I’ve noticed a couple of requests that I add a Tweet button to the blog. You may recall that my technical skills are abominable, and that I have to await my tech helper on that score. So this is just to let you know I’m working on it, but it may take a while.
Also, a question: would a Facebook button be a good idea, too?
I was at a doctor’s office today and had to sit in the waiting room for a few minutes, listening to the blah-blah-blah noise pollution of CNN. They were crowing about how terrible Romney is and how great Obama’s been doing; no surprise there.
I rarely listen to CNN except when forced to, in doctor’s officers and airports and such (in fact, I don’t listen to TV news very much at all). I’ve become so accustomed to the CNN drone in those settings that it rarely occurs to me to ask: why always CNN? Why not Fox for a change?
Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a public venue in the entire US where the default station might be Fox. But I certainly haven’t noticed one. Nor am I saying that public waiting rooms should play us cable news stations at all; I’d much prefer silence, especially nowadays, when at least half the people carry their entertainment with them in the form of iPods and iPhones and the like (even the occasional book is sometimes spotted, a rara avis).
But it strikes me that this hegemony of CNN as public background music is part of the reason for the nation’s leftward drift. It reminds me ever-so-slightly (or maybe not so very slightly) of the telescreen in 1984, which (if I remember correctly) could not be turned off, or the mind-shaping recordings that the residents of Brave New World had to listen to for their “education.”
“What’s the lesson this afternoon?” he asked.
“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”
The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.
“Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let’s have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.”
At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
“…all wear green,” said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, “and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
“Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfuly glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able…”
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
“They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.”
…some plans for another post, but I have a busy afternoon ahead of me. So I thought I’d give you an open thread in the meantime to discuss whatever you want. There’s so much happening (most of it upsetting), so here’s your chance to talk.
Here’s one piece you might want to take a look at (hat tip: Ace). It echoes some thoughts we’ve discussed here recently. And then take a look at this piece by Sarah Hoyt, who still thinks the American people are not that dumb.
I hope she’s right, but I have very serious doubts.
I often write about political change and changers. It’s almost axiomatic that most political change occurs in the direction of left to right rather than the other way around, with the caveat that in young adulthood there is quite a bit of change from right (or center) to left, and even from left to more left.
On that latter point, I remember in my own larger (non-nuclear) family, I had some distant relatives whose parents were pro-Soviet but whose young adult offspring became pro-Chinese Communist during the late 60s, and this created a remarkable amount of discord within the family.
But I digress.
Recently a reader alerted me to Jeremiah Goulka’s right-to-left change story. It’s hard to say whether his tale is representative of most right-to-left change, since I’ve read so few stories of that nature, but on reading it I think it’s fairly easy to see why he was susceptible to that particular transformation.
Goulka’s Republicanism was an inherited one, rather than having been arrived at through independent thinking. He was a Republican through osmosis, having absorbed his family ethos. A great deal of early political orientation is like that, so Goulka is hardly unique in that regard. But questioning one’s political inheritance often begins in college or even high school for many people; Goulka seems to have had a delayed political adolescence and rebellion.
Note the prevalence of the word “we” when Goulka describes what he thought back when he was a Republican. He’s talking about his family and himself as though they were a single entity. I’m not sure of his age when he had his political conversion from right to left, but he seems to have been a college student intern for Denny Hastert some time between 1995 and 1998, and then reports that Abu Graib (2004) was a special turning point for him, which would probably place him somewhere in his mid- to late-20s at the time. Also, he says he voted for Kerry that year “out of spite,” which indicates both immaturity and emotionality.
Goulka’s description of his family’s Republicanism reads like the left’s caricature of Republicanism (although he makes it clear they were not racists). It’s almost like it was designed to make the Salon audience feel good about themselves and have their stereotypes about Republicans validated. (Not that he’s lying about it; such people do exist in the GOP):
We believed in noblesse oblige, for we saw ourselves as part of a natural aristocracy, even if we hadn’t been born into it.
Another turning point for Goulka was Katrina. Note again the emotionalism with which he looks at the issue, plus the parroting of MSM reporting and liberal talking points (such as, for example, Bush’s callousness):
I had fallen in love with New Orleans during a post-law-school year spent in Louisiana clerking for a federal judge, and the Bush administration’s callous (non-)response to the storm broke my heart. I wanted to help out, but I didn’t fly helicopters or know how to do anything useful in a disaster, so just I sat glued to the coverage and fumed ”” until FEMA asked federal employees to volunteer to help. I jumped at the chance.
The piece goes on to describe more of Goulka’s previous naivete (“Not having experienced it, I had always assumed that government force was only used against guilty people.”—this is someone who’d gone to law school??) Whether this guy was a Republican or a Democrat, in each incarnation he was a lightweight as a thinker.
