We're Not Gonna Have Barney Frank to Kick Around Anymore...

...Unless of course, he gets prosecuted. As he needs to be.

Ladd Ehlinger reminds us of how awesome he is:

"We Will Control the Market"

And there you have it, really. (h/t Protein Wisdom)

For 100 years these hyper-instructed ne'er-do-wells have been telling that, given sufficient money and authority, they'll get everything under control. That the business cycle is theirs to command. That the incentives and motivations of millions of human hearts could be perfectly shaped by legislation. Despite watching their house of  jokers collapse around them, they believe it still.

Monty, at Ace:

The “market” is not a thing to be managed, or a process to be controlled. The market is just an aspect of the natural world, working on the creatures who move through it. Merkel’s comment reflects the combination of arrogance and ignorance that is at the root of so many of our economic problems.

Yes. And the only thing wrong with this statement is that every GOP candidate is not shouting it from the rooftops, all the time. Every quarter the GDP is "unexpectedly" less than envisioned, and yet the premise of progressive politics -- that a learned technocracy can manage the wealth of the land better than the people -- remains a truism in the minds of too many people. They will continue to believe it until the bottom drops out.

Whereupon, they will eulogize their fallacies as "noble".

The Greatest Trick the Socialists ever Pulled was Convincing the World They Didn't Exist...

And like that... they're gone.

The reductio ad Hitlerium is an irritating logical fallacy, which almost never serves to improve understanding or conversation. Calling the OWS crowd Nazis, or even fascists, is a stretch. That needs be said before anything else.

But pointing out what Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei means is a handy and fun way to irritate socialists, as Ladd Ehlinger has discovered. I've been round the block with lefties desperate to argue that nothing about the Nazi's was left at all (keep scrolling), so I sympathise.

It all comes to how the word "socialist" is defined. Typically, those on the Left prefer to define "socialist" as "one who favors ending private property." This allows anyone who hasn't gone that far left to escape the title of "leftist" altogether. By this and similar ellisions, the Left pretends to be the Center.

But I prefer to define "socialist" as "one who favors the use of direct political power to remake society according to principles of universal justice." I like it because it allows the myriad of squabbling social thinkers, from LeFebre to Lenin to Mussolini to Mao to be recognized according to their common traits. It puts all the tyrants who covered their tyranny in the cloak of True Justice in a single pot.

And it allows us to draw distinctions between them. We can see Progressives, Mensheviks, Trade-Unionists, Corporatists, Fascists, Nazis, and Communists as similar, but also note their wide and obvious differences. We can grant that your average "liberal" Democrat has no intention of carting anyone off in a boxcar, while continuing to point out that their calls for "unity" are code for "now stop arguing with us."

A few objections:

• But Nazis and Fascists (and no small number of Progressive Democrats) hated Communists. If Communists are Socialists; how can Nazis, etc. be Socialists?

Answer: Large political/philosophical movements engage in vicious infighting all the time. See also, Christianity in the 16-17th centuries. For that matter, the Communists hated and murdered other Socialists with great regularity. No history of the Russian Revolution is complete without tracing the roles played by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Bolshevik rise to power, and the cruelty with which the Bolsheviks repaid them.

• Isn't this just a cheap method of putting Progressive Democrats in the same boat as Fascists and Communists?

Answer: Not at all. In fact, it works within the way Progressives think of themselves: as sensible radicals who oppose totalitarianism. A Progressive who accepts my definition of "socialist" can still say "Sure, I want to see society change, and am prepared to use the law as a tool to bring that change about. But I'm not going to impose change at the point of a bayonet. I'm humane and have a conscience."

As evidence for my assertion, I invite anyone to read Section III of The Communist Manifesto, wherein Marx lists the varieties of socialism which fail to meet his standard of scientific materialism: Feudal Socialism, Petit-Bourgeois Socialism, German or "True" Socialism, Conservative Socialism, etc. If Marx could admit that numerous and mutually contradictory versions of socialism existed, why cannot we?

My New Favorite Word for the Left...

Oikophobic. (This is why it pays to read Instapundit)

American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Read the whole thing.

The Occupy Movement's Masturbation Rage

A few weeks ago I pointed and laughed at a genius who misspelled her lament at not being able to land a job with her expensive degree. I felt bad about it later (I actually didn't), but it turns out the young lady did not take kindly to being upbraided:

I recognize that I switched the i and the e in field. If you want to sit there and lie to yourself and say that you’ve never done that, go ahead. But I wasn’t going to go through all the trouble to take it down, rewrite the sign, re-upload it, and then still probably catch hate for people that center their lives around looking for it.

