My response to a (at the time) gloating liberal (who later became a fan of the site, and an Obama critic), who wrote, in reply to my insistence that Obama was not then a “good man”:
My point was about the delicious (but yet unseen by you) irony of your overheated and lofty statement about not uttering even a slightly flattering word about Obama as it speaks to something classical liberals need to put at the top of their priority list: namely, a refusal to allow that tactics of progressives to pass unchallenged or even to be celebrated. That just cracks my shit up.
To which my rejoinder was directly to the point, I think:
I never said one can’t utter flattering things about Obama. I uttered a few myself. What I said was, calling him a “good man” when he has shown himself to be the opposite […] is dangerous. Because it wasn’t done on Obama’s behalf, first off; and second […] it does not magically insulate us.
Even now, it has been used by lefty trolls as a wedge: they take [Obama’s GOP adulator’s] side for now, but the minute [these same political “pragmatists”] begin criticizing Obama’s policies, [they’ll] quickly realize that the gesture bought [them] nothing but further derision. It was a sign of weakness pretending to be a show of moral strength. It was a gambit, and I think a bad one, tactically and strategically speaking.
I have not changed my opinion.
[…]
I am comfortable in my assessment for now. Obama can change and become a good man; he can distance himself from domestic terrorists and race hustlers and anti-Semites and Maoists; he can not presume to rewrite the Constitution, or use academic fraud to try to sway court decisions pertaining to fundamental rights; he can learn the role of the judiciary and promise to respect that. He can treat critical speech as critical speech, not as provocation to destroy his opponent — often by proxy.
When I see it, I’ll acknowledge it. Until then, calling him a good man is disingenuous. And I should think you’d prefer my candor over anothers calculated machinations born of a desire to have his “party” seen in a certain way by people who are politically retarded to begin with.
I want to fix the retardation; others, it seems, wish to pander to it.
So. Chickens coming home to roost, it seems. And all while I was kept from issuing widespread warnings, of which I at one point was considered more than capable.
It is what it is. Deal with it.
OneRepublic – Counting Stars
I kinda felt for ya in you twitter line yesterday, trying to persuade those rino fellas that thing they thought a lollipop is actually the bullety end of a gun they’re licking on. They just won’t have it though. Until they learn the hard way, that is — when the great line from the Thomas More character pops in their mind: once the law has all been cut down and the devil turns round on you, where would you hide . . .?
And what it is is pretty damn perspicacious.
To paraphrase good ol’ Denny Green, he is who we thought he was.
>KNOCK ON WOOD
(PART ONE)
As a child when did I first hear about trout
fishing in America? From whom? I guess it
was a stepfather of mine.
Summer of 1942.
The old drunk told me about trout fishing.
When he could talk, he had a way of describing
trout as if they were a precious and intelligent
metal.
, Silver ,is not a good adjective to describe
what I felt when he told me about trout fishmg.
I’d like to get it right.
Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout.
The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry
and heat.
Imagine Pittsburgh.
A steel that comes from trout, used to make
buildings, trains and tunnels.
The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!<
Not that this has happened yet, or even that it will happen perhaps, but:
“Even now, it has been used by lefty trolls as a wedge: they take [
Obama’s GOP adulator’sGlenn Beck’s] side for now, but the minute [these same political “pragmatists”Beck] begin[s] criticizing Obama’spoliciesamnesty executive action, [they’llwe’ll ] quickly realize thattheBeck’s gesture bought [themus] nothing but further derision. It was a sign of weakness pretending to be a show of moral strength. It was a gambit, and I think a bad one, tactically and strategically speaking.”Food for (admittedly politically reductivist) thought.
obama is a ghetto trash by way of harvard piece of shit
he will always be a piece of shit
he internalized this at a young age when his slutty mom left him with his bitch grandma to smoke weed and not get laid for years on end
fuck barack obama with an aids dick
>Food for (admittedly politically reductivist) thought.<
try running "george will" in your fake narrative?
>It was a sign of weakness pretending to be a show of moral strength. <
that be fu territory 'cause msm ain't showing the border stuff. good allan mary mapes and dan rather.
george will is pimping for tom donohue these days
dude, seriously
how many lithesome young latino boys can one man conceivably have need of?