Goulka went on to spend three weeks in Iraq during the surge, and was shocked to discover the American war effort was imperfect! Naive doesn’t even begin to cover it. Now Goulka seems to assume that all Republicans are as naive as he was:
Today, I wonder if Mitt Romney drones on about not apologizing for America because he, like the former version of me, simply isn’t aware of the U.S. ever doing anything that might demand an apology.
Goulka describes himself in the following passage, but he assumes (naively; old habits die hard) that he’s describing Republicans in general:
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.
The idea that the foundation of Republican thought is a belief the world is a perfect moral meritocracy is odd, to say the least. Goulka seems never to have heard of the idea that one can have compassion for a person’s plight and yet not think that throwing more and more money at that person, and encouraging more and more helplessness, dependency, and entitlement is the best way to be of assistance. In other words, he seems unfamiliar with the underpinnings of conservative thought.
And of course the commenters at Salon congratulate Goulka for finally seeing the light and entering the reality-based community.
…and offers the definitive proof that he is fundamentally insane.
[Hat tip: Maetenloch at Ace’s.]
Remember back to when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie seemed a strange and unfathomable aberration?
This.
[ADDENDUM: Gee, I think the Libyan president just insulted Ms. Rice.]
Audacious bot who just wants to share the love—and the French Revolution:
Simply a smiling visitor here to share the love. btw outstanding design . “Audacity, more audacity and always audacity.” by Georges Jacques Danton
And by the way, Danton really did say that.
Danton said quite a few other things as well. Here’s what he said right before he was guillotined:
“I leave it all in a frightful welter,” he said; “not a man of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the government of men!” The phrase ‘a poor fisherman’ was almost certainly a reference to Saint Peter, Danton having reconciled to Catholicism. In reference to his belief that Robespierre would meet a similar fate, his last words to the crowd were, “My only regret is that I am going before that rat Robespierre.”
A reader alerted me to the following, written by someone who purports to have had a long career as a US Foreign Service Officer. If correct, it sheds some light on certain questions that have come up in recent discussions on this blog in connection with the security (or lack thereof) at the Benghazi consulate:
The press has spent a lot of time speculating about marines. Not all embassies have them, and few consulates do. Contrary to what you see in Hollywood movies, an marine detachment at an embassy (MSG) is generally small: six to eight marines, at times a few more. Their job is to protect the most sensitive parts of the embassy. They are rarely expected to be the force that stops an assault on the outer walls. That is the responsibility of the host nation. I remember being inside an embassy on many occasions, with a howling mob of thousands of irate Muslims outside, hoping that the host country would fulfill that responsibility. If they did not, and things such as high walls, and barbed wire could not hold back the invaders, we had drilled, over and over and over, the things we all would do to protect classified materials and ourselves as best we could. Different embassies have different rules of engagement for the marines. In the ones I ran they had very instructions on the use of deadly force. They had weapons, and those were loaded.
The Obama White House is hiding its manifest incompetence and failures of judgement behind the excuse of lack of “actionable intel.” The White House claims there was no “advance warning” of an attack in Libya and presumably Egypt. This, of course, is nonsense. As noted before, there rarely is highly detailed advance warning of a specific event; when you have that sort of rare quality intel you often can do something to avoid the incident in the first place. If, for example, you know of an assassination attempt on the Ambassador at point X on date X, at a minimum you make sure the Ambassador is not there then. In one case in which I was heavily involved, we had exceptionally good intel that the bad guys were building a giant truck bomb to use in a public event in which we would be participating; we were able, working with specially vetted local forces and the always great Aussies, to interrupt that construction effort and put away a nice number of evil doers. Most of the time, however, you have to have good people interpreting incomplete and often contradictory information in light of current events and the current operating environment. It is an art, not a science, and it relies on something which seemed missing in the Libya case, i.e., common sense.
Common sense, remains the single most important component in making decisions about security. If the resources did not exist for whatever reason to have a properly set up and secured facility in Benghazi, why was it there? That is a question for the people at State management and for the Secretary. Who approved placing such a weakly defended facility in a highly unstable location? What was the purpose and usefulness of the facility weighed against the risks of having it there? Some bad calls seem to have been made.
A valuable piece of intel seemed to have been ignored: the calendar. Did nobody have access to a calendar? They are readily available. In the missions where I served we always had a keen awareness of the date and the love of terrorists for key dates. Certainly the date 9/11 should have rung some bells. Were people not aware of outside events that could have an impact in Libya? What was the urgent nature of the business that required the Ambassador to be in a remote, hard-to-defend location on 9/11, at a time when any newspaper reader could see the tensions building all over the Muslim world? Canada, for example, had just shut down its Tehran mission and ordered Iranian diplomats in Canada to leave. Why? What was up? I do not want to be unfair but I fail to understand why the Ambassador was in Benghazi on 9/11.