When people talk about how the younger generation has no concept of non-verbal communication, this is what they mean. Luv, if you can't take the time and effort to make sure your pedestrian rant at Teh Man doesn't make you look like a complete idiot, then you can't be surprised when people make fun of you. Because they don't know you. Because all you are to them is a piece of paper with words next to the kind of hangdog face that Sarah McLachlan uses to get donations for the ASPCA.

It's a hard cold cruel fact that I began to come to terms with about halfway through college: people judge you on first impressions, and that means appearance. It's human nature. It isn't going to change. If you're going to put your face out there in the big bad world, try not to give people a reason to throw shit at it. And if you can't be bothered, then your skin better be thicker than rhino horn, 'cause the Internet is a mean mean place.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Last night I attended a performance of Church by Young Jean Lee at Single Carrot Theater in Baltimore. Fine performance of a provocative play by a damn good troupe. I mean "provocative" in the best possible sense of that word: it provoked me to think about it's subject, that being organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. But it also gave me a wonderful phrase to hang about the Occupy Movement and its fellow-travelers: Masturbation Rage.

Everything about these clowns is a cheap facsimile of what they imagine the French Revolution was like. A bunch of people standing around waving signs and being obnoxious is not, in any meaningful sense, "occupying" anything. Sure, that's where things have to start: the Tea Party and the French Revolution began that way. But then you have to move on and organize, create a set of goals and attempt to carry them out. For the Tea Partiers, that meant expressing our distaste at our New Class overlords and using electoral muscle to hold the GOP's feet to the fire. Now, they may not succeed in that second part, but they're trying.

The Occupy Movement is a stunt. It's astroturf. It's waiting for fucking Godot to immanentize the eschaton. It's a loud pitched wail for Big Daddy White Boss to change your diaper and give you a sucker. When it ends, exactly the same players will be saying and doing exactly the same things, and the New York Stock Exchange will open and close as though nothing happened. Because nothing has. Ask this guy:

We will stack the bodies this high...

What's the difference between you and him? His maxim was that "political power comes from the barrel of a gun." When V.I. Lenin "occupied" something, that wasn't a demonstration of the possibility of occupation. It meant blood was going to flow. He didn't want the Tsar to provide jobs for the mis-educated; he wanted to kill the Tsar. Which he did.

The Occupy "movement" has legitimate complaints. Crony capitalism is a blight on a free society. The higher education industry has been shafting their customers for decades. But they can't see the extent to which they are the pawns of the institutions they claim to deplore. They have allowed themselves to be turned into useful idiots for a political class that exploits their misery to serve those same corporate and bureaucratic interests. In much the same way, Lenin exploited the suffering of the Russian people during WW1 to establish a regime that multiplied that suffering a thousand-fold.

Trying to prevent industry from corrupting government by giving government more money and authority is like trying to prevent rape with breast implants. All you're doing is making the victim more desirable.

More #OccupyWallStreetFail

Probably shouldn't have majored in Marxist Dance Interpretation, either....

The Wall Street Protesters in a Single Image

David Brooks Snaps Out of It; Says the First Worthwhile Thing In Years

He issues a series of mea culpas, for which most of the wingnut-osphere will return nothing but snarky contempt. Which is fine, as he's deserved it, but that's not what I'm interested in.

This is:

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

I have long been of the opinion that Democrats are going to regret putting Obama in the Presidency when he had exactly the right credentials to be the rightful heir to Ted Kennedy's mantle. He could have had as many terms as he wanted as the liberal "conscience of the Senate." Instead, he's flailing around because real life keeps not following the shooting scripts for The American President or Dave, where one honest, heartfelt liberal speech changes everything.

But he has no alternative to than to run as a fighting liberal, because he ran as a transformative President. Initially the transformation was to come from Obama himself, from his gloriously first-class temperament, his telegenically orotund orations, his finely creased pants. But somehow the Obama magic failed to set everything to right. Somehow political waves ignored his regal presence. So when the Mask slips, he reverts to type. Maybe he'll win re-election, maybe he won't. But it'll be the best shot Ted Kennedy could give.

Religion is Bad. When Republicans Do It.