It works with George will too, only I suspect that George’s criticism will amount to “grave concern” over executive overreach, the blame for which no doubt beinge laid at the feet of the conservative base for preventing the GOP controlled house from reaching a bipartisan compromise.
@”
newrouter says July 29, 2014 at 11:28 pm ”
>I remember with particular amusement, people with three-colored hats fishing in the dawn<
Ah, Mr Brautigan. A dude who committed suicide is still an important component of my sanity. Thanks, nr.
Ironically, I had to google the line to see if it was one of mine or one of his. That one is his.
while we’re speaking of overrated pieces of shit
I just made it almost half-way through Gravity
– I’ve observed that at times trying to be too cute by half is often a sign of fear.
To quote John Foxx of Ultravox: I can feel the fear in the Western World.
All this talk of impeachment coming from … the White House.
Why would Republicans want to impeach this POTUS ?
Is the White House saying that the POTUS is engaged in some “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” ?
If so, how can they work there ? Why no resignations ?
Is Beck still a thing?
It’s all well and good to do something with certain intentions, but such gestures play out on multiple levels and we all know, or ought to know, the dangers of poorly constructed messages in a world full of malicious reinterpreters.
Under those circumstances it’s best to keep your messages unmixed — and I think that’s Beck’s error.
“He means well” is a piss-poor defense at the best of times.
I think Beck alienated allies and lost his near central position in speaking about this issue. I think his instinct displayed when slapped by angry followers was to curse them and send them away and try to replace them with their opposite numbers, which he has since backed off on.
I don’t think he’s as influential with the border issues as he was before this started. If he thinks the humanitarian gestures and cries of “they’re children” (sure, children works in the Trayvon sense of the word) are more important than keeping pressure on the federal government to enforce its own law at the border, then fine.
I’ve avoided criticizing his gesture beyond mentioning my thoughts on his early and rather bitterly off kilter appearance on Megyn Kelly and his day of berating his listeners for reacting wrongly to his work. Glenn is Glenn and he has Dana Loesch to bat for him. The real problem here is not him. It’s non-enforcement of our border by design and intent. The non-enforcement is being carried out by idiots with no sense of consequences or prudential responsibility who see a chance to gain a 20 year advantage at the polls and don’t carer how many ghettos they need to slap together and graves they have to fill to do it.
I do wish Glenn had handled things differently and reacted differently to his followers demanding more from him than a chance to follow him in…whatever. He did calm down after his initial “the beatings with continue until morale improves” moments.
The problem with Glenn from my perspective is reliability. You never know just what he’ll be like after the next epiphany. I am always waiting for a shoe to drop with him and watching him teeter about at what seems to be critical moments. On balance though he is still focused on being a force for anti-progressive push back and still anti-centralized-authoritarian-statism. He still calls out lawlessness in the bureaucracy, and enforcement and congress when he sees it.
So I have doubts but I’m not condemning Beck as a lying sellout like David Frum, Colin Powell, or Charles Johnson.
Nor is he a mushy angry/whiny pendulum who swings between being all crudely cut raw-meat with a side of fearless edginess one second and then transforms into a bottomless fountain of snooty, ‘shocked to the fainting couch with a paper fan’ concern trolling and disappointed sniffing about the anti-intellectual loser cult of the tea party like Ace of Spades. (And sometimes Ace even mixes the rolls up and goes edgy against the right. You can’t credibly complain about cheap seats theater politics one day, and then call Rick Santorum the pope’s rubber stealing Theocrat the next.Not even under an H. L. Mencken quote about throat slitting, that gets forgotten about anytime Ace want to paint the tea party side as the stupid violent crazy side of the political debate.)
I think the problem is more the interpretation of his messages than those he has actually delivered. His political/policy stand on this is “Secure the border and send them home.” His private citizen/Christian stance is that we are commanded to be charitable and to service those in need.
These messages are not in conflict. They are being presented as being in conflict by those who insist on conflating and distorting them. Properly presented, they’re the winning argument for squashing proggy halfwits who say stupid shit that allows for responses like this.
If you’re equating government policy with private charity, you’re doing it wrong because you’re doing it proggy style.
