of slaves as such, but because he was protecting sacred property rights (carried to their ultimate extreme -- owning other people), and imposing a wonderfully conservative cultural stasis on society. The Democratic lip service to liberalism could never be more than hot air as long as they moved in lockstep with the "slavocracy". Wills loves the "good" liberal Jefferson, but attacks the "bad" conservative one. Like a typical intellectual, he gets it all backwards. He also stops his story short, missing how conservatives haveevolved changed with the times over the years.
Yes, the slave power was overrepresented and disproportionately in control of America before theCivil War War Between The States, but Wills misses how much better off the Southern elite were after that war. Now a black citizen counted for Congress and the electoral college not as three-fifths of a person, but as a whole person. This gave the Southerners an even greater voice in the government. Nevertheless, segregation and denial of voting rights meant the former slaves and their descendants had exactly the same political voice as before -- none whatsoever. The former slaveholders were also spared the burden of owning old unproductive slaves. In the New South those who could not work were simply allowed to starve -- a great cost saving for the plantation owners.
This agrarian utopia lasted until the 1950s when an intrusive U.S. Extreme Court began striking it down, aided by the images broadcast by nosy television cameras of Southern police dogs (really only doing their jobs) attacking crowds of "peaceful" demonstrators. But though segregation has passed away (at least in law), conservatism has continued to grow. Today the owning elite is reinstating a class society, polarized between the haves and the have nots. Once the underclass was all black, and wasn't even allowed to own their own lives in the South. Today, social progress has been made so that both white and black poor are equally free to own nothing but their own lives. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France) Each year Bush's tax and fiscal policies make it more difficult for the middle class to move up in the world and challenge their betters, or even to continue to exist. More of them sink into the growing mass of the working poor, helping keep wages down and profits up -- the very purpose of a sound government. To quote Martha Stewart, a contributor to Democrats who is thankfully about to be shut up and shut away on trumped up charges, this is a GOOD thing.
I'll post another book report in a day or two; check back for more.
I didn't spend all the last two weeks skiing, sunning, and swimming. I also read, beginning with "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills. (You can also find an excerpt from this on the web in The New York Review of Books.) Wills explains how the "three-fifths" compromise in the Constitution, which counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for Congressional representation, and therefore for Presidential electoral votes, made Jefferson's victory in 1800 possible despite his getting fewer votes. (Don't mention Florida 2000 to me again!) He claims the logic of this so-called corrupt bargain between Southern slave owners and northern democrats led them to further tyranny to protect slavery, including censorship and destruction of civil liberties in the northern states, and even politically motivated attempted impeachments. Now my faithful readers will no doubt expect me to point to all this as an example of the hypocrisy of current Democrats, who claim to represent the will of the majority and stand for judicial independence. No, I'm going to denounce this book instead, no matter how well written and researched it is.
Jefferson is praised as an icon by today's liberals, mostly for his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Naturally they like it, since it espoused virtual anarchy and was literally treasonous under British law at the time. Wills, cowering before Political Correctness, felt he had to appease liberal conventional wisdom by writing gushingly "I have admired Jefferson all my life, and still do. ...there is much else I revere in him." He adds that of his criticism here "that fact does not mean that I would prefer that John Adams had won." We should be suspicious of any symbol people dare not question without such apologies. Why, even Jefferson's sex life was an example of "affirmative action".
Twisting the Constitution to preserving the slave power was almost the only good thing Jefferson did in his long career. This is not because he was protecting ownership of slaves as such, but because he was protecting sacred property rights (carried to their ultimate extreme -- owning other people), and imposing a wonderfully conservative cultural stasis on society. The Democratic lip service to liberalism could never be more than hot air as long as they moved in lockstep with the "slavocracy". Wills loves the "good" liberal Jefferson, but attacks the "bad" conservative one. Like a typical intellectual, he gets it all backwards. He also stops his story short, missing how conservatives have
Yes, the slave power was overrepresented and disproportionately in control of America before the
This agrarian utopia lasted until the 1950s when an intrusive U.S. Extreme Court began striking it down, aided by the images broadcast by nosy television cameras of Southern police dogs (really only doing their jobs) attacking crowds of "peaceful" demonstrators. But though segregation has passed away (at least in law), conservatism has continued to grow. Today the owning elite is reinstating a class society, polarized between the haves and the have nots. Once the underclass was all black, and wasn't even allowed to own their own lives in the South. Today, social progress has been made so that both white and black poor are equally free to own nothing but their own lives. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France) Each year Bush's tax and fiscal policies make it more difficult for the middle class to move up in the world and challenge their betters, or even to continue to exist. More of them sink into the growing mass of the working poor, helping keep wages down and profits up -- the very purpose of a sound government. To quote Martha Stewart, a contributor to Democrats who is thankfully about to be shut up and shut away on trumped up charges, this is a GOOD thing.
I'll post another book report in a day or two; check back for more.
