Category Archives: Bush

UPDATE III: Rick Perry: Bush Only Prettier (Or Palin Without the Bra)

William N. Grigg puts Rick Perry in perspective: “Why doesn’t everybody admit that the figure known as ‘Rick Perry‘ is simply Josh Brolin’s version of George W. Bush?”

Another way I’d describe Perry: Palin without the bra.

I imagine that Perry and Sarah Palin get on well.

UPDATE I: In reply to an unruly fight talking place on my Facebook Wall between neoconservatives and libertarians:

“First of all, Michael Farris, you failed to transcribe my facebook Wall post accurately; it’s ‘Palin without a bra.’ You misquote me, even though my post is above yours, more or less. No wonder you were too slack to look over my Articles and Blog Archives for my GOP ticket proposal. I’ve spilled plenty pixels over the past two years making practical proposals that comport with my principles, but are not way out in libertarian wonderland. Finally, all of you: keep a civil tongue in your head. I’m going to remove rude posts”

UPDATE II: SB: But all you are talking about is style, not substance. What about Perry’s policies? Have you examined the political similarities between Bush and Perry? (Btw, we libertarains cheered Bush when he started out. That was b/c he too waxed fat about the evils of big government and promised a humble foreign policy.) What you say here makes one thing plain: Give him the gift of the gab and a better face than the Ewok Bush, and a Republican estalishmentarian masquerading as a conservative will win you over. Never mind his political proclivities.

UPDATE III (Aug. 16): Mrs. Greenspan to the Rescue! Posted by Christopher Manion, at LRC.COM:

So let me get this straight. NBC news opens with the taxpayer-funded ObamaBust tour. Obama blows off a Tea Party guy who doesn’t like Joe Biden calling him a terrorist, and then unctuously schools Rick Perry for calling Bernanke a potential traitor (but they never mention why. Forbidden word: Inflation).
Apparently, Perry has purloined Ron Paul’s view of the Fed. Good for him. But not for Mrs. Alan Greenspan (a.k.a. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell), who parades an Obama spokesman and establishment Hot Tubber Karl Rove as the voices of reason — how dare anyone endanger the Fed’s “independence,” Mrs. Greenspan wails. (I am not making this up.)

MORE.

Where Was Coulter On … Economic Freedoms, Asks Vox Day

Ann Coulter, Bush, Debt, Economy, Federalism, John McCain, libertarianism, Republicans

My WND colleague Vox Day wants to know “where was Miss Coulter when the McCain-Palin ticket suspended its Republican presidential campaign to help the Bush administration collude with the Democratic Senate to ram TARP down the throats of a protesting American public?”

“Cowering frauds,” writes Vox—with reference to Ann Coulter’s term for libertarians who do not want a department of marriage affairs to be added to the Federal Frankenstein in enforcing morality—“is a term that is best reserved for Republicans, who preach fiscal responsibility while repeatedly raising the debt ceiling, who talk about the importance of respecting the law while permitting Wall Street to openly violate it at will, and who claim to advocate personal freedom while staunchly supporting a futile Prohibition that saw three times more Americans arrested for drugs last year than were arrested in 1980.”

Check the WND archives for the two months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Miss Coulter was too busy cheering on the Red Faction of the bifactional ruling party in a futile attempt to elect John McCain to bother speaking out against the Republican elite’s rejection of economic reality, small government principles, the U.S. Constitution and the American people. On the other hand, WorldNetDaily’s two libertarians, Ilana Mercer and myself, wrote no less than 10 columns attacking TARP and the treacherous Bush bailouts during those two months. When viewed from this perspective, Ann Coulter calling libertarians ‘”cowardly frauds” looks rather like Anthony Weiner calling Pope Benedict XVI a perverted exhibitionist.

Revere Paul Revere the Pioneering Metallurgist

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Capitalism, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History

Our president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.

The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)

The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.

In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,

an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.

To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.

UPDATE I: US Engineering & Egalitarian Education

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Education, Europe, Feminism, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Labor, Technology

I heard it said that in the US there are two types of engineers: overworked or unemployed. A tough economy would indeed force increases in productivity: fewer and fewer workers are doing more and more of work. But there’s something else at play. It comports with what Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens, has exposed:

There’s a mismatch between the jobs that are available, at least in our portfolio, and the people that we see out there,” Mr Spiegel told the Financial Times. “There is a shortage (of workers with the right skills.)” … a recent survey from Manpower, the employment agency, found that 52 percent of leading US companies reported difficulties in recruiting essential staff, up from 14 percent in 2010.

German education is known for its rigor and high standards. But more importantly: The Germans run the same sort of schools I attended growing up in Israel, where, because no pedagogue believes all kids are created equal, students are streamed into different tracks.

Wikipedia:

… German secondary education includes five types of school. The Gymnasium is designed to prepare pupils for university education and finishes with the final examination Abitur, after grade 12 or 13. The Realschule has a broader range of emphasis for intermediate pupils and finishes with the final examination Mittlere Reife, after grade 10; the Hauptschule prepares pupils for vocational education and finishes with the final examination Hauptschulabschluss, after grade 9 or 10 and the Realschulabschluss after grade 10. There are two types of grade 10: one is the higher level called type 10b and the lower level is called type 10a; only the higher level type 10b can lead to the Realschule and this finishes with the final examination Mittlere Reife after grade 10b. This new path of achieving the Realschulabschluss at a vocationally-oriented secondary school was changed by the statutory school regulations in 1981 – with a one-year qualifying period. During the one-year qualifying period of the change to the new regulations, pupils could continue with class 10 to fulfil the statutory period of education. After 1982, the new path was compulsory, as explained above. Other than this, there is the Gesamtschule, which combines the approaches. There are also Förderschulen/Sonderschulen. One in 21 pupils attends a Förderschule.[2][3] Nevertheless the Förderschulen/Sonderschulen can also lead, in special circumstances, to a Hauptschulabschluss of both type 10a or type 10b, the latter of which is the Realschulabschluss. German children only attend school in the morning. There is no provision for serving lunch. There is a lot more homework, heavy emphasis on the “three R’s” and very few extracurricular activities.

The secondary school I attended (I grew up in Israel) provided a vocational track, just like German schools do, where kids with no academic aptitude acquired useful skills and graduated with a diploma in woodwork, welding, sewing, etc. The academically inclined were also streamed into grades in accordance with aptitude. You could take math, for example, on different levels of difficulty. We had a special math genius class of 5 kids with super high IQs. Nobody pretended everyone was equal. Kids were kept busy with the kind of work that was best suited to their abilities, not egos.

On the other hand, “evidence of how stupid American students (and teachers) are has been slowly amassing. The creeping cretinism is confirmed by reports like “A Nation at Risk.” Especially indicative are the below-international-average scores of 17-year-olds. One out of four children is dropping out and not graduating. High schools have been so dumbed down that even average students sit bone idle. Fully 50 percent of students with IQs that border on mental retardation manage to pass. Unlike our European counterparts, American universities, colleges and even corporations spend a fortune on teaching students elementary things they should have learned in high school. College professors attest to a decline in the quality of students entering colleges.” (“THE WORM IN THE APPLE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION”)

In the US of Obama’s “Yes We Can” and Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” all kids are treated as equally able. If a subject appeals to a certain cohort—or selects for smarts—why then, we cancel it; make it fun by sucking out the hard work required to master it; make it girl/minority/Deep-Space-alien friendly. New Math replaces eternal math; social studies does away with history, etc.

Look, libertarians, yes, public schools and unions are a big part of the problem. As important, however, is the country’s progressive pedagogic philosophy, which dominates in private schools as well.

We’ve ditched canon and core curriculum. We’re replaced reason with sentimentality and attitude. We’ve manned our schools with females to the exclusion of strong male role models. I would not wish to be the parent of a young, hyper-active boy drawn to the hard sciences, in schools full of females, bent on promoting every mythical, politically correct orthodoxy that pervades the Zeitgeist.

What Herr Spiegel has observed is the end result of decades of these low or no standards.

UPDATE I (June 21): Abelard Lindsey: My sources confirm your point about HR. But you’re wrong about the MBA managers. They are no better: these are technically clueless individuals, hot-housed in America’s pinko business schools, who have no place screening for technical and temperamental competence. However, America’s most famed corporations have screening processes that go on for days and have a candidate interview in front of many higher-ups. One particularly brilliant friend, a genius who works for Apple, was regaled for days with the intellectual equivalent of a special ops training unit. He loved every minute of it. (I would have crumbled.)

Alas, the largest and richest corporation work a lot like government, the connections between private property and profits having been long since loosened. These giants consist of many fiefdoms, layered with deadwood, and governed often by nepotistic hiring practices. It takes massive failures, as Microsoft’s Kin project surely was, to instigate some corrections (but seldom any firings).