The private sphere has been relentlessly attacked by progressivism, so successfully, in a sense, that any private charity nowadays stands like a species of redundancy in comparison to the vast sums seized by coercive government means and distributed by government expertise (this expression, of course, is made from the progressive point of view, which maintains that decisions of distribution are only rightly, i.e., justly, made by experts who know better than private persons or private societies what justice is). The ‘just’ distribution can only be determined by the enlightened jurists, the experts, within the politico-scientific class.
To the extent that there is any lack in Beck’s presentation of the issue, we might say he doesn’t focus plentifully enough on the existential challenge the Alinksyites pose to our elemental conditions, the primary condition in this issue being citizenship or the meaning of the citizen which is called into question upon the erasure of the border.
People going about their private business in their day by day concerns won’t voluntarily be keen on stopping themselves to rethink the elements at the roots of our social and political conduct, since as elements these relationships are presumed to be stable and enduring, whereas the Alinskyite has embarked on a knowing program to “problematize” (their word) all such things. So: border, sovereignty, marriage, sexual identity, rule of law, ally, enemy, etc. — if it is fundamental, it is on the target list.
There is no nature, so there are no natures. Stability is an illusion. All things are subject to alteration, even at a whim, the whim being among the simplest demonstrations of the proposition that nature isn’t, simply. Social construct, they maintain, is the order of a day. Doubt them? Just watch as yet another rug is jerked from beneath the feet of the sheep who peacefully graze.
Just watch as John Boehner and Co. are forced to abjure impeachment, washing their hands of the Constitution, while citing impeachable offenses as they attempt to defend their absurd law-suit to call on the courts to do the job of Congress, enforcing the silly and abandoned Constitution for them. Just watch the delight on the faces of the Alinskyites as the opposition party does the work of abandoning the Constitution for them, all for the sake of avoiding the mockery of a complicit media. These nominal Republicans have unwittingly jumped themselves into the spin-cycle of a washing machine.
They are utterly disoriented — by their own doing! — with nothing, nothing! to catch hold of.
Fools? Or cunning collaborators?
Looks like a difference without distinction.
By design.
Heh.
Preferring self-administered electric shock to sitting and thinking!
Perfect.
People see it as a humanitarian issue because the open-borders people win when it’s framed that way. In reality it’s a national security issue and it’s less damaging in the long run to treat it that way.
Unfortunately when the fate of civilizations is decided within the span of a child’s tears, the stage is set for millions to weep.
Quiescence.
Cause like with Jack Benny — “Your money or your life.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“I’m thinking . . . . . . . I’m thinking.”
Humanitarian issues are the purview of charity, the goodness of our hearts. Security issues are the purview of government. Or, as Beck likes to frame it, the government must provide justice not mercy.
Further, the government is causing more humanitarian crisis than relief.
The robber never bothers to point out that “or your life” isn’t entirely accurate. In reality it’s, “Your money, or your life AND your money.”
Heh, the robber didn’t read John Locke — or if he did, it isn’t in his narrow interest to let on.
I’ve been contemplating all the options we have for pressuring the governments south of us to stop letting this go on, and to STFU about giving them more money when we’re already hemorrhaging the stuff.
We could send those countries back to the Stone Age without firing a shot.
Until he runs into a comedian from the vaudeville era.
I’m not inclined to count on such governments to be either competent or compliant. Hell, We can’t count on ours!
Build. The. Damn. Fence.
Moat with alligators? Fine, let’s have a moat with alligators. Whatever it takes.
If we dig out Locke’s conclusion, what does he say? I think he says something like [I gist] ** Kill him, kill the robber at the first declaration he makes that he would take your purse, for he has just as assuredly declared in the doing of that that he will take your life. It is your natural right to keep your life: therefore you may by right defend it. **
Melville presents, I believe, much the same condition in Billy Budd, where Budd follows Locke’s view in action. There, however, Melville resuscitates the tragic view of human life, for though Budd does instant justice to Claggart, to himself and indeed, to his shipmates, the order of the city (the ship) cannot survive the purity of Budd’s deed. So Budd must hang.
So would we, were we to act toward the Alinskyites as Budd acts toward Claggart, though the act may be as pure as the driven snow.
Whence, we may note, the framers’ resort to impeachment.
President Swampy volunteering to be bait would satisfy me.