McCain Surrenders To Torture Bill After Torture
By Propaganda Department9/30/2006, 6:25 pm
Despite vociferous claims that torture never works, Arizona senator John McCain helped to pass Bush's new Torture Bill that will allow the CIA to continue violating the Geneva conventions by torturing innocent political prisoners who happen to be Muslims. What did the Bush administration do to break John McCain that a North Vietnamese prison camp couldn't do? A recent leak from the White House establishes beyond doubt that the supposed change of heart came after one of the closed door sessions, at which George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist subdued the maverick senator with a headlock, tied him to a chair, and violated his humanity by subjecting him to cruel and degrading treatment with loud Eminem music, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, and waterboarding.
Resorting to these and other most sinister Skull & Bones initiation techniques known to mankind, the Neocons forced Senator McCain to capitulate and agree to broaden the definitions of "unlawful enemy combatant" and "material support" to include librarians who released copies of "Vagina Monologues" to al-Qaeda members, Starbucks employees who served them nonfat Latte Grande, and any person who has ever thrown a quarter to a Taliban foot soldier, having mistaken him for a homeless person.
Experts predict that these nefarious measures may increase the prison population at Guantanamo Bay to over a hundred million people, which would include absolutely everyone who had ever, wittingly or unwittingly, provided aid and comfort to America's enemies at home and abroad, from Wal-Mart greeters, McDonalds drive-thru operators, Econolodge clerks, phone-sex workers, customer service and technical support representatives, Girl Scouts cookie distributors, to Catherine Zeta Jones who helped terrorists to choose T-Mobile for their wireless needs.
At a press conference following the vote, Senator McCain was asked to explain his surrender on the torture issue, one on which he has been as passionate in the past as Lindsey Graham was on secret evidence.
"I was going to push the Al-Qaeda Bill of Rights instead," McCain replied in a monotonous, robotic voice, bobbing his head back and forth. "But I have learned something important in the last few days. Torture works."
(Special reporting by Mr. Snuggle Bunny & Red Square)
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Thursday, September 28, 2006
They want "Reparations"? Give them Repatriation!
I have yet to understand the continued popularity of the so-called “slave reparations” movement, in the news yet again:
Meanwhile, over at Jeff Goldstein's all around awesome Protein Wisdom site, Darleen Click points out how her ancestors, along with many thousands of other whites, where "indentured servants", which esentially meant slaves for their lifetimes, which were often just as Hobbes put it, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
You are lucky to be here, Darleen. I believe indentured bond servants had lower survival rates than regular slaves. People have a tendency to treat permanent property better than rental property.
David Horowitz also has a very good list of reasons why reparations are a bad idea.
The problem with Mr. Horowitz's reasoning is that it is just that, a reasoned argument to miserable people who cannot be reasoned with. They demand viscerally "gimmie gimmie gimmie", to which I would reply, just as viscerally, "OK, if you hate it here so much, go back to Africa. If it were up to me, I'd have you deported. How do you like that?"
Yes, I would pay Antoinette Harrell and her ilk. Not “reparation” money, but REPATRIATION money. We could haggle over the price, I like $40,000 myself, plus a one way ticket to Cape Town. ("Forty Acres And A Mule” becomes “Forty Thousand And An Airplane Ride.” It would buy a lot of South African rand, too).
In return, I expect Antoinette Harrell and her ilk to leave this country, and never come back, ever.
I pick South Africa because I think Ms. Harrell would like the new regime there quite well, it is industrialized, mostly English speaking, and above all, it is as far away from these United States as she can go.
Remember Liberia? South Africa is more modern and even further away.
If they hate America so much and were “stolen from Mother Africa”, send them back!
(I know, a misnomer, since their ancestors were *not* stolen, they were *traded*, from other black Africans or Arab Muslims, for gold, guns, liquor or other trinkets.)
Of course, the mealy-mouthed liberal Demunist Commiecrats will call this response “racist”, but hearing that charge coming from / about Farrakhanesque people (or fellow travelers like Randall Robinson), who ooze anti-Asian, anti-Semitic, and anti-White hatred, just makes me laugh.
CHICAGO - Lawyers for slave descendants asked a federal appeals court Wednesday to revive a landmark reparations case that demands 17 of the nation’s insurers and banks publicize and pay for their roles in the country’s slave trade.Actually, I take that back. I DO understand the whole reparation movement. It's a way for the America-haters and the moral equivalency crowd (the leftist people who when presented with evidence of the Soviet gulags and mass executions, would reply "and in America, you lynch Negroes") to get their fifteen minutes of fame again.
The case, which names Wall Street behemoths JP Morgan Chase & Co., Aetna Inc., Bank of America, Lehman Brothers and others, says the companies’ predecessors issued loans to slave owners and, in some cases, owned, insured and transported slaves — all at a financial profit that helped ensure their success today.
“We were left in poverty. My family’s hardship and free labor was not in vain,” said Antoinette Harrell, a genealogist from Kentwood, La. who clutched raw cotton as she spoke inside federal court Wednesday.
(Note: Bank of America, while it may have acquired older banks who were involved in the slave trade, was founded long after the abolition of slavery, by A.P. Gianinni, an Italian immigrant! J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and the Chase Manhattan Bank created their financial empires long after slavery as well; perhaps they acquired failed Southern banks, but they can hardly be said to have been involved in the slave trade.)
(and how much of that slavery profit was destroyed by the Civil War? Has dear Ms. Harrell ever heard of Sherman's March? Of course not....)
Meanwhile, over at Jeff Goldstein's all around awesome Protein Wisdom site, Darleen Click points out how her ancestors, along with many thousands of other whites, where "indentured servants", which esentially meant slaves for their lifetimes, which were often just as Hobbes put it, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
You are lucky to be here, Darleen. I believe indentured bond servants had lower survival rates than regular slaves. People have a tendency to treat permanent property better than rental property.
David Horowitz also has a very good list of reasons why reparations are a bad idea.
The problem with Mr. Horowitz's reasoning is that it is just that, a reasoned argument to miserable people who cannot be reasoned with. They demand viscerally "gimmie gimmie gimmie", to which I would reply, just as viscerally, "OK, if you hate it here so much, go back to Africa. If it were up to me, I'd have you deported. How do you like that?"
Yes, I would pay Antoinette Harrell and her ilk. Not “reparation” money, but REPATRIATION money. We could haggle over the price, I like $40,000 myself, plus a one way ticket to Cape Town. ("Forty Acres And A Mule” becomes “Forty Thousand And An Airplane Ride.” It would buy a lot of South African rand, too).
In return, I expect Antoinette Harrell and her ilk to leave this country, and never come back, ever.
I pick South Africa because I think Ms. Harrell would like the new regime there quite well, it is industrialized, mostly English speaking, and above all, it is as far away from these United States as she can go.
Remember Liberia? South Africa is more modern and even further away.
If they hate America so much and were “stolen from Mother Africa”, send them back!
(I know, a misnomer, since their ancestors were *not* stolen, they were *traded*, from other black Africans or Arab Muslims, for gold, guns, liquor or other trinkets.)
Of course, the mealy-mouthed liberal Demunist Commiecrats will call this response “racist”, but hearing that charge coming from / about Farrakhanesque people (or fellow travelers like Randall Robinson), who ooze anti-Asian, anti-Semitic, and anti-White hatred, just makes me laugh.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Ryan Sager asks "Can Conservatism Be Saved?"
Ryan Sager is a columnist for the New York Post and RealClearPolitics.com.
In his new book, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, he points out that there is a growing rift between the "libertarian" conservatives and the "social" conservatives in the Republican Party.
A portion of the first chapter, titled "Can Conservatism Be Saved?" can be found here. Read it, it's good.
The "social" conservatives are sadly too accepting of big government, and are happy to use it to achieve their ends. Mr. Sager particularly holds Karl Rove at fault for this, and he is for the most part correct.
Not only does that go against limited government principles, Mr. Sager warns, it raises a scary question: what happens when you lose an election and the Democrats, or even all-out Demunist Commiecrats, take over that big government apparatus? Katie, bar the door....
While Mr. Sager does raise some very important points, he is flat out wrong to suggest that Mr. Rove is entirely listening to the social/religious conservatives at the expense of the libertarians.
Instead, it seems to me that Mr. Rove is cherry picking "the worst of both worlds".
For example, Mr. Rove is engaging in open borders and cheap labor uber alles, to the utter dismay of social conservatives for whom national security, national sovereignty, and cultural unity are paramount. He is trying to "Hispander" to people who, when they become US citizens, will for the most part turn around and vote for Democrats anyway, even far-left Demunist Commiecrats, because the Left will always Hispander even more. The Mexican anti-American demonstrations, on Communist May Day no less, clearly were a wake up call to the "libertarian" immigration romantics.
Not only that, Rove's open border policies indicate that he has deeply imbibed the leftist "multicultural" (communist leftover anti-Americanism) poison. This poison has infected our cultural, educational, legal and media institutions, and it is preventing immigrants from integrating into American society and only sowing further discord. Because of it, we simply cannot allow the proportion of immigrants in that we did in the past, and sadly, because of it, we wind up allowing them in anyway. The immigrants, in turn, will be influenced by this un-American ideology to become a restive underclass. Thank goodness the Mexicans and other Latinos are NOT Muslims, because if they were, we would be seeing European-style riots from an extremely unhappy and restive culturally alien underclass.
It just saddens me that so many "libertarian" Republicans just don't get it when it comes to the immigration problem. I am thinking of the short-sighted greedheads at the Wall Street Journal here, among others.
But Karl Rove and "social conservative" Congresscritters like Chris Cannon and Sam Brownback also just don't get it on this issue. They too have thwarted efforts to secure our southern border.
Moreover, Mr. Sager is just plain wrong in some of his attacks on social conservatives, although his criticisms of "big government conservative" programs (an oxymoron, yes?), like a new Medicare entitlement and "No Child Left Behind" are spot-on. For example, when he asserts that:
he utterly ignores the fact that every state that has had the choice has soundly rejected homosexual marriage. Massachusetts only has homosexual marriage because of leftist nanny-state judges--the very tyrants in black robes that Frank Meyer warned about.
(Frank Meyer, a thinker who back in the 1950's found a common ground between libertarian and social conservative views, appears to be a hero of Mr. Sager's).
Libertarians and social conservatives could still find so much common ground in opposing such judicial tyrants.
The same goes for government funding of stem cell research; why should libertarians want to support what is blatantly corporate welfare for the biotech industry?
In short, while Mr. Sager is right to sound the alarm about the errors and pitfalls of "big government conservatism", all is not lost in terms of cooperation between libertarian and social conservatives. Both could find a common enemy in the Left's "multicultural" poison, which is anti-American, anti-freedom, and anti-Western civilization. Moreover, the Islamunists might serve to be the threat that the Communists were, with the Crescent becoming the 21st century Hammer and Sickle and the "Raghead Menace" uniting libertarians and social conservatives the way the Red Menace did.
