Category Archives: Politics

Updated: The Authentic Ass-troturfers

Conspiracy, Constitution, Democrats, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, Healthcare, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics

“The outcry against state takeover of medicine is in the best of traditions. Yet the malpracticing media are discounting the fractious town-hall participants as proxies for corporate and political interests. And worse.”

“The Authentic Ass-troturfers,” my new WND.COM column, details these execrable efforts by the left-liberal news filters, and their political master. Yes, “Cronkite died the other day; news coverage croaked a long time ago.”

You’ll find particularly patronizing the manner in which MSNBC “Anchors David ‘Shyster’ and Tamron Hall inferred that, rather than ‘un-American,’ the turbulent town hallers were a little simple.”

To quote from the column, What “led our sleuth in a C Cup to ‘inform’ her viewers that the mutinous multitudes were muddled beyond belief”? “Town hall attendees seemed to be harping on the proper role of government, and not on the minutia of the messiah’s medical plan.”

Lo! Making a philosophical point instead of a utilitarian one—now that is dimwitted. …”

Read the complete column, “The Authentic Ass-troturfers,” in which I make sure to further dim the debate, at least as Tamron Hall of MSNBC would see it.

You can catch the weekly fare every Saturday on Taki’s Magazine too, where the reading is really good.

Update (August 14): BECK. I like Glenn. I’ve said so often. But you come to this space for reason, not for platitudes. That’s not going to change. If you like the Beck blackboard and its “delusional diagrams of multiplying giant ACORNS,” you have to consider the merits of Maddow’s Memos, and other conspiracies lurking behind what to this here rational individual are “really unremarkable events and associations.”

You can’t gravitate to Glenn’s conspiracies while rejecting Rachel’s.

And here’s the mundane truth Glenn’s conspiracies obscure (from the post “On Conspiracy Theories”):

The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.
Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold.

Politics is dirty; there is no secret or conspiracy to it. Glenn’s nonsense, aside being tedious and taking away from the important issues of the day that he could be covering, encourages a sort of childish faith in the institute of government: “Omigod: look what they’re up to. I’m going to cry if they don’t start being nice to me.”

The Founders bequeathed a limited government because they did not believe, like Glenn appears to, that filthy politics is so unusual and conspiratorial. It’s the norm! Stray away from their vision of the corrupting properties of power, and you wander into the real of Democratic Pollyanna politics.

True, Rachel finds conspiracy in private interactions, even though these do not use coercion or access public funds. So, I guess, she is worse. Still, that’s not much of a consolation for adherents of Glenn’s latest obsession.
Incidentally, why does Glenn not sketch a diagram of the military-media-congressional-industrial complex? It’s plenty meaty. I’ll tell you why: Warfare, any warfare, so long as it involves our sainted men in uniform and their chiefs and generals, is sacred to our Glenn.

Lesson: people see conspiracy where they want to.

Paglia’s Statist Prattle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The State

Camille Paglia is the scrappy Democrat adored by conservatives. On politics, she conceals heavy-duty statism behind the fig leaf of libertarianism. In the realm of art and culture, she substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. Remember her clapped out claptrap about the significance of drag-queen iconography? What she knows about music is positively dangerous; she has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist”? The Paglia prattle about the mismanaged sexuality of well-worn, ugly monsters like Britney Spears, here, was as worn and uninteresting as anything Gloria Steinem has ever mustered.

This month’s canned performance, “Obama’s healthcare horror,” can be followed from the conservative, Drudge newssite. (The “edgy” stuff about nude depictions is supposed to give this bit of banality a cutting-edge feel. Please! How original do you have to be to admit that Sharon Stone takes a good picture?)

Here’s a quick précis of the essay that instantiates Paglia’s hallmark statism and proclivity for the stylistic over the substantive:

• She voted for Obama so that he could repair the country’s IMAGE overseas. She’s pleased with that choice.
• She has complaints as far as his domestic policy, but they concern strategy rather than philosophy.
• A case in point: “healthcare reform,” which she thinks is the most important thing confronting dying America. It, of course, has been merely mishandled.
• The once beloved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer in Camille’s good books.
• Congress is “chaotic, rapacious, and solipsistic”; Obama is usually “sober and deliberative.”
• It is the State’s responsibility to see to it that an individual in “a major crisis,” or “earning at or below a median income,” has healthcare.
• More tired odes to the 1960s and the Democratic Party as a relic of that great era.
• Poor Camille is disillusioned. She never saw it coming: “I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic Party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”
• Camille beats on breast because her “party is drifting toward a soulless collectivism.” Pray tell, Ms. Paglia, what would a soulful collectivism look like?
• Obamby failed to engender an “in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.” Another one of Ms. Paglia’s contradictory spasms; big pharma/business bad; big Obama good.
• On the Gates Case; she has nothing new to say that has not already been said by Pat Buchanan and this column.
• “The basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm.” That was said by your host first.

(The same goes for Paglia’s eventual evaluation of the blogosphere; it came well after mine and only echoed what I had said in “The Importance of Boundaries.”)

THERE ARE A FEW paragraphs that are poignant. For instance: “The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.”

Overall, you’re better off watching the pictures linked, instead.

Used Car Sales Tactics

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Politics, Socialism

SEX. GREED. FEAR. These are the time-honored sales tactics B. Hussein is using in pushing his healthscare Obamination. Who better to vouch for Obama’s used-car sales methods than a used-car salesman entertained on Neil Cavuto’s FoxNews program? B. Hussein got top marks from Cavuto’s car guy for hyping the sex appeal of the deal (cheap, good), for baffling Boobus with the numbers, and for playing on the fears we all harbor about our own mortality, and hammering home the urgency of the “deal.”. I could not find the segment on YouTube, but Don Imus invited Cavuto on his show to talk about it. Listen here.

In last week’s column, “And Now for Something Completely Different,” I mentioned the Mayo Clinic, which, as one of our readers pointed out, Obama had confused with the Mao Clinic:

Obama—who, to paraphrase poetry critic William Logan, never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying—promised that his medical system would be a well-oiled machine much like the Mayo Clinic is. There, “experts have figured out the most effective treatments and eliminated waste and unnecessary procedures,” preached the president.

Unlike Mephisto’s Medicare, the key to Mayo—and many such private not-for-profits—is not the all-knowing, demigod experts. Mayo clinic operates as smoothly as it does because it is a private clinic, where market forces and a mission combine to motivate dedicated entrepreneurs and professionals to minimize losses and maximize profits, so as to plow these back into an organization in which all are invested.

What’s the government’s mission? To keep Americans in the missionary position?

Well, what do you know: as the Washington Times reports, this superb clinic is panning Obamacare.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Barack Obama, Economy, EU, Healthcare, Iran, Neoconservatism, Politics, Regulation, Russia, Socialism

A girl has to have some fun: In my new WND.COM column, “And Now For Something Completely Different,” I invite you to laugh along about the EO (The European Onion), “A-Jad,” Geithner (the gift that keeps giving), and Obama who “never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying”:

“Although Obama has appointed more czars in six months than Russia’s Romanov Dynasty had occasion to anoint over three centuries, he is still missing a Vegetable Czar. If he acts quickly, Barack might be able to recruit a cheap VC with experience from The European Onion (formerly the EU).

The EO has been regulating fresh produce for quite some time. Duly, the Brussels Sprouts that run the Continent had barred “curly cucumbers, crooked carrots and mottled mushrooms – any odd-looking fruit and vegetables” — from Europe’s markets and supermarkets

But things are about to change. As the BBC News reported in a burst of good cheer, “July 1 marks the return to our shelves of the curved cucumber and the knobbly carrot.” Indeed, Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has finally disavowed the rules that were introduced to ensure common standards among EU vegetables, “but are regarded by critics as examples of Euro-madness.”

Said the Patron Saint of ‘wonky’ vegetables…”

The complete column is “And Now For Something Completely Different.”

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine every Saturday.