When I was at State, the atmosphere under the Obama misadministration was even more unreal than usual. The fawning over Obama and Hillary Clinton knew no bounds. The press releases and the internal conversations seemed to reflect the nattering of a cult rather than sober deliberations. We would have “serious” people tell us, “The world loves President Obama.” There was a feeling that somehow we were at a magical turning point in the history of humanity.
In addition, Breitbart quotes Colonel David Hunt as saying it would have been Hillary Clinton with the final authority for such decisions, as well as the rules of engagement:
Hunt told Breitbart News that the new State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya, approved and signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton since the 2011 fall of Khadafi’s regime, severely compromised the safety and security of murdered Ambassador Stevens and all American diplomatic staff in Libya.
He also stated that the decision not to staff Benghazi with Marines was made by Secretary of State Clinton when she attached her signature to the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya document. Breitbart News has subsequently learned that under those rules of engagement, Secretary Clinton prohibited Marines from providing security at any American diplomatic installation in Libya…
We allowed a contractor to hire local nationals as security guards, but said they can’t have bullets. This was all part of the point of not having a high profile in Libya.”
Wishful thinking on Hillary and Obama’s part. But common sense is not their specialty.
Here’s the story I’m referring to.
Why does the press think we need to know this?
(a) a story’s a story, and they don’t care whether this exposes him to greater peril.
(b) they figure his enemies already know who he is, so their story doesn’t matter
(c) it’s a smokescreen, because the Feds are actually going to place him in protective custody and/or the witness protection program.
(d) the press doesn’t think at all
(e) some other reason I haven’t thought of yet
Oh, and by the way, remember the early reports that the filmmaker was an Israeli? I wonder how much fact-checking and soul-searching went into that story. When in doubt–the Jooooos!
Barry Rubin has written a piece describing Obama as a new kind of leftist:
Barack Obama is not a communist, a fascist, a Muslim, a Marxist, a Progressive (in the pre-1920s meaning of that word), or even a socialist. Obama and those who control much of America’s academia, mass media, and entertainment industry ”” plus a number of trade unions and hundreds of foundations, think tanks, and front groups ”” are believers in a new, very American form of leftism. It is very statist, very dangerous for freedom, and economically destructive…
So what are we dealing with here? A radical leftist movement pretending to be liberal, growing out of the New Left of the 1960s, painfully aware of how the far left miserably failed in American history, and trying to create a twenty-first century stealth leftism. The first step was to gain hegemony in the key institutions that created ideas, rather than the factories that created material goods. They succeeded brilliantly.
The next step was to shape millions of Americans, especially young Americans, to accept their ideas that the United States was a force for evil in the world, a failed society, a place of terrible racism and hatred for women, and a country where the vast majority didn’t have a fair chance because the system was unfair. In fact, if you take away the varnish rhetoric, they argue that America is a virtual dictatorship of a small minority of wealthy people who just set everything up for their own convenience.
I kept reading Rubin’s piece to see what was so very very new about this, because it just didn’t seem new to me at all. It seemed rather old, actually, and known by the name Fabianism—and in fact, I’ve long thought of Obama as a type of American Fabian.
Who were the Fabians? They were British socialists who got together in the late 19th century and believed in peaceful gradualism:
The Fabian Society is a British socialist organization whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means….
An explanatory note appearing on the title page of the group’s first pamphlet declared:
“For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.”…
The first Fabian Society pamphlets advocating tenets of social justice coincided with the zeitgeist of Liberal reforms during the early 1900s. The Fabian proposals however were considerably more progressive than those that were enacted in the Liberal reform legislation. The Fabians lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917.
There are differences, of course (particularly in foreign policy), as befit a different time and place. But the similarities are striking, as is the fact that the Fabian Society was manned (and womanned) by intellectuals and artists, especially writers.
I’m hardly the first person to make the comparison. Just Google “Obama Fabian” and you’ll see. One of the earliest articles on the subject was this one by Jerry Bowyer, appearing in Forbes around the time of Obama’s 2008 election. I wrote much the same about Obama in October of 2008; although I didn’t actually use the term “Fabian,” that’s what I was referring to.
I’ve never ascribed to the “Obama isn’t intelligent” philosophy. He may not be wise, but he’s very smart about the things that especially interest him. One of these things is political strategy of the Alinsky variety. Another is “progressivism.” A third is how to appear to be moderate and soothing, and thus ingratiate himself with enough of the public to win an election.
[NOTE: The title of this post comes from this song.]
…but I repeat myself.
I’d actually rather he was bullsh**ting us than that he actually believed this sort of naive, arrogant claptrap.