| Wednesday,
June 9, 2010 The election is over without spectacular results
so far as I have heard. No incumbent Member of Congress lost a seat in the
primaries, as many Tea Party people had hoped and a few had predicted.
Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas won in a runoff with the Lieutenant
Governor. True she just barely won in contrast to her 84% in the primary 6
years ago, but win she did, despite the fixed intention of the unions to
dump her in the primary because she wasn't for card check. Come the general
election it will be interesting to see what develops, since her Republican
opponent won't be for card check either.
In summary: it's no time to relax. The election results are good news,
but not great news. The trend is toward the conservative alternatives --
in California the Republicans all ran on platforms of "I'm more
conservative than he is" -- but they also cut each other up pretty badly,
when it would have made more sense for Whitman to concentrate a lot more
of that negative advertising on Brown rather than Poizner. Poizner and
Whitman both ran as conservatives, but spent most of their money pounding
the other as not having always see the light. No surprise there. It's not
as if either had always been disciples of Bill Buckley and Russell Kirk.
After all, neither were the voters. Buckley's intent in founding National
Review all those years ago was to stand in the path of history shouting
Stop! He had his effect, but the leftward lurch was merely slowed, not
halted. Now the piper has to be paid.
The fact is that California isn't a far right state, and Whitman's
campaign is going to need a great deal of care. She'll run center right,
fiscal conservative but on social issues not so much.
As to the rest of the nation, I suppose we were all hoping for more
thrilling results. That doesn't change the fact that next November is
critical. If the lurch toward European style socialism is to be diverted,
it will have to be done then. The country is waking up to that.
=========================
Dorothy Rabinowitz has an interesting column in
today's Wall Street Journal, "The
Alien in the White House." One supposes that it will not be long
before the charges of racism begin to fly, but that isn't her point. Her
point is alienation. Extract:
It is a White House that has focused
consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is
euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States
frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his
counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans
with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus
that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New
Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York.
This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of
Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered
from the darkness of the Bush years.
There's considerably more.
===================
I try to keep up with Fred, but I missed this one.
Fortunately Colonel Couvillon reminded me:
Fred on Everything
Fred is an acquired taste, but this is an excellent
article:
<http://fredoneverything.net/Commentators.shtml>
David Couvillon Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps,
Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs;
Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de
Hot Dog Excellance; Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work
Fred's point about Commentator's Disease is well made. The particular
manifestation is Beltway Disease: those who live inside the Washington
Beltway, over time, come to the view that the only important things that
happen in the world are those that happen inside the Beltway. The only
leader I have ever known who didn't succumb to that view was the late
General Dan Graham.
Fred goes further in pointing out that commentators are all
bright people and they only talk to other bright people, and get an
exaggerated view of human capability.
Some commentators urge letting people invest
their Social Security taxes in the stock market. To them it is a question
of abstract freedom and probably the Federalist papers. The commentators
are smart enough to invest money. I’ll guess that at least half the
population isn’t. Go into the tit bar (does it still exist) in Waldorf,
Maryland, and ask the dump-truck drivers and nail-pounders what NASDAQ is.
Liberal commentators want everyone to go to
college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think
that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people
have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made
it.
The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in
an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a
Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from
discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost
anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost
nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her
life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.
It's a powerful argument; but is it true? The temptation is to
"compassionate conservatism" which is sometimes known as paternalism.
There are a lot of people who live their lives in quiet desperation and
who are never going to achieve anything of national importance. It's not
true that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
It is true enough that most of us -- by us I mean me,
Fred, those who read this web site -- spend most of our time conversing with
other smart people, and few of us have more than very brief interaction with
people of IQ 90 or less (16% of the population). Half of the people are by
definition below average, but I would suspect that most of the people we
know are IQ 110 or above -- 16% of the population. As Fred observes, about
20% of the population has the brains for going to college. Those are the
people we generally know. But it hardly makes everyone else stupid.
Compassion is all very well, but it can't actually change
the way things work:
I often see victims of
Commentator’s Disease arguing against the minimum wage on abstract grounds
of economic theory. It is what commentators do—bandy abstractions, railing
for or against Keynes, assaulting their ideological opponents with pointed
phrases. They have never had to do the arithmetic of forty times the minimum
wage minus taxes minus bus fare minus rent and gotta pay the cable because
it is the only thing they have after work. They have never had to choose
between the electric bill and a new coat as winter comes on.
The problem is that the main effect of a minimum wage is to
see to it that teenagers and the unskilled never get jobs in the first
place, or if they do, they'll be under the table jobs. I don't know many
people who would argue against need, or that the national minimum wage is
absurdly high. The question is, if you can't make a profit by hiring someone
at that minimum wage, why would you hire anyone? There's no great reward for
having employees. It's actually a fairly large hassle.
And yet this nation was built largely on the concept of freedom.
"...a wise and frugal
government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which
shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry
and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it
has earned. This is the sum of good government." Thomas Jefferson
When most government is local, many more have a chance to
participate. When the government is not trying to do everything, there is
more room for those who will never found a big company, or make a huge
salary, or be on Oprah, to do and feel good about. At one time one did not
need to be greatly successful to be a pillar of the community. Instead one
could be concerned with the waitress who has nothing. As to the Federalist
Papers, I do remind Fred that they were originally published as letters to
the editors of newspapers.
===================
Wednesday TOP
Current Mail
|