Via Other McCain, Ian Stanley of the Telegraph lays down the persistent media double-standard:

Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats, is a Mormon. Many readers probably won’t know that because the mainstream media oddly doesn’t talk about it. It’s okay to call Mitt Romney a polytheist with twelve wives, but Reid is untouchable because he’s a Democrat. And yet it’s reasonable to theorise that the leader of the Senate wears the magic underwear associated with Mormonism. Is his belief that Jesus walked on American soil, anti-science? Geographers and historians would probably object.
Democratic presidential candidates regularly visit black churches, Nancy Pelosi has invoked her Catholicism so many times you might think she was a nun, and Barack Obama was married by a pastor who actively hates America. Yet Krugman suggests that only the GOP uses and abuses religion every election. More sickening is the innuendo that there is a uniquely violent subtext to conservative faith, as if every Right-winger wants to shoot an abortionist. There is no comparison between fundamentalist Islam and Dominionism: one kills and the other doesn’t. The conflation of the two is ugly and deceitful.

It gets awfully damn tiresome to have to point these things out. And I don't mind Stacy McCain's "Welcome to the Party, Pal" response. But so long as there are people who refuse to admit that this is going on, it needs to be underscored. We need to say, as McCain does, that:

It would be great if we could have a reasoned, well-tempered discussion with the Left, but the typical Lefty cannot or will not engage in a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. Conservatives have inadvertently arrived at Abuse, instead of the Argument Clinic.

Although, in all honesty, the Argument Clinic kind of sucks, too.

Why Democrats Can't Abide to Have Public Sector Unions Messed With

The image says it all...(h/t Ace)

So the next time someone loses their shit over hoe much the eeeevil Pentagon controls this country, just remember that labor unions dwarf defense contractors by an order of magnitude. In fact, shouldn't we be wondering where Jimmy Hoffa was when JFK was shot?

Thieves, Liars, Whores, Swine and Gilded Fools: A Four-Letter Dissertation on Politics

August is traditionally the time of vacation, down time, relaxing. I need such most greatly, for a variety of personal reasons. So this post may be considered my declaration of farewells, for the nonce. I've learned that for me, blogging is a cyclical activity.

But first, it is time to take stock of the inanity which has prevailed before us, of the Debt-to-GDP ratio hitting 1-to1, of the thousand manifold bottles of snake-oil that the New Class has sold us. Walter Russel Meade has a fine dissertation on "The Progressive Crisis" (h/t: Ace), which the usual suspects of the droit-osphere have linked approvingly to. He correctly points out what Ayn Rand pointed out 60 years ago: that there is an unspoken will-to-power in the Progressive Movement. Our Saviors are as corrupt and wicked as the rest of us, and the people know it.

Barack Obama is full of shit. Harry Reid is full of shit. Nancy Pelosi is so full of shit she could fertilize Death Valley. Now, as it happens, being full of shit goes with the territory of politics, because politics is shit. Hunter Thompson, who had a Ph.D in Being Full of Shit, nevertheless once wrote something in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about the profession of journalism that I quote approvingly:

Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage.

But a few shifts in nomenclature and metaphor would suffice to make this an utterly apt description of politics. Politics is a bunch of glad-handling buffoons, flannel-mouthed ward bosses, and dipshit crusaders. There's but a few of any rank anywhere in the City of Washington that the country would miss if they all spontaneously combusted tomorrow.

This is not a matter of replacing one group of swine with another. I still haven't decided whether John Boehner is full of shit yet (odds are, yes). The nature of the activity is inherently corruptive. To rule others, one can adopt one of two strategies: letting the traditions of your people guide your every action, or attacking every vested interest not on board with your self-aggrandizing agenda. The first is mere office-holding, the second is tyranny. Progressives of every stripe keep declaiming that they have found the Third Way, and more bodies have been littered in that fruitless Grail-Quest than frozen ships seeking the Northwest Passage. It is a fantasy: nothing more than tyranny in a velvet glove. Politics is shit. Inhale deeply.

And that is why I could never muster the anger at someone like Charlie Rangel or Robert Byrd. Rangel is a thief, and a racist thief at that. But I suspect that, in some deep-down, cameras-off world that neither you nor I will ever see, the son of a bitch knows he's a thief, and justifies his thievery on the same grounds that I have offered: he must swim in the same seas as everyone else. That he's a fat little fishy in a sea of shit does not change the odeur of the water one jot.

So sure, catch the fat little fishy if you wish, mount him to the wall. Send his ample ass to jail: why not? That oily bastard lives by our sufferance, which we the people, in our limited wisdom but unlimited sovereignty, can withdraw at any time we see fit. Just you remember: there are plenty of fish in the shitty sea.

No, I have no animus for the Rangles and Byrds of the world of politics. Thieves are thieves, and eventually they end up robbing themselves. I reserve my true hate for the ones who claim not to hunger for graft or power but for a Square Deal for all Americans, the ones who claim that it is time to put politics aside and do the People's Will. Proggies have been shilling that line for a century, and it's the biggest pile of dinosaur shit there is.

The People don't have One Will; that Rousseauist fantasy builds nothing but guillotines. The People are a multiverse of conflicting dreams, desires, and ideology. They have no Main Line from which silken-voiced princes with first-rate temperaments can eternally suckle. 40% of them hate Democrats, 40% hate Republicans, and the rest would rather everyone just play nice. You cannot claim a Mandate to do whatever the hell you please on the basis of winning 51% of such an electorate. It is a house built on quicksand.

The People's Will is a fantasy, and I hope that Obama knows it. Bill Clinton did. That man was as gifted a liar as politics has seen in a while, but he was a better whore. And whores know that it doesn't matter what the john wants if you get extra for the service. So if the john wanted to hear that The Era of Big Government was Over, then Billi would make that sound pretty coming out of his mouth. He knew the tricks; he knew the game; the People (or 60% of them) loved him.

Right now, 50% of the People are fucking sick of Obama, of his fecklessness, his emptiness, his inability to handle one thing with anything approaching success. What the Sam Hell are we doing in Libya? Who the hell knows? Who's in charge? What the hominy fuck happened with ObamaCare? Did Obama even read an executive summary of it? And precisely what about trillion-dollar deficits does this simple bastard love so much?

The worst of all politicians, worse than Thieves, Liars, Whores, or other Associated Swine, are the Gilded Fools: the Bobble-heads, the ra-ra true-believing priests of the Progressive Leviathan. Fools there are aplenty in Washington, and every state house and city hall for that matter. Dennis Kucinich is one such, as is John Edwards (Sarah Palin might be, as well). But these are more or less harmless, as they quickly up-jump their place and show their true motely colors. But sometimes, press or party takes a Fool and Gilds him, makes him shine brighter than the Sunne in Splendour, and the 20% that just wants everyone to play nice will swoon like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert (In Edwards' case, the gilding did not work, perhaps because a gelding was more in need). By such precise means did a junior senator with no executive experience and a middling legislative experience parlay a MLK-timbered voice into the highest office in the land. The story was too good. We just had to believe that he knew what the hell he was doing.



And now we sit, with a government broke and broken, about to fundamentally disprove Hamilton's postulate that a national debt could be a national treasure (or for those who know the context of that remark, fundamentally prove it). And we are shocked, shocked I say, that the warring tribes cannot negotiate with one another. We can't believe that there's actually a dimes worth of difference between the two.

Well, there is. The GOP has no shortage of Thieves, Liars, Whores, and Swine. Duke Cunningham was a Thief; Gingrich was a Liar, and the Maine Sisters (Snowe and Dukakis) consistently sell their virtue to whatever trawler comes by. But the GOP doesn't get to Gild many Fools, because the gang of fuckoffs and misfits don't usually let them. The rest may or may not actually mean what they say about shrinking the size of government.

Yet even Swine can find a truffle, and the gang of elephants has stumbled upon the reality that eludes the current Gilded Fool: We cannot afford the size of the government we currently have. Not even if we expropriate the wealth of the nation can we afford it. You can only loot Microsoft once. It won't be there to feed the current services baseline next year.

Robert Stacy McCain has a succinct phase for this reality: The State is not God. Get over it. The State can't do everything or satisfy everything. It has limits intrinsic to its nature, which are thievery, force, and lies. You can accomplish much with thievery, force, and lies. But you cannot uplift the human spirit with them. They do not nurture the true and good. They will not succor the middle class, or any other class. They will work only until there is nothing left to steal, no force left untried, and no lie still believed.

And on that note, I take my leave. I will leave Revolutionary Nonsense fallow for a few weeks, but will return by Labor Day at the latest. Enjoy the the Dog-Days.

I am the Wrecking-Ball Right

There's a good line in the movie L.A. Confidential, after the second-plot-point fight between Sgt. Bud White, played by Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce's Lt. Edmund Exley. Exley has discovered that the three black men he arrested for a shooting at the Nite Owl restaurant, in which an ex-cop was killed, were innocent. He recieved a promotion for his work on that case, but now he wants it re-opened.

"The Nite Owl made you," says White. "You want to tear that down?"

"With a wrecking ball," replies Exley. "You want to help me swing it?"

And the enemies become allies.

I've thought of nothing else since I looked at Robert Reich's "The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right". Most of the article is but strawmen assembled by anecdote, but the closing paragraphs sums up the basic meme that many on the left have been and will be adopting this coming election season:

If You Think Gay Marriage Will License Polygamy, You're Crazy

You're also right.

And all the proggies will not only not prevent it, they will work themselves over to first countenancing, then supporting, then calling you a bigot for disagreeing with it.

And they will have forgotten the fact that anyone ever predicted this chain of events.

It's what they do.

UPDATE: Right now, on Red Eye, Marc Lamont Hill is embracing "live and let live" towards polygamists.

Janice Hahn Fails

In case you had forgotten, Janice Hahn is the Democratic Candidate for CA-36 who got called out by Ladd Ehlinger for putting gangsters on the public payroll as part of a bogus gang-pacification campaign.

He did so using a hilarious attack ad that offended all the right people. Hordes of them poured into the comments section of the link waving the bloody shirt of Honky Offendedness:



Everyone told Ladd he was wasting his time. They were wrong. How can you tell that Hahn is now realizing this is a problem?

Her attorneys sent Fox11 a cease and desist letter forbidding them from pursuing this story.

 She may as well have paraded her dog in front of the camera and told everyone she is not a crook.

"White Girl Bleeds a Lot"

Over at Other McCain, the blunt truth of "youths" engaging in mob violence yields another:

“Liberals believe ‘racist’ is the antonym of ‘Democrat.’”

Indeed.

2012: Year of the "RAAAAACIST!"

Over at Is This Blog On, the owner gets called a Klansman for suggesting that Michelle Obama isn't as toned and healthy as everyone says she is.

No, really.

Here, his response, wherein you can read my comment.

Is it just me, or is this the only rhetorical hill they have left to die on?

Walter Russel Mead on Al Gore

Read the Whole Thing, but here's the Knife Point:

The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science. Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.
To argue with these people about science is to miss the core point. Even if the science is exactly as Mr. Gore claims, his policies are still useless. His advocacy is still a distraction. The movement he heads is still a ship of fools.

And that's where environmentalism fundamentally errs. They cannot trust that humans, left to their own devices, will solve a problem. They insist on slapping some make-up on the Hegelian God-State, that it might fix it for us.

Frank Fleming Asks the Hard Afghanistan Questions

I’m confused on what the Democrat narrative on Afghanistan is now. The war in Iraq distracted from fleeing Afghanistan?

For more, see here.

MSNBC's Lynn Mucken on High Gas Prices: Suck it Up, Proles.

This is a month old, but hardly past its Mock-By date, especially for this web site. Out come the Fisking Shears:

It's my new thing.

The Anti-Retards are Serious

They have a web site. And nearly a grasp on the situation:

When they were originally introduced, the terms “mental retardation” or “mentally retarded” were medical terms with a specifically clinical connotation; however, the pejorative forms, “retard” and “retarded” have been used widely in today’s society to degrade and insult people with intellectual disabilities

So I pointed out when I last addressed this issue. But they fail to carry the water all the way:

Why "intellectual disability" is replacing "mental retardation"

The R-word, “retard,” is slang for the term mental retardation. Mental retardation was what doctors, psychologists, and other professionals used to describe people with significant intellectual impairment. Today the r-word has become a common word used by society as an insult for someone or something stupid. For example, you might hear someone say, “That is so retarded” or “Don’t be such a retard.” When used in this way, the r-word can apply to anyone or anything, and is not specific to someone with a disability. But, even when the r-word is not said to harm someone with a disability, it is hurtful.

Because of this, Special Olympics and the greater disability community prefers to focus on people and their gifts and accomplishments, and to dispel negative attitudes and stereotypes. As language has evolved, Special Olympics has updated its official terminology to use standard, people-first language that is more acceptable to our athletes.

The treadmill is there, but they refuse to see it.

I found this website via Popeater, which has done more to advance intellectual disability than any other corner of the 'net.

Kim Kardashian could not be reached for comment,
as she has a big retarded wedding to plan.