In his new book, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, he points out that there is a growing rift between the "libertarian" conservatives and the "social" conservatives in the Republican Party.
A portion of the first chapter, titled "Can Conservatism Be Saved?" can be found here. Read it, it's good.
The "social" conservatives are sadly too accepting of big government, and are happy to use it to achieve their ends. Mr. Sager particularly holds Karl Rove at fault for this, and he is for the most part correct.
Not only does that go against limited government principles, Mr. Sager warns, it raises a scary question: what happens when you lose an election and the Democrats, or even all-out Demunist Commiecrats, take over that big government apparatus? Katie, bar the door....
There are many in the Republican Party who believe that now is the time to enjoy the spoils of victory. In truth, however, this is just the beginning of a new war -- a war for the heart and soul of conservatism.
On one side are those conservatives who think that the cause of small government is lost. And if they can't beat big government, they might as well run it. They believe that the battles of the past have been a foolish diversion and that now is the time to adapt to the world as it is and to cease imagining the world as it could be. Some of these people have begun to simply seek power for its own sake. Others have sold their souls in the hope of buying them back one day. Still others have glimpsed a golden opportunity to impose their idea of morality on their fellow citizens. The road to victory has been long and arduous, all of these people recall, and so in their minds there can be no turning back to the discarded ideas of the past.
Yet, there are other conservatives. They are just now waking up to what it is that their party has become: an echo, not a choice. They are realizing that big-government conservatism is no longer an ill-conceived theory, it is the creed of the Republican Party. And they are realizing that far from being "confident and optimistic and forward-leaning," as Karl Rove would have it, this brand of conservatism is weak-kneed, defeatist and retrogressive to a time before giants fused together the coalition that in four decades defeated Communism abroad, halted the march toward socialism at home, lowered taxes and reformed welfare -- just to name a few of its accomplishments.
While Mr. Sager does raise some very important points, he is flat out wrong to suggest that Mr. Rove is entirely listening to the social/religious conservatives at the expense of the libertarians.
Instead, it seems to me that Mr. Rove is cherry picking "the worst of both worlds".
For example, Mr. Rove is engaging in open borders and cheap labor uber alles, to the utter dismay of social conservatives for whom national security, national sovereignty, and cultural unity are paramount. He is trying to "Hispander" to people who, when they become US citizens, will for the most part turn around and vote for Democrats anyway, even far-left Demunist Commiecrats, because the Left will always Hispander even more. The Mexican anti-American demonstrations, on Communist May Day no less, clearly were a wake up call to the "libertarian" immigration romantics.
Not only that, Rove's open border policies indicate that he has deeply imbibed the leftist "multicultural" (communist leftover anti-Americanism) poison. This poison has infected our cultural, educational, legal and media institutions, and it is preventing immigrants from integrating into American society and only sowing further discord. Because of it, we simply cannot allow the proportion of immigrants in that we did in the past, and sadly, because of it, we wind up allowing them in anyway. The immigrants, in turn, will be influenced by this un-American ideology to become a restive underclass. Thank goodness the Mexicans and other Latinos are NOT Muslims, because if they were, we would be seeing European-style riots from an extremely unhappy and restive culturally alien underclass.
It just saddens me that so many "libertarian" Republicans just don't get it when it comes to the immigration problem. I am thinking of the short-sighted greedheads at the Wall Street Journal here, among others.
But Karl Rove and "social conservative" Congresscritters like Chris Cannon and Sam Brownback also just don't get it on this issue. They too have thwarted efforts to secure our southern border.
Moreover, Mr. Sager is just plain wrong in some of his attacks on social conservatives, although his criticisms of "big government conservative" programs (an oxymoron, yes?), like a new Medicare entitlement and "No Child Left Behind" are spot-on. For example, when he asserts that:
"The Bush administration...(has) a philosophy that has led the president to support a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would override the decisions of several state governments on a matter that has traditionally been left to the states"
he utterly ignores the fact that every state that has had the choice has soundly rejected homosexual marriage. Massachusetts only has homosexual marriage because of leftist nanny-state judges--the very tyrants in black robes that Frank Meyer warned about.
(Frank Meyer, a thinker who back in the 1950's found a common ground between libertarian and social conservative views, appears to be a hero of Mr. Sager's).
Libertarians and social conservatives could still find so much common ground in opposing such judicial tyrants.
The same goes for government funding of stem cell research; why should libertarians want to support what is blatantly corporate welfare for the biotech industry?
In short, while Mr. Sager is right to sound the alarm about the errors and pitfalls of "big government conservatism", all is not lost in terms of cooperation between libertarian and social conservatives. Both could find a common enemy in the Left's "multicultural" poison, which is anti-American, anti-freedom, and anti-Western civilization. Moreover, the Islamunists might serve to be the threat that the Communists were, with the Crescent becoming the 21st century Hammer and Sickle and the "Raghead Menace" uniting libertarians and social conservatives the way the Red Menace did.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Kevin Costner: A Better Guy Than You Thought
He's not a commie leftist asshole after all!
He may have been dumb to pass up the role Tom Hanks took in "Apollo 13" in order to film "Waterworld", but he actually said and did something tremendously decent.
Movie fans reportedly sat in stunned silence at the end of Range's screening, which featured doctored images of Bush getting shot, and Costner, who wasn't in the audience, isn't happy with what he's heard about the film. He says, "It's awfully hard if you're his children, his wife, his mother, his dad; there's a certain thing we can't lose as human beings, which is empathy for maybe the hardest job in the world. "Whether we think it's being performed right or not we can't, like, wish... or think that's even cute."
Here's to hoping that this doesn't end his film career.
He may have been dumb to pass up the role Tom Hanks took in "Apollo 13" in order to film "Waterworld", but he actually said and did something tremendously decent.
Movie fans reportedly sat in stunned silence at the end of Range's screening, which featured doctored images of Bush getting shot, and Costner, who wasn't in the audience, isn't happy with what he's heard about the film. He says, "It's awfully hard if you're his children, his wife, his mother, his dad; there's a certain thing we can't lose as human beings, which is empathy for maybe the hardest job in the world. "Whether we think it's being performed right or not we can't, like, wish... or think that's even cute."
Here's to hoping that this doesn't end his film career.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Illegal Aliens: Does Bill Frist Get It?
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pens a column in yesterday's Washington Examiner regarding national security, and he hits on border security as a big part of that picture:
Among the snippets:
Patriots had given up hope that this Congress would address the porous southern border. With the short session upon us and the nationwide immigration hearings stalled, the effort looked dead for this year. However, the overwhelming consensus among the American People to secure the border and stop all "Illegal Aliens" (none of this "undocumented" crap) gives Frist and House Speaker Denny Hastert a mandate to address at least that portion of immigration reform.
It will, of course, get resistance from the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate, as well as a few RINO Republican members and the greedhead cheap labor Republicans who still take the Wall Street Journal's position on this seriously.
Surely the Republicans will not miss this low-hanging fruit for the midterms? Then again, they are the STUPID Party, the Demunist Commiecrats turned Dhimmicrats being the Evil Party.
It just saddens me that so many "Conservative" Republicans, not just RINOs, just DON'T GET IT when it comes to the immigration problem. I am thinking the short-sighted greedheads at the Wall Street Journal here, among others. Karl Rove and "conservative" Congresscritters like Chris Cannon and Sam Brownback come to mind here too.
Not only is illegal immigration per se evil, but too much legal immigration is a problem as well, given the "multicultural" (communist leftover anti-Americanism) poison in our cultural, educational, legal and media institutions, that is preventing immigrants from integrating into American society and only sowing further dischord.
The Mexican anti-American demonstrations, on Communist May Day no less, clearly were a wake up call to the immigration romantics. "Hispandering" will not work; whatever Rove promises, the Left will top. These people ARE NOT going to vote Republican.
Even if legal immigration on balance has been a good thing, there is such a thing as too much, and we are at that point. A "time out" or curtailment is needed, until we can sort things out and get the "multicultural" poison out of the body politic. After that, we can throw the Golden Doors open wide again.
Why are some so eager to import what is sadly becoming a Fifth Column into the nation???
Among the snippets:
"Homeland security stands atop my list of remaining priorities. Last month’s arrests in England reminded all of us that, almost exactly five years after Sept. 11, terrorists remain intent on attacking and killing Americans...Could enough Republicans finally be GETTING IT???
Congress must also work to secure America’s borders.
While the Republican Congress has already devoted billions of dollars in new spending to border security, our frontiers still need additional protection.
Thus, as we appropriate money, we’ll provide funds to hire new Customs and Border Protection personnel, provide them with necessary equipment, and begin the construction of a mixture of virtual and physical fencing covering every inch of the United States’ southern border."
Patriots had given up hope that this Congress would address the porous southern border. With the short session upon us and the nationwide immigration hearings stalled, the effort looked dead for this year. However, the overwhelming consensus among the American People to secure the border and stop all "Illegal Aliens" (none of this "undocumented" crap) gives Frist and House Speaker Denny Hastert a mandate to address at least that portion of immigration reform.
It will, of course, get resistance from the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate, as well as a few RINO Republican members and the greedhead cheap labor Republicans who still take the Wall Street Journal's position on this seriously.
Surely the Republicans will not miss this low-hanging fruit for the midterms? Then again, they are the STUPID Party, the Demunist Commiecrats turned Dhimmicrats being the Evil Party.
It just saddens me that so many "Conservative" Republicans, not just RINOs, just DON'T GET IT when it comes to the immigration problem. I am thinking the short-sighted greedheads at the Wall Street Journal here, among others. Karl Rove and "conservative" Congresscritters like Chris Cannon and Sam Brownback come to mind here too.
Not only is illegal immigration per se evil, but too much legal immigration is a problem as well, given the "multicultural" (communist leftover anti-Americanism) poison in our cultural, educational, legal and media institutions, that is preventing immigrants from integrating into American society and only sowing further dischord.
The Mexican anti-American demonstrations, on Communist May Day no less, clearly were a wake up call to the immigration romantics. "Hispandering" will not work; whatever Rove promises, the Left will top. These people ARE NOT going to vote Republican.
Even if legal immigration on balance has been a good thing, there is such a thing as too much, and we are at that point. A "time out" or curtailment is needed, until we can sort things out and get the "multicultural" poison out of the body politic. After that, we can throw the Golden Doors open wide again.
Why are some so eager to import what is sadly becoming a Fifth Column into the nation???
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Is California more dangerous than Iraq now?
An interesting perspective about our "Drive by Media." Victor Davis Hanson is a professor at Fresno State. What is most interesting, upon reflection, is that the very same people who proclaim Iraq a hopeless mess, and insist we should withdraw a la South Vietnam 1975, have MADE California into the mess that it is now....
"Eye of the Beholder" by Victor Davis Hanson
The American Enterprise Online
War torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each.
As a fifth generation Californian, I deeply love this state, but still imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons, 180 robberies, and 360 instances of assault in California yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if the headlines would scream about "Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!"
How about a monthly media dose of "600 women raped in February alone!" Or try, "Over 600 violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end in sight!" Those do not even make up all of the state's yearly 200,000 violent acts that law enforcement knows about.
Iraq's judicial system seems a mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let out 100,000 inmates from his vast prison archipelago. He himself sat in the dock months after his trial began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal system like California's with 170,000 criminals - an inmate population larger than those of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined. Just to house such a shadow population costs our state nearly $7 billion a year or about the same price of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per year in Iraq. What would be the image of our Golden State if we were reminded each morning, "Another $20 million spent today on housing our criminals"?
Some of California's most recent prison scandals would be easy to sensationalize: "Guards watch as inmates are raped!" Or "Correction officer accused of having sex with under-aged detainee!" And apropos of Saddam's sluggish trial, remember that our home state multiple murderer, Tookie Williams, was finally executed in December 2005 - TWENTY SIX years after he was originally sentenced.
Much is made of the inability to patrol Iraq's borders with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. But California has only a single border with a foreign nation, not six. Yet over 3 million foreigners who sneaked in illegally now live in our state. Worse, there are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid headlines: "Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San Francisco!" or "Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into California!"
Every year, over 4,000 Californians die in car crashes - more than the number of Americans lost so far in the years of combat operations in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly maintained roads, and often poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers, are even more lethal than IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices.) Perhaps tomorrow's headline might scream out at us: "300 Californians to perish this month on state highways! Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!"
In 2001, California had 32 days of power outages, despite paying nearly the highest rates for electricity in the United States. Before complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from private generators, think back to the run on generators in California when they were contemplated as a future part of every household's line of defense.
We're told that Iraq's finances are a mess. Yet until recently, so were California's. Two years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger inherited a $38 billion annual budget shortfall. That could have made for strong morning newscast teasers: "Another $100 million borrowed today - $3 billion more in red ink to pile up by month's end!"
So is California comparable to Iraq? Hardly. Yet it could easily be sketched by a reporter intent on doing so as a bankrupt, crime-ridden area with murderous highways, tens of thousands of inmates, with wide-open borders.
I myself recently returned home to California, without incident, from a visit to Iraq's notorious Sunni Triangle. While I was gone, a drug-addicted criminal with a long list of convictions broke into our kitchen at 4 a.m. was surprised by my wife and daughter, and fled with our credit cards, cash, keys, and cell phones. Sometimes I wonder who really was safer that week.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame: Asshole and Slut
Saturday, 9 September 2006
Does everyone remember "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"? Just think of Joe Wilson as "Brad", and Valerie Plame as "Janet".
Richard Armitage could be Frank N. Furter...
With the disclosure that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the initial source for Robert Novak's July 2003 column that outed CIA operative Valerie Wilson - also known as Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador and Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson - it is now clear that all the hype about a "Bush-inspired vendetta against the Wilsons" is utter crap.
The "outing" of Wilson, a desk jockey at Langley turned mommy, was not an act of treason. It was not a deliberate effort to smear an administration critic. It was not an act of revenge orchestrated by Bush political guru Karl Rove. He had nothing to do with it. It was not an effort to hurt anyone's CIA career. It was gossip, by a rather despicable Richard Armitage, who knew full well this "scandal" was a fraud, but let it play out either because he enjoyed the political hype, or he was afraid to fess up.
As Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, co-author of the book "Hubris" about the Wilson leak and Iraq pre-war intelligence, wrote, "Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity."
No one knows how much special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has spent in taxpayers' money investigating this leak, but figure the probe came with a hefty price tag because he has been in business since December 2003. We do know now, however, that when Fitzgerald set up shop, the secretary of State and someone at the Department of Justice knew that Armitage leaked the story. As Fitzgerald has failed to charge Armitage, it seems as though the leak was not a crime, which suggests that the investigation has been colossal waste of time and money.
What did America learn? Rove confirmed Wilson's identity. Big deal. As Mark Corallo, who served as Rove's spokesman during this controversy, noted, Rove "never made a single phone call to a single journalist on this matter. He simply answered two phone questions from two journalists." For confirming, not initiating, the Armitage leak, Rove was hauled before a grand jury five times.
Rove is not the only White House aide made to jump through hoops. Some 2,000 White House staffers also were hopping as they had to produce phone records, diaries and correspondence.
Then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days behind bars before disclosing who told her about Wilson - even though she never wrote about the CIA operative's identity. That's another colossal waste of taxpayers' dollars, which would have been better spent jailing a real criminal.
Fitzgerald has charged Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, with perjury and obstruction of justice. But the special prosectuor's failure to charge the original leaker makes one question whether Fitzgerald was mindful of his office's mandate - that a special prosecutor's probe, as Attorney General Janet Reno wrote in 1999, "be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies."
Instead, Fitzgerald's actions have been plodding and heavy-handed, landing a journalist who didn't write on the leak behind bars, while the leaker remained anonymous and free.
As for the time table, while Deputy U.S. Attorney General James B. Comey told reporters that Fitzgerald had a reputation for working quickly, Fitzgerald has spent years investigating a leak that he has failed to prosecute, although the Libby prosecution is pending.
The irony is that as Joe Wilson charged that the White House was pursuing him as an act of revenge, he emerges as a partisan bent on punishing those with whom he disagreed. Wilson, after all, once bragged that he wanted to see Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." The Wilsons filed a silly lawsuit suit against Libby, Cheney and Rove.
Armitage was not an Iraq war hawk, so it should come as no surprise that Wilson's attorney has given Armitage a pass. "Mr. Armitage's conduct does not change the facts of what Libby, Cheney and Rove did," Melanie Sloan told CNN. "The case is about the abuse of government power."
Yes, it is about the abuse of government power. The victims are the innocent staffers and journalists who had to face the threat of jail over three years while Armitage was too ashamed to come forward and admit what he had begun.
Meanwhile, it is clear the Saddam DID, in fact, seek to buy uranium from Niger.
Can we deal with a real issue, please?
Of course not. This IS the liberal media, which flings feces hoping SOMETHING will stick.
Does everyone remember "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"? Just think of Joe Wilson as "Brad", and Valerie Plame as "Janet".
Richard Armitage could be Frank N. Furter...
With the disclosure that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the initial source for Robert Novak's July 2003 column that outed CIA operative Valerie Wilson - also known as Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador and Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson - it is now clear that all the hype about a "Bush-inspired vendetta against the Wilsons" is utter crap.
The "outing" of Wilson, a desk jockey at Langley turned mommy, was not an act of treason. It was not a deliberate effort to smear an administration critic. It was not an act of revenge orchestrated by Bush political guru Karl Rove. He had nothing to do with it. It was not an effort to hurt anyone's CIA career. It was gossip, by a rather despicable Richard Armitage, who knew full well this "scandal" was a fraud, but let it play out either because he enjoyed the political hype, or he was afraid to fess up.
As Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, co-author of the book "Hubris" about the Wilson leak and Iraq pre-war intelligence, wrote, "Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity."
No one knows how much special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has spent in taxpayers' money investigating this leak, but figure the probe came with a hefty price tag because he has been in business since December 2003. We do know now, however, that when Fitzgerald set up shop, the secretary of State and someone at the Department of Justice knew that Armitage leaked the story. As Fitzgerald has failed to charge Armitage, it seems as though the leak was not a crime, which suggests that the investigation has been colossal waste of time and money.
What did America learn? Rove confirmed Wilson's identity. Big deal. As Mark Corallo, who served as Rove's spokesman during this controversy, noted, Rove "never made a single phone call to a single journalist on this matter. He simply answered two phone questions from two journalists." For confirming, not initiating, the Armitage leak, Rove was hauled before a grand jury five times.
Rove is not the only White House aide made to jump through hoops. Some 2,000 White House staffers also were hopping as they had to produce phone records, diaries and correspondence.
Then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days behind bars before disclosing who told her about Wilson - even though she never wrote about the CIA operative's identity. That's another colossal waste of taxpayers' dollars, which would have been better spent jailing a real criminal.
Fitzgerald has charged Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, with perjury and obstruction of justice. But the special prosectuor's failure to charge the original leaker makes one question whether Fitzgerald was mindful of his office's mandate - that a special prosecutor's probe, as Attorney General Janet Reno wrote in 1999, "be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies."
Instead, Fitzgerald's actions have been plodding and heavy-handed, landing a journalist who didn't write on the leak behind bars, while the leaker remained anonymous and free.
As for the time table, while Deputy U.S. Attorney General James B. Comey told reporters that Fitzgerald had a reputation for working quickly, Fitzgerald has spent years investigating a leak that he has failed to prosecute, although the Libby prosecution is pending.
The irony is that as Joe Wilson charged that the White House was pursuing him as an act of revenge, he emerges as a partisan bent on punishing those with whom he disagreed. Wilson, after all, once bragged that he wanted to see Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." The Wilsons filed a silly lawsuit suit against Libby, Cheney and Rove.
Armitage was not an Iraq war hawk, so it should come as no surprise that Wilson's attorney has given Armitage a pass. "Mr. Armitage's conduct does not change the facts of what Libby, Cheney and Rove did," Melanie Sloan told CNN. "The case is about the abuse of government power."
Yes, it is about the abuse of government power. The victims are the innocent staffers and journalists who had to face the threat of jail over three years while Armitage was too ashamed to come forward and admit what he had begun.
Meanwhile, it is clear the Saddam DID, in fact, seek to buy uranium from Niger.
Can we deal with a real issue, please?
Of course not. This IS the liberal media, which flings feces hoping SOMETHING will stick.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Governor Ah-nold's Revealing Gaffe
No, the ethnic joke is NOT revealing: Ah-nold wasn't saying anything offensive, he was joking about how Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia refers to *herself*.
Garcia was on KFI the afternoon of the 7th, where she bashed Phil Angelides for trying to make something this stupid and trivial 7 months old a political issue. Good on her.
Bonnie Garcia, is, of course, a Republican, so she responds with class, in fact, Arnold was referring to the fact that she called *herself* a hot-blooded Latina.
But leave it to Commiecrats like Angelides, Torres and Barbara Lee to try to make something out of nothing. (Remember how Bolshevik Barbara Lee voted with respect to dealing with the Taliban? That's all you really need to know).
As for the other Commiecrats who chimed in, Phil Angelides is a prissy little twat; he would bend over and let Mark Leno and Sheila Kuehl do him (the latter with a with a strap-on) if he thought it would help his fawning.
Art Torres, meanwhile, is preparing to become one of the land barons of the New Mexifornia and treat the rest of us as peasants in the ejidos.
But what is revealing--and disappointing--about Ah-nolds remarks is this part of the yahoo news article:
"He wonders aloud if the Republican Assembly leader, George Plescia, can "control that wild bunch upstairs," referring to the Assembly's Republicans as an "unruly bunch of guys and girls."
Gee, Ah-nold, we're unruly because we had a special recall election to end Commiecrat one party rule, and we elected you to act like a REAL Republican and veto the crap that the Demunists send your way. So please stop caving in here and there. No driver's licenses for illegals, no to the Gay Mafia rewriting school textbooks, and do something to stop the illegal alien floodtide.
And fix the roads and build new roads and power plants while you are at it.
That's why we voted for you, Ah-nold. Try not to forget it.
Garcia was on KFI the afternoon of the 7th, where she bashed Phil Angelides for trying to make something this stupid and trivial 7 months old a political issue. Good on her.
Bonnie Garcia, is, of course, a Republican, so she responds with class, in fact, Arnold was referring to the fact that she called *herself* a hot-blooded Latina.
But leave it to Commiecrats like Angelides, Torres and Barbara Lee to try to make something out of nothing. (Remember how Bolshevik Barbara Lee voted with respect to dealing with the Taliban? That's all you really need to know).
As for the other Commiecrats who chimed in, Phil Angelides is a prissy little twat; he would bend over and let Mark Leno and Sheila Kuehl do him (the latter with a with a strap-on) if he thought it would help his fawning.
Art Torres, meanwhile, is preparing to become one of the land barons of the New Mexifornia and treat the rest of us as peasants in the ejidos.
But what is revealing--and disappointing--about Ah-nolds remarks is this part of the yahoo news article:
"He wonders aloud if the Republican Assembly leader, George Plescia, can "control that wild bunch upstairs," referring to the Assembly's Republicans as an "unruly bunch of guys and girls."
Gee, Ah-nold, we're unruly because we had a special recall election to end Commiecrat one party rule, and we elected you to act like a REAL Republican and veto the crap that the Demunists send your way. So please stop caving in here and there. No driver's licenses for illegals, no to the Gay Mafia rewriting school textbooks, and do something to stop the illegal alien floodtide.
And fix the roads and build new roads and power plants while you are at it.
That's why we voted for you, Ah-nold. Try not to forget it.
Monday, September 11, 2006
On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check
It's nice to see another Jewish liberal journalist wising up:
Nor do any of them seem to be cooperatively "dropping a dime" about anything questionable going on or being discussed in the mosque.
But it's worse than that, says Ira Rifkin. Essentially, they don't believe Jews (and to a lesser extent, anyone not Muslim) have the right to exist. We are to surrender to dhimmitude, and *we* must always accommodate *them*, even though *they* moved *here*.
There are still fools on the left, who attribute Muslim extremism to neo-colonialism or the usual blame Western Civilization in general and America in particular crap. To the dupes, our terrorist enemies are a rag-tag group of the dispossessed of the world, legitimately mad at the United States for our wealth and interference in the world.
How to answer them? Two words: Palestinian statehood.
Remember when we were told that the "intafada" was about the desire of the Palestinians to have a nation of their own? If they were just given that, we were told, there would be peace.
Well, they got that. And now they are claiming that having two states side by side constitutes "apartheid":
Few of any of these Arabs are even descended from those who fled in the 1948 war, and as for those who in fact did, there is one simple answer for them: that's what you get for trying to "push the Jews into the sea and pick up where Hitler left off".
But just when you are pleased that Mr. Rifkin has wised up, he includes a little but-I'm-still-a-good-liberal disclaimer:
We have built a working federal system of government over there, and while civil war may erupt, in which case Iraq still might need to be partitioned into two or three smaller nations, so far it is holding.
For this, several years into it, we have paid with less than 2,500 dead. Any casualty is sad, but those figures are incredibly low. Do you realize that this far into the Vietnam War, we had lost about FIFTEEN times that many casualties? And the cause of giving the people there something better than a choice between Tweedle-secular tyrant and Tweedle-mullah is undeniably noble and just.
Moreover, we must understand the ultimate goal of the jihadists: they want to be us. Not that they desire to adopt western norms, customs, and extravagances. Quite the opposite. They want our position of power that allows those things to dominate the world. They wish to establish themselves as a regional power first and then as a world power. And they intend to do so, not by defeating us militarily, but by breaking our will. They believe that we can be made to retreat, with a sense of regret, to the relative safety behind our two oceans.
Here at home our arguments play into this plan. We are told we should return home because Iraq has descended into civil war. But this would only teach our terror driven enemy that killing their own will hasten our retreat even faster than killing us. Perhaps the warring factions should be sorted into different mini-nations, but to cut and run is to invite a vacuum there.
He polished the prose of Muslim leaders so their views would be marketable. He invited them home to break bread. He even attacked his co-religionists in print for not being more realistic.We keep hearing about how these terrorists are only a tiny fraction of Muslims, and the overwhelming majority of them in the United States are patriotic and loathe what is being done in their name. Perhaps most indeed do. But when it comes to speaking out against the savagery being done in their name, their silence is deafening.
But not anymore, he says.
Nor do any of them seem to be cooperatively "dropping a dime" about anything questionable going on or being discussed in the mosque.
But it's worse than that, says Ira Rifkin. Essentially, they don't believe Jews (and to a lesser extent, anyone not Muslim) have the right to exist. We are to surrender to dhimmitude, and *we* must always accommodate *them*, even though *they* moved *here*.
There are still fools on the left, who attribute Muslim extremism to neo-colonialism or the usual blame Western Civilization in general and America in particular crap. To the dupes, our terrorist enemies are a rag-tag group of the dispossessed of the world, legitimately mad at the United States for our wealth and interference in the world.
How to answer them? Two words: Palestinian statehood.
Remember when we were told that the "intafada" was about the desire of the Palestinians to have a nation of their own? If they were just given that, we were told, there would be peace.
Well, they got that. And now they are claiming that having two states side by side constitutes "apartheid":
That (willingness to make a deal) is not the case among the majority of Muslims, whose leading mainstream organizations, in the United States as well, insist that all Palestinians living outside the Jewish state's 1948 borders have a right to return to resettle in Israel. That's a recipe for Israel's demographic eradication and they know it.There's a world for this claim about Israeli "apartheid": It's called, simply, bullshit.
Few of any of these Arabs are even descended from those who fled in the 1948 war, and as for those who in fact did, there is one simple answer for them: that's what you get for trying to "push the Jews into the sea and pick up where Hitler left off".
But just when you are pleased that Mr. Rifkin has wised up, he includes a little but-I'm-still-a-good-liberal disclaimer:
Jews are equated with Israel, Israel is equated with the United States; the absurdly mismanaged war in Iraq and the global conflict against "terrorism" are conflated in Muslim minds.Now look here Mr. Rifkin, these Islamofascist savages DID and sometimes still do have alliances of convenience with other tyrants. The murderous Saddam and Sons may have been secular booze and porno hounds, but they still provided safe harbor, logistical and even financial support to the Islamunist savages. And the world is better for their demise.
We have built a working federal system of government over there, and while civil war may erupt, in which case Iraq still might need to be partitioned into two or three smaller nations, so far it is holding.
For this, several years into it, we have paid with less than 2,500 dead. Any casualty is sad, but those figures are incredibly low. Do you realize that this far into the Vietnam War, we had lost about FIFTEEN times that many casualties? And the cause of giving the people there something better than a choice between Tweedle-secular tyrant and Tweedle-mullah is undeniably noble and just.
Moreover, we must understand the ultimate goal of the jihadists: they want to be us. Not that they desire to adopt western norms, customs, and extravagances. Quite the opposite. They want our position of power that allows those things to dominate the world. They wish to establish themselves as a regional power first and then as a world power. And they intend to do so, not by defeating us militarily, but by breaking our will. They believe that we can be made to retreat, with a sense of regret, to the relative safety behind our two oceans.
Here at home our arguments play into this plan. We are told we should return home because Iraq has descended into civil war. But this would only teach our terror driven enemy that killing their own will hasten our retreat even faster than killing us. Perhaps the warring factions should be sorted into different mini-nations, but to cut and run is to invite a vacuum there.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
The need for common-sense "profiling"
This cartoon sums it up.
*
The terrorists are NOT Christian (Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox), Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, Scientologists, Jainists, Bahais, or even Druze.
*
A selective inspection at the airport does NOT an internment camp make.
*
Nor is it unjust, as there is ample precedent for probable cause.
*
Let's get real.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Sorry, you dupe, anti-Semitism comes from the Left
I have to laugh at Sheldon Drobny (of Huffingslut Post infamy) and other leftist dupes who think the rampant anti-Semitism of the Newest Left is somehow the American Right in disguise.
What the dupes can't admit is that what they are observing is their "multicultural" (i.e., multicommunist) and "politically correct" (i.e., politically leftover communist) ideology taken to its logical end.
In the beginning, they were communists, apologizing for the Soviet Union. Apologizing for the Soviet Union led them to apologizing for the Soviet Union's Third World client states.
Then the Soviet Union, their bright shining beacon for a socialist future, collapsed, as socialism was revealed to be a rotten failure. What to do?
Their answer was "multiculturalism", and "politically correct" thinking, which involved romanticizing the various Third World former Soviet client states that remained. Like the sheep of Orwell’s Animal Farm, they changed their bleats from "Soviets gooood, Americans baaaaaad", to "People of Collllor Gooooood, White Males Baaaaad". This allowed them to retain their anti-Americanism, taking advantage of tragedies in America's past.
But they weren't honest in admitting that these tragedies are of the human condition, and not uniquely American. "Racist" became the replacement for "bourgeois" in their hatred of America.
This explains the massive political fellatio of the Sandinistas a few years back. These Third World tin-horn tyrants became the new idealistic revolutionaries to romanticize. But in reality they were just applying their old communist ideology to these third world goons. They were transformed into Chocolate Covered Communists, Butterscotch Bolsheviks, Lemon Leninists, giving the frankly bitter white gall of Communism an ethnic candy coating.
This ideology worked well for some of them in academia as well. Academic Standards? Scholarship? Reasoning? Why, those were just evil white male (nee Capitalist Pig) constructs. This was a great way for some of their academic frauds to get cushy tenured jobs. That spawned the charlatans like Ward Churchill and Cornell West.
But alas, they took it farther than dupes like Sheldon Drobny wanted them to, because they realized that Israel and Jews in general were part and parcel of the evil white male Judeo-Christian Western Civilization that "multiculturalism" (i.e., multicommunism) was sworn to destroy. And this is so even though many Israelis aren't "white" (i.e., of European extraction).
This also explains why the Right, which still defends Western Civilization, stoutly defends Israel. Israel is an outpost of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization in a sea of frankly racist and sexist Islamic Barbarism.
To sum it up, the Commiecrats turned into Dhimmicrats, and now they are becoming Nazicrats, because of a dishonest ideology meant to cover up for and romanticize Marxism's failures.
What the dupes can't admit is that what they are observing is their "multicultural" (i.e., multicommunist) and "politically correct" (i.e., politically leftover communist) ideology taken to its logical end.
In the beginning, they were communists, apologizing for the Soviet Union. Apologizing for the Soviet Union led them to apologizing for the Soviet Union's Third World client states.
Then the Soviet Union, their bright shining beacon for a socialist future, collapsed, as socialism was revealed to be a rotten failure. What to do?
Their answer was "multiculturalism", and "politically correct" thinking, which involved romanticizing the various Third World former Soviet client states that remained. Like the sheep of Orwell’s Animal Farm, they changed their bleats from "Soviets gooood, Americans baaaaaad", to "People of Collllor Gooooood, White Males Baaaaad". This allowed them to retain their anti-Americanism, taking advantage of tragedies in America's past.
But they weren't honest in admitting that these tragedies are of the human condition, and not uniquely American. "Racist" became the replacement for "bourgeois" in their hatred of America.
This explains the massive political fellatio of the Sandinistas a few years back. These Third World tin-horn tyrants became the new idealistic revolutionaries to romanticize. But in reality they were just applying their old communist ideology to these third world goons. They were transformed into Chocolate Covered Communists, Butterscotch Bolsheviks, Lemon Leninists, giving the frankly bitter white gall of Communism an ethnic candy coating.
This ideology worked well for some of them in academia as well. Academic Standards? Scholarship? Reasoning? Why, those were just evil white male (nee Capitalist Pig) constructs. This was a great way for some of their academic frauds to get cushy tenured jobs. That spawned the charlatans like Ward Churchill and Cornell West.
But alas, they took it farther than dupes like Sheldon Drobny wanted them to, because they realized that Israel and Jews in general were part and parcel of the evil white male Judeo-Christian Western Civilization that "multiculturalism" (i.e., multicommunism) was sworn to destroy. And this is so even though many Israelis aren't "white" (i.e., of European extraction).
This also explains why the Right, which still defends Western Civilization, stoutly defends Israel. Israel is an outpost of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization in a sea of frankly racist and sexist Islamic Barbarism.
To sum it up, the Commiecrats turned into Dhimmicrats, and now they are becoming Nazicrats, because of a dishonest ideology meant to cover up for and romanticize Marxism's failures.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Jim Goad: Bay Aryans
Jim Goad, author of "The Redneck Manifesto", devastingly describes the parasites who ruined a once great city:
BAY ARYAN RESISTANCE
San Francisco constantly struggles with itself to solve the question of how many assholes it's possible to fit into a square mile. How many cybersissies can you cram into a phone booth? How many Gaia-peddling belly-floppers? How many self-absorbed monkish Nerf® balls of ideological irrelevance? How many dayglo lemon-meringue fashion tarantulas? How many gaunt, cellophane-wrapped nipple-tweakers? How many prune-twatted hipster debutantes?
It's a star-lit ballroom full of elitists masquerading as egalitarians. Of snobs pretending to be socialists. Of petty backstabbers who appoint themselves as moral crusaders. These creeps can't get along with the other 99% of the country-shit, most of their time is spent quarreling among themselves-yet they try to fist-fuck you with Universal Brotherhood.
Almost down to the very last shaved anus, San Franciscans are a xenophobic breed. If you don't speak, look, and act like a San Franciscan, their policy is one of Zero Tolerance. They're totalitarian in the sense that they insist on controlling the thoughts and lives of others through forceful statist intervention. In doing so, they align themselves with the establishment which they pretend to be overthrowing. They're a buncha urban supremacists. Unyielding. Humorless. Stuffed to the gills with an unwarranted sense of their own cultural/moral superiority. I call them "Bay Aryans."
Surely I must be kidding, that I don't mean to compare such twinkle-toed West Coast coolness-mongerers to the TEETH-CHATTERINGLY SINISTER ATROCITIES of the Nazi pork-butchers. After all, Hitler killed six million Jewboys! That's enuff goldurned Heeb-a-roos to fill eight San Franciscos. You may be right, tootsie-pop, but are you aware that non-racist, peace-licking, universal-personhood-touting communist governments have slaughtered ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE this century? The commies beat Hitler 20-1. Their unbounded love for "humanity" didn't seem to put a check on an even stronger love for controlling and killing human beings. So much for your murky notions of government-mandated humanism. Better a Nazi than a commie, I guess.
And either one's better than a Bay Aryan. Being born in San Francisco is excusable, provided that you evacuate within 30 days of reaching adulthood. But moving TO the Bay Area is unforgivable under any circumstance. Based on an unfortunate long-term trend of Freak Relocation, the town has become a sort of Kurdish tent village of refugee weirdlings. A once-pretty city with happy-flappy seagulls has degenerated into an island of whitebreads-in-exile who've all fled from hometown persecution. San Francisco's foggy hills have become America's Largest Support Group, a Jonestown for people who were socially traumatized in high school.
Within city limits, I think San Francisco's fine as a cultural sanctuary for oversocialized misfits. Its danger lies in an apparently insatiable drive to vengefully impose its values on everyone outside the fortress. I think it's good that you people should have your own ghetto. I just think we should build a fence around it.
Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the desire to know the truth. Rejected by the Überclique, the Bay Aryans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other groping for "scene" status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that "scene" status is a worthwhile goal. They howl about "fighting fascism," yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel part of some "community," which is the first flash of the fascist impulse.
You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you finally feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your compassion for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with "the movement" because you're lost on your own.
I don't care about your precious personal lifestyle choices. I really don't. And your entire dingbat philosophy, the whole tectonic plate upon which San Francisco rests, is based on the false presumption that people such as me are somehow upset about the manner in which you flap your genitals around. Egads.
It isn't what you do, it's the way you do it. Not the meat, but rather the motion. It's not your lisping voice, it's the crap you're saying. It isn't your private cock-slurping, it's your public megaphone-mouth. It ain't how you move beneath the sheets, it's the way you wave the picket signs around. The problem isn't your self-consciously "decadent" personal lifestyle, it's your warped social and political instincts.
It has nothing to do with the widespread sidewalk displays of ass-rimming...or the women who look like Lou Costello...or even the concept of white people who hate the concept of white people. In fact, those are some of the things I LIKE about SF. It's the attitude. The vantage point. Cloistered in a cultural Presidio, the Bay Aryans see fit to cast judgment about the millions of peasants who live out on the Plains.
The Bay Aryans prove that they aren't truly compassionate by consistently showing a flagrant hatred for America's white rural lumpenproletariat. Though San Franciscans may mince through the streets in protest of hate speech, they sure as shootin' despise dem trailer trash. Although their hearts are opened like dilated rectums for poster kids halfway around the world, they disowned the homebound hillbillies a long time ago. I wonder what would happen if the hillbillies were to disown the Bay Aryans? Maybe if all the redneck farmers just decided to stop growing crops for a year. Perhaps if all the white-trash truckers agreed to halt delivery of all goods into this hostile enemy area. Maybe if all the Evil White Male Pig cops decided to ease up on Oakland and let black people REALLY express how they feel about their brethren in Frisco and Berkeley. That's all it would take. A puff of wind, and they'd all fall down.
It's a good thing that the rest of the country sees your city as a harmless Fruitcake Palace. The rest of America is too busy trying to put food on the table than worrying about your neurotic socio-libidinal peccadilloes. The rest of America could get along fine without San Francisco. The reverse is hardly true.
You should thank your "Goddess" that there are a few Nazis in Idaho and a smattering of Klansmen in Kentucky, because what else would you talk about at the weekly gatherings of the collective? Never mind that you all live in a much more AFFLUENT place than nearly all Idahoans or Kentuckians do.
Personal finances don't often factor into your ideas of what constitutes oppression, do they? You claim to identify with the poor and downtrodden, yet you're miraculously able to pay some of the highest rents in America. How do you do it? Maybe if you took the silver spoon out of your mouth, I'd be able to understand what you were mumbling about empowerment.
Modern American Leftoidism, a Volk religion epitomized in places such as the evil SF/Berkeley vortex, is almost exclusively the purview of upper-middle-class white kids who've never breathed a fleeting gasp of true oppression in their lives. This must be why the Bay Aryans don't seem nearly as concerned with America's widening class disparities as they are with its fashion mistakes and verbal boorishness. Though the Bay Aryans fancy themselves as revolutionaries, they're actually little more than a left-wristed inversion of Miss Manners. An area that prides itself on the Free Speech Movement is now gung-ho in favor of legal restrictions on terminology which it doesn't deem proper or sensitive. The Bay area teems with tattletales and stool pigeons and hall monitors and snitches. Since they don't have any REAL problems in their lives, these mushy bananas worry about getting their feelings bruised.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you, but human history is not entirely summarized by the bold struggle for the "right" to poke your veiny ding-dong through disco-bathroom glory holes. Not every act is political. Some are just silly and ugly and stinky.
Are you all high on crack? Does some municipal law require you to either have a glass pipe or a dick in your mouth at all times? Who else would seriously try to argue that rape has nothing to do with sex or that racism has nothing to do with economics? The holes in your logic have been stretched wider than your sphincters. Any honest overview of African, Asian, and Hispanic cultures would reveal more sexism, homophobia, and ethnic strife than you could shake a white dick at. Everyone is born corrupt. White males were simply better at it.
You can show your sincere opposition to white-male imperialism by giving your city back to the Injuns. Maybe we could help San Francisco realize its multicultural dreams by immediately shipping a million or so Third World indigents there. Let them take your jobs while you starve for awhile. We could forcibly relocate all the white-hipster undesirables out to Alcatraz, where they'd perform bloody gladitorial feats to the delight of Kenyan tourists on paddleboats.
I'm glad you've all gathered together in one place. Makes it easier to aim the missiles. Aren't you due for another natural disaster or something? Exactly what year are you scheduled to slide into the ocean? I want to take pictures.
No offense, but I have a higher opinion of the runny, worm-filled dogshit I scrape from my boot with a popsicle stick than I do of your fair city. You gave us OJ Simpson, but what have you done lately?
San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris.
San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock.
San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country.
Second to Berkeley, of course. Berkeley's so bad, it's too painful to talk about.
Tony Bennett left his heart. I took a dump. I'd tell you all to go to hell, but you already live there.
BAY ARYAN RESISTANCE
San Francisco constantly struggles with itself to solve the question of how many assholes it's possible to fit into a square mile. How many cybersissies can you cram into a phone booth? How many Gaia-peddling belly-floppers? How many self-absorbed monkish Nerf® balls of ideological irrelevance? How many dayglo lemon-meringue fashion tarantulas? How many gaunt, cellophane-wrapped nipple-tweakers? How many prune-twatted hipster debutantes?
It's a star-lit ballroom full of elitists masquerading as egalitarians. Of snobs pretending to be socialists. Of petty backstabbers who appoint themselves as moral crusaders. These creeps can't get along with the other 99% of the country-shit, most of their time is spent quarreling among themselves-yet they try to fist-fuck you with Universal Brotherhood.
Almost down to the very last shaved anus, San Franciscans are a xenophobic breed. If you don't speak, look, and act like a San Franciscan, their policy is one of Zero Tolerance. They're totalitarian in the sense that they insist on controlling the thoughts and lives of others through forceful statist intervention. In doing so, they align themselves with the establishment which they pretend to be overthrowing. They're a buncha urban supremacists. Unyielding. Humorless. Stuffed to the gills with an unwarranted sense of their own cultural/moral superiority. I call them "Bay Aryans."
Surely I must be kidding, that I don't mean to compare such twinkle-toed West Coast coolness-mongerers to the TEETH-CHATTERINGLY SINISTER ATROCITIES of the Nazi pork-butchers. After all, Hitler killed six million Jewboys! That's enuff goldurned Heeb-a-roos to fill eight San Franciscos. You may be right, tootsie-pop, but are you aware that non-racist, peace-licking, universal-personhood-touting communist governments have slaughtered ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE this century? The commies beat Hitler 20-1. Their unbounded love for "humanity" didn't seem to put a check on an even stronger love for controlling and killing human beings. So much for your murky notions of government-mandated humanism. Better a Nazi than a commie, I guess.
And either one's better than a Bay Aryan. Being born in San Francisco is excusable, provided that you evacuate within 30 days of reaching adulthood. But moving TO the Bay Area is unforgivable under any circumstance. Based on an unfortunate long-term trend of Freak Relocation, the town has become a sort of Kurdish tent village of refugee weirdlings. A once-pretty city with happy-flappy seagulls has degenerated into an island of whitebreads-in-exile who've all fled from hometown persecution. San Francisco's foggy hills have become America's Largest Support Group, a Jonestown for people who were socially traumatized in high school.
Within city limits, I think San Francisco's fine as a cultural sanctuary for oversocialized misfits. Its danger lies in an apparently insatiable drive to vengefully impose its values on everyone outside the fortress. I think it's good that you people should have your own ghetto. I just think we should build a fence around it.
Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the desire to know the truth. Rejected by the Überclique, the Bay Aryans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other groping for "scene" status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that "scene" status is a worthwhile goal. They howl about "fighting fascism," yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel part of some "community," which is the first flash of the fascist impulse.
You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you finally feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your compassion for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with "the movement" because you're lost on your own.
I don't care about your precious personal lifestyle choices. I really don't. And your entire dingbat philosophy, the whole tectonic plate upon which San Francisco rests, is based on the false presumption that people such as me are somehow upset about the manner in which you flap your genitals around. Egads.
It isn't what you do, it's the way you do it. Not the meat, but rather the motion. It's not your lisping voice, it's the crap you're saying. It isn't your private cock-slurping, it's your public megaphone-mouth. It ain't how you move beneath the sheets, it's the way you wave the picket signs around. The problem isn't your self-consciously "decadent" personal lifestyle, it's your warped social and political instincts.
It has nothing to do with the widespread sidewalk displays of ass-rimming...or the women who look like Lou Costello...or even the concept of white people who hate the concept of white people. In fact, those are some of the things I LIKE about SF. It's the attitude. The vantage point. Cloistered in a cultural Presidio, the Bay Aryans see fit to cast judgment about the millions of peasants who live out on the Plains.
The Bay Aryans prove that they aren't truly compassionate by consistently showing a flagrant hatred for America's white rural lumpenproletariat. Though San Franciscans may mince through the streets in protest of hate speech, they sure as shootin' despise dem trailer trash. Although their hearts are opened like dilated rectums for poster kids halfway around the world, they disowned the homebound hillbillies a long time ago. I wonder what would happen if the hillbillies were to disown the Bay Aryans? Maybe if all the redneck farmers just decided to stop growing crops for a year. Perhaps if all the white-trash truckers agreed to halt delivery of all goods into this hostile enemy area. Maybe if all the Evil White Male Pig cops decided to ease up on Oakland and let black people REALLY express how they feel about their brethren in Frisco and Berkeley. That's all it would take. A puff of wind, and they'd all fall down.
It's a good thing that the rest of the country sees your city as a harmless Fruitcake Palace. The rest of America is too busy trying to put food on the table than worrying about your neurotic socio-libidinal peccadilloes. The rest of America could get along fine without San Francisco. The reverse is hardly true.
You should thank your "Goddess" that there are a few Nazis in Idaho and a smattering of Klansmen in Kentucky, because what else would you talk about at the weekly gatherings of the collective? Never mind that you all live in a much more AFFLUENT place than nearly all Idahoans or Kentuckians do.
Personal finances don't often factor into your ideas of what constitutes oppression, do they? You claim to identify with the poor and downtrodden, yet you're miraculously able to pay some of the highest rents in America. How do you do it? Maybe if you took the silver spoon out of your mouth, I'd be able to understand what you were mumbling about empowerment.
Modern American Leftoidism, a Volk religion epitomized in places such as the evil SF/Berkeley vortex, is almost exclusively the purview of upper-middle-class white kids who've never breathed a fleeting gasp of true oppression in their lives. This must be why the Bay Aryans don't seem nearly as concerned with America's widening class disparities as they are with its fashion mistakes and verbal boorishness. Though the Bay Aryans fancy themselves as revolutionaries, they're actually little more than a left-wristed inversion of Miss Manners. An area that prides itself on the Free Speech Movement is now gung-ho in favor of legal restrictions on terminology which it doesn't deem proper or sensitive. The Bay area teems with tattletales and stool pigeons and hall monitors and snitches. Since they don't have any REAL problems in their lives, these mushy bananas worry about getting their feelings bruised.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you, but human history is not entirely summarized by the bold struggle for the "right" to poke your veiny ding-dong through disco-bathroom glory holes. Not every act is political. Some are just silly and ugly and stinky.
Are you all high on crack? Does some municipal law require you to either have a glass pipe or a dick in your mouth at all times? Who else would seriously try to argue that rape has nothing to do with sex or that racism has nothing to do with economics? The holes in your logic have been stretched wider than your sphincters. Any honest overview of African, Asian, and Hispanic cultures would reveal more sexism, homophobia, and ethnic strife than you could shake a white dick at. Everyone is born corrupt. White males were simply better at it.
You can show your sincere opposition to white-male imperialism by giving your city back to the Injuns. Maybe we could help San Francisco realize its multicultural dreams by immediately shipping a million or so Third World indigents there. Let them take your jobs while you starve for awhile. We could forcibly relocate all the white-hipster undesirables out to Alcatraz, where they'd perform bloody gladitorial feats to the delight of Kenyan tourists on paddleboats.
I'm glad you've all gathered together in one place. Makes it easier to aim the missiles. Aren't you due for another natural disaster or something? Exactly what year are you scheduled to slide into the ocean? I want to take pictures.
No offense, but I have a higher opinion of the runny, worm-filled dogshit I scrape from my boot with a popsicle stick than I do of your fair city. You gave us OJ Simpson, but what have you done lately?
San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris.
San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock.
San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country.
Second to Berkeley, of course. Berkeley's so bad, it's too painful to talk about.
Tony Bennett left his heart. I took a dump. I'd tell you all to go to hell, but you already live there.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Just how cheap is that produce, really?
This came to me from a California school teacher:
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or $6.00 hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200 free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare.
All of this is at taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00 hour in benefits.
Many working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00 hour of discretionary income left after paying their bills and his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.
Cheap labor? YEAH, RIGHT!
Wake up, people.
"As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of:AND IS IT REALLY CHEAP LABOR?
I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large southern California high school which is designated a Title 1 school, meaning that its students are below average socioeconomic and income levels.
Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, etc., where these students are protesting, are also Title 1 schools.
Title 1 schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll -- but a full breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it being dumped in the trash uneaten. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least moderately overweight. About 75% or more DO have cell phones. The school also provides day care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with graffiti by the "appreciative" students, who obviously feel humbled and grateful to have a free education in America . (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)
I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country less then 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling them "Putas" (whores) and throwing things that the teachers were in tears.
Free medical, free education, free food, day care etc., etc., etc. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to not only be in this country but to demand rights, privileges and entitlements?
To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute to our society because they LIKE their gardener and housekeeper and they like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal immigration and see the TRUE costs.
Higher insurance, medical facilities closing, higher medical costs, more crime, lower standards of education in our schools, overcrowding, new diseases etc., etc, etc.
For me, I'll pay more for tomatoes.
We need to wake up. The guest worker program will be a disaster because we won't have the guts to enforce it.
Does anyone in their right mind really think they will voluntarily leave and return?
There are many hardworking Hispanic/American citizens that contribute to our country and many that I consider my true friends. We should encourage and accept those Hispanics who have done it the right and legal way.
It does, however, have everything to do with culture: A third-world culture that does not value education, that accepts children getting pregnant and dropping out of school by 15 and that refuses to assimilate, and an American culture that has become so weak and worried about "politically correct" that we don't have the will to do anything about it."
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or $6.00 hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200 free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare.
All of this is at taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00 hour in benefits.
Many working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00 hour of discretionary income left after paying their bills and his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.
Cheap labor? YEAH, RIGHT!
Wake up, people.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Tom McClintock on Congestion
The Last Honest Politician, or hopefully the first of their return, explains just how California road infrastructure got the way it is.
This was a speech Mr. McClintock made to the California Asphalt and Pavement Association on January 24, 2002. It's too bad this guy didn't become Governor, although there is a good chance he can become Lieutenant Governor this November. As for Ah-nold, despite his initiative setbacks, his only serious challenger is Phil Angelides at this point.
This was a speech Mr. McClintock made to the California Asphalt and Pavement Association on January 24, 2002. It's too bad this guy didn't become Governor, although there is a good chance he can become Lieutenant Governor this November. As for Ah-nold, despite his initiative setbacks, his only serious challenger is Phil Angelides at this point.
Thank you for your invitation to discuss the transportation crisis in California. The thing that makes it so fascinating to me is how simple the problem is to correct, and how monumentally stupid has been our policy to deal with it during the past 30 years.McClintock is just talking about LA County, but we all know what happened to Routes 65, 143, 148, 244, and 256 in this area.
Throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th Century, policymakers understood the simplicity, the efficiency and the necessity of the individualized transportation system made possible by the automobile.
In 1958, they adopted the most visionary infrastructure plan in California’s history that proposed a highway system to link all of the population, commercial and resource centers of the state with this remarkably efficient system – and to do so from existing gasoline tax dollars. This highway system was on schedule for completion in the 1980’s, until a single climacteric changed everything: the election of Gov. Jerry Brown and his “era-of-limits” “small-is-beautiful” “don’t build things and people won’t come” new-age nonsense.
We walked away from our highway program, literally abandoning projects in mid-construction. In this region, they canceled the Whitnall Freeway – which was to be the third east-west freeway through the middle of the San Fernando Valley. We already owned the land for that freeway – all that remained was to grade and pave. They canceled the Reseda Freeway, the third north/south freeway for the San Fernando Valley. They canceled the Pacific Coast Freeway from Oxnard to Long Beach in mid-construction. They canceled the 118 freeway from Oxnard to San Fernando in mid-construction. They canceled the Fillmore freeway in mid-construction. They canceled the Long Beach Freeway in mid-construction. It wasn’t for lack of funds – it was because of a retrograde ideology that held that the automobile is the root of all evil.
And through two Democratic and two Republican administrations, this basic agenda has not been challenged. Since 1974, the miles driven by Californians have increased 116 percent, while lane mileage has increased just 8 percent.I would add one caveat to McClintock's statement here: There are oh-so-many incidents where developers WANTED to build denser in a given area, but were stymied by growth controls imposed by residents frustrated by gridlock, caused by road construction not keeping pace in the first place. So communities imposed growth controls, and developers just took their projects a few miles up or down the road. The "sprawl" was in effect CAUSED by a lack of road capacity in the first place.
According to one of Jerry Brown’s deputies, Adrianna Gianturco: “We are prepared to endure considerable outcry in order to pry John Q. Public out of his car."
This policy has reached a new level with the election of Jerry Brown’s chief of staff, Gray Davis. Last summer, scant attention was paid when Davis announced that “California’s era of freeway construction is over.” I suggest to you that this statement ranks with “Let them eat cake,” and “Apres nous, le deluge” for sheer irresponsibility and lunacy in public policy.
Well, we stopped building freeways, the people came anyway, and they’re still in their cars.
I am here to state what is politically incorrect in bureaucratic circles, but what is self-evident to virtually every motorist on the road today. California policy makers have conducted a 30-year hate affair with the automobile, to the detriment of our economy, our safety, our environment, and our quality of life. And it is time – it is long past time – that Californians kicked them out of office and demanded the highways that we have paid for.
During those 30 years, we have heard the derisive and condescending comments about “Californians’ love affair with their cars.” California’s highway system was not due to an irrational love affair with a machine. It was the simple fact that the individualized transportation made possible by the automobile offers advantages that no mass-transit system could ever begin to duplicate: high-speed, low-cost, doorstep-to-doorstep, 24-hour a day on call service in safety, convenience and comfort, offering infinite flexibility in travel schedules and routes. It was this efficient, adaptable system that made 20th Century commerce possible – and it is the foundation upon which our ability to socially and commercially interact now rests.
But it is not popular with big government. Highly decentralized systems that respond to individual needs are anathema to the manipulative whims of government. Government likes centralized, command-and-control structures that can be dominated politically. Those who have lectured Californians that they have become too dependent on the automobile would rather make them dependent on government-managed mass transit.
So today, the finest highway system in the world is a shambles. It has not been merely neglected. An ideological war has been waged against it. I am here to suggest that it’s time that war was joined, and that the ideologues that have destroyed our transportation system be challenged by common sense.
Our plight is not for lack of money. California motorists bear the third heaviest taxes per vehicle and on gasoline in the country, and yet we rank dead last in our per capita spending for our highways.
In 1990, they doubled the excise tax on gasoline – and promised that money would be used for road construction. In the decade that followed, the miles driven by Californians increased another 30 percent, our lane mileage increased just ONE percent.
The Left likes to argue that government subsidizes the car. The truth is exactly the opposite. The car once paid for all highway construction. Now it is used to subsidize every aspect of the welfare state – except for a decent road system.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, virtually the entire California freeway system was constructed from the taxes – lower taxes, I might add – paid by the motorists who used the freeways. Since the 1970’s, there has been virtually no new freeway construction. We are carrying 30 years more volume – 116 percent more usage --- on the same road system built by our grandfathers – and paying higher taxes to boot.
The politically correct transportation system is, of course, mass transit. The only problem is that the masses don’t use it. And there’s a reason. It is inconvenient, it is enormously time-consuming, and most of all, if it wasn't heavily subsidized, it would be cost prohibitive.
Take a look at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority for example. Last year, the MTA consumed $2.7 billion: $5,900 annually for every passenger it carried. Last year, they had a 32-day strike. There was no appreciable increase in traffic congestion. There was actually a decrease in air pollution. Even the MTA admitted that 90 percent of its passengers had alternative means of transportation. And for the 45,000 truly transit dependent people in Los Angeles, a low-cost jitney service immediately materialized on every street corner until LA City government aggressively shut it down.
Now, consider this. Shifting just the MTA’s mass transit subsidy funds to road construction – even at Century Freeway prices – would mean four new lanes on the San Diego Freeway from the Ventura Freeway to the Century Freeway in the first year of savings alone. The next three years could do the same on the Hollywood Freeway from the Ventura to the 605 and on the Santa Monica from the Pacific coast to the 605. Within ten years, 170 miles of congested freeway routes in the Los Angeles area could have four lanes of angioplasty done, using the most conservative possible figures, for the MTA’s net operating costs for mass transit.
For the cost of the 79-mile long Los Angeles Metro-rail, we could have added 618 miles of new freeway lanes to the Los Angeles Freeway system – at Century freeway prices.
Let me ask for a show of hands. How many of you rode on the MTA in Los Angeles last year? How many of you rode on a Los Angeles Freeway last year? Any questions?
A few years ago, I attended a “transit summit,” composed of several hundred mass transit advocates throughout the region. There was a bus stop right outside the hotel. I asked these transit officials and lobbyists how many had come by bus. Of roughly 300 in attendance, three hands were raised. More recently, the director of Rideshare for Los Angeles was asked if she carpooled. She said “No,” it seems her schedule was just too unpredictable. Well, welcome to the world.
Four years ago, the San Fernando Valley Industry and Commerce Association conducted a survey of commuter preferences. According to the poll, a vast majority of area commuters want transit service that requires no more than a ten minute wait, stops no more than once on the way home, takes no more than thirty minutes in transit, and charges no more than 75-cents. For a Southern California mass transit system, such demands are impossible. Fortunately, what the public is describing is something they already have: the convenience, versatility and economy of the politically incorrect automobile.
But we don’t have that system any more because the taxes that once paid for all of our roads now have been diverted to pay for everything except our roads, and specifically to mass transit systems that are wildly unrealistic, hugely inconvenient, and enormously expensive.
There is method in their madness. County Supervisor Roger Niello of Sacramento, a strong advocate for highway construction, told me of his experience at one of these “mass transit summits.” There, the speaker said to the approval of the audience, “Remember, gridlock is our friend.” If you make the highways impassable, if you make life miserable enough for the single motorist, then people will have no choice but to take mass transit, with all its inconveniences and inefficiencies.
As boring and as politically incorrect as the road system is, it is the most efficient, most economical, safest, and most environmentally friendly transportation system we have. And if that statement surprises you, it is because of a massive mis-information campaign to which the mass transit lobby has subjected us for a generation.
I have already talked about the economies. The efficiency of doorstep to doorstep service should be obvious to all.
The safety figures are there for the asking. Private automobile traffic has a lower injury and mortality rate (per mile traveled) than the public mass transit systems in operation today.
But let me also mention the environment, which is the most prevalent excuse we have for California’s 30-year hate affair with the car.
Gridlocked automobiles create twice the NOx contaminants and six times the carbon contaminants per mile as those operating at peak efficiency. Think about that. Bringing California’s highways back to capacity would be the environmental equivalent of removing half the automobiles from the roads during rush hours for nitrogen oxide and removing five cars out of six for carbon monoxide.
And let me ask you this: does even the most wild-eyed environmentalist ever suggest that these mass transit systems will remove half of the cars from the roads?
Instead of doing the obvious, the big government crowd is suggesting everything but. We are told that we need to expand bus systems, add more light rail, telecommute, offer flex-time schedules, more HOV lanes, and on and on.
We’re told, “If you build more lanes, in ten years they’ll be as crowded as ever.” Listen to the logic of this statement: “Don’t build more lanes, people will just use them.” Instead, they have squandered billions of dollars on transportation systems people don’t use.
We’re told, “We can’t build our way out of these problems.” Well, how would you know, we haven’t tried in 30 years. When we kept pace with our needs, congestion was limited to a brief period at the height of rush hour. Now look at us.
We’re told, “Freeways will create suburban sprawl.” Well, there’s a reason for that that has nothing to do with freeways. People don’t like living in dense urban cores. It seems they like to have a yard for their kids to play in. And that’s why they are willing to endure endless traffic delays to provide that room for their kids. We can either recognize that and accommodate their needs, or refuse to recognize it and ruin of our standard of living and our quality of life.
It is one of the ironies of human nature that the more we invest in our mistakes, the less inclined we are to admit them.
So let me offer these politically incorrect suggestions:
First, restore highway revenues for highways. I first proposed dedicating our sales taxes on gasoline for our highways three years ago. Today, a similar measure is before us as Proposition 42, and it is a start.
Second, let’s ask that MTA and all the other mass transit systems pay for themselves through their own fareboxes, just as we expect highway users to pay for their highways through their gas taxes.
Third, fire the social engineers at CalTrans, update the blueprints for the highway system that our parents and grandparents drafted, and that we were supposed to have in place by now. And then, where it is still economically possible to do so, re-purchase the land and get to work.
This prescription raises a very important practical question: “How?” How do we change the thinking that has dominated transportation policy in this state for nearly 30 years?
I don’t have an easy answer to that question. I only have a hard answer to it. We have to change public opinion. We have to confront the mass transit lobby. We have to remove from office an entire generation of Luddites who have an utterly irrational abhorrence for the automobile and a blind faith in 30 years of failed transportation policy.
And that ain’t easy. Changing governing agendas is never easy.
But every now and then, change does occur – once the necessity for it overcomes our natural resistance to it.
But here’s the tough part – it takes years – sometimes decades of setbacks and disappointments and defeats and routs. It means going out every day into that marketplace of ideas and selling a position that a majority initially opposes.
But the good news is, the facts are not subtle. This is not a close call. But the facts have to be out there for the people to consider, and that is where we have utterly failed. And as we educate – as we agitate – as we bang our heads against a brick wall – public opinion will start to stir – glacially at first – imperceptibly at first – then very slowly, then slowly, and then quite suddenly the folly of decades gives way in a climacteric.
The good news is that the public will exercise solid judgment once they are in possession of all the facts. The problem is, all they currently hear is the propaganda of the mass transit lobby.
Change will not originate from within the Capitol building. In order for change to occur inside a Capitol, it must first change outside.
So I must ask you, and your companies, and your organizations, and your clients, What are you prepared to do?
Are you prepared to educate every Californian that in the decade since our road taxes doubled and our driving increased 30 percent, our highways have increased just one percent? Are you prepared to confront the MTA and its clones over the misuse of our highway money? Are you prepared to undertake a steady campaign until every voter is as aware as each of us in this room of the condition of our highway system and how we got there?
Because until you are prepared to do so – things are not going to change. And once you do – it might be years before we see results. And that is not an easy answer. It is a hard and expensive and uncertain answer. But it’s the truth and it is time we learned the truth – and acted on it.
What I can promise is that I will continue to press on these issues at every opportunity. And every voice that is raised will bring us closer to the day when all Californians can again enjoy high-speed transportation that is perfectly individualized to meet their precise needs -- that picks them up at their doorsteps and whisks them to their destinations in safety and comfort – whenever they need to go, wherever they need to go.
In short, what we once had, what we foolishly threw away, and what we must restore for our children and grandchildren: the finest highway system the world had known.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Paul Johnson on Bill Clinton
An interesting article on the Clinton presidency -- both good and bad, both praiseworthy and blameworthy, by historian Paul Johnson. In the book "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House", by a panel of historians left, right, and center, Clinton is rated 24th of 42--about right up the middle.
Presenting a just estimate of the Clinton presidency will pose perhaps insoluble problems to historians. The printed record of his doings, misdoings, and omissions is unarguably deplorable from start to finish. Yet he was reelected without difficulty, and many would argue that, had it been constitutionally possible for him to run for a third term, he would have been easily elected again. It is a fact that historians will have to take into account, for it is central to the success he enjoyed that William Jefferson Clinton was a formidable personality, at least in one sense:
Face-to-face, it was almost impossible to dislike him. Indeed it was difficult not to like him very much. As Tony Blair put it to me: "I found I had to like him, despite all the evidence."
Yet who, or what, was one liking? Other men who have gotten into trouble in the White House--one thinks of Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon--were distinctive personalities, to be made the subject of deeply etched portraits. They could be grasped. Clinton was, and still is, elusive.
Like Ronald Reagan, he was a consummate actor. But whereas Reagan devised his own part, wrote his own lines, and passionately believed in both, Clinton ad-libbed. He believed in nothing, or perhaps one should say in anything, since most positions received his fleeting endorsements at one time or another.
He certainly believed in himself, that is, in his capacity to occupy high office, and this self-justification by faith carried him through all the embarrassments and humiliations to which he was subjected during his eight vertiginous years of power. One day he would (as in 1994) be answering questions on the MTV Network from a silly teenager about his underpants; later that same day he would pick up the phone and speak to then Russian President Boris Yeltsin, seemingly unaware of any incongruity.
This confidence in his star and his survival was not attended by arrogance. There was nothing subjectively arrogant about Clinton; had there been, he would have been much easier to destroy. His power, rather, lay in his capacity to edit unwelcome reality out of his life. This may have been hereditary. Clinton's family background was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and there is no more to be said about it other than to applaud his strength in rising above it. His mother, Virginia Kelley, provided a clue in explaining how she survived her rackety life: "I construct an airtight box.
I keep inside it what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. . . . Inside is love and friends and optimism. Outside is negativity, can't-doism, and any criticism of me and mine." Bill Clinton would not have been able to describe his defensive technique so clearly. But that is what he did, with great success. As a result, while never arrogant, he was always secure.
He was clever, quick, and capable of huge efforts over short time spans. He has been compared to a geyser. From a marshy launching pad in Arkansas he got himself to Georgetown, to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, to Yale Law School, and to a law professorship at the University of Arkansas. This quickly propelled him into the attorney general's chair in Little Rock, then to the governorship. He was barely thirty-two when first elected governor in 1978 and, though he lost his reelection bid in 1980--his only defeat at the hands of the voters--he thereafter served another ten years, 1983--92, relinquishing power only to take up the presidency.
This performance can be taken either way. When he ran for the presidency, one commentator noted: "Anyone who has been elected governor of Arkansas five times cannot be an entirely honest man." On the other hand, his record in winning and holding voters was there for all to see. In particular he learned exactly how to befriend and win over the local opinion-formers whereever he went from town to town in Arkansas--"the car salesmen if white, the funeral parlor owners if black," as he told his staffers.
He was affable, easygoing, uncontentious, friendly to all. It is true that as governor he accomplished little or nothing. But there were advantages ininactivity: Clinton got to Washington with few enemies and virtually no intellectual baggage. He had a bland support for all "progressive" left-wing causes, but this was a veneer over the innate conservatism of a man who knows he can always persuade voters to give him good jobs.
Such baggage as he did possess was the property of the clever woman he met at Yale and married, for better or for worse. Hillary Rodham, a year younger, came from Chicago and quickly became a fierce Democrat partisan courtroom fighter, her first significant job being as counsel on the staff formed to impeach President Nixon in 1974.
Hillary gave an ideological edge to Clinton's general fuzziness when he got to the White House. She also stuck a left-wing feminist finger in appointment pies, especially of women, sometimes with embarrassing, indeed hilarious, results. Thus Tara O'Toole, nominated assistant secretary of energy, turned out to be a devout member of a Marxist women's reading circle. Roberta Achtenberg, assistant secretary for fair housing, revealed herself as a militant lesbian who persecuted the Boy Scouts for not allowing homosexuals as scoutmasters. Joycelyn Elders, made surgeon general, after many public rows, had to go when she advocated compulsory sex education for children far below puberty, even to the point of teaching about masturbation.
It has to be said that, from start to finish, there was always a comic aspect to the Clinton presidency. Funny things happened to him on his way to the White House, and in it, and wherever he went. The scandals began early in his first term and never let up, some trivial, even surreal. You had to laugh. Clinton held up traffic for an entire hour at Los Angeles International Airport, one of the world's busiest, while a barber came on board Air Force One to give him a haircut. When he stayed on the supercarrier George Washington, members of his staff were accused of carrying off embroidered bathrobes and fancy towels as souvenirs. Clinton said it was an outrageous lie and blamed the media for the thefts, but a White House payment of $562 told a different story.
Also comic, but to many Americans shocking, was the news that Clinton had agreed to let celebrity seekers sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House in return for hefty donations to Democratic Party campaign funds. More serious, indeed deeply serious, were the allegations that campaign contributions had been accepted from communist China.
There were also, as the Clinton presidency progressed, endless stories of business corruption involving Clinton and his wife in their Arkansas days, senior staffers in conflict-of-interest accusations, associates like Vince Foster and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who mysteriously died, and White House people who went off to become lobbyists. But most of these stories were complex and dreary to follow, hopelessly enmeshed in contradictory evidence. And there were too many of them. One clear, deadly scandal bullet is more likely to finish off a president than a scattering of scandal shrapnel coming from all directions.
Moreover, scandals about money and death had to compete with sex--a topic that eventually came to dominate the Clinton presidency. Indeed, it could be said to have been Clinton's salvation. His womanizing cropped up early in the presidency when it was revealed that, as governor, he had used state troopers to round him up partners. This was nothing, especially to Democrats hardened by covering up for John F. Kennedy. Presidential illicit sex in the White House, which gradually emerged, albeit of an uncomfortable, hurried, and furtive kind, might have been another matter if Hillary had taken offense and begun divorce proceedings. But she kept her eye on the real ball: Each presidential peccadillo led her to demand and get more political say, with her own future political career in mind. So long as Hillary was forgiving, the nation could be too.
That Clinton covered up his womanizing by lying on oath was dangerous, of course, because courtroom perjury and obstruction of justice might be construed as "high crimes and misdemeanors." Indeed they became the engine of the eventual impeachment proceedings. The trouble, however, was that the independent counsel made them the sole engine--questionable dealings with communist China, for instance, were left out.
Clinton clearly lied, glibly and easily, unselfconsciously and gaily--even unnecessarily--all his political life, often justifying his deception by legal quibbles on words, a skill he honed to perfection; his admission that he "smoked" marijuana but "never inhaled" was a characteristic distinction.
But to try to nail him for lying about sex was a serious tactical, indeed a strategic, error. Most men, including most members of the Senate, have lied about sex at some time. Of all the different kinds of lies it is the one that carries the least opprobrium, either among colleagues or with the public. This was probably the real or main reason why the impeachment proceedings, though serious enough to barely clear the House, could not succeed in the Senate.
But in the meantime, the Clinton presidency had come and gone. It is most improbable that it could ever have been a success story, even on Clinton's own terms. He was indeed a fountain of energy, a geyser, but a spasmodic and uncontrolled one, propelled by galvanic appetites and generating chaos.
Aides testified: "He reads half a dozen books at a time." "He relaxes not by watching a basketball game on TV or reading or picking up the telephone or doing crossword puzzles, but doing all simultaneously, while worrying an unlit cigar." "When he would eat an apple, he would eat the whole thing, core, stem, and seeds. He would pick up a baked potato in his hands and eat it in two bites."
The womanizing fitted in well with this dynamic but incoherent approach, but careful and systematic policy planning did not. Indeed to the question "Did Clinton have a strategy in the White House?" the answer must be no. His foreign policy was a long list of failed, aborted, or abandoned initiatives, punctuated by bouts of somnambulation, which, in the case of international terrorism, was to have serious consequences in the future. However, most of Clinton's time and energy as president were spent not on policy or executive activity but in defending himself against accusations. The theme of his presidency might be described as "The Inconvenience of Sexual Appetites." Clinton in fact did nothing. It was not so much masterly inactivity as mistressly inactivity.
That inactivity had one outstanding virtue. It turned the Clinton years into one of the longest periods of laissez-faire free enterprise in U.S. history. If Clinton had been a continent man, and so with the time and focus to be a left-wing activist president, the consequences would almost certainly have been disastrous for the American economy. As it was, with the president busy elsewhere, the nation thrived mightily, as it always does when politicians do not meddle. The stage had already been set by the Reagan years, but under Clinton all surged forward. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, more than $5 trillion in real terms was added to America's gross domestic product. This was the central paradox of the Clinton presidency, and of course the leading reason why he remained popular.
Not even Clinton's notorious end-of-term list of pardons for notorious gangsters and corrupt former pals could quite extinguish popular support for the man. The charm continued to work, not only in America but abroad. I last saw Clinton near my own house in the celebrated Notting Hill district of London in 2002. He decided to do a walkabout, and plunged into the crowd, an activity he enormously and palpably enjoyed, and which delighted everybody. No one ever matched him as a simple campaigner. It was the thing he did best. It might be said, indeed, that he almost never did anything else.
In Notting Hill he was not running for office. The locals were not his voters. But he behaved as if they were and they loved it. The old political master was in his element. He found himself in a pub and ordered drinks all round. All cheered. The news spread to the vast crowd outside, and it cheered too. Adrenaline racing, fists thumping chests, hugging and handshaking, wisecracking and slogan swapping, Clinton worked that crowd for twenty minutes, leaving it hoarse and exhausted, delighted and deeply impressed when he swept off in his limo. There was however, one unhappy man -- the bartender, who was never paid for ol' Bill's round.
****
Mr. Johnson is author, most recently, of "Art: A New History"
(HarperCollins, 2003). From the book "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House," edited by James Taranto and Leonard Leo. Foreword by William J. Bennett. Copyright 2004 by Dow Jones & Company Inc. A Wall Street Journal Book, published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Presenting a just estimate of the Clinton presidency will pose perhaps insoluble problems to historians. The printed record of his doings, misdoings, and omissions is unarguably deplorable from start to finish. Yet he was reelected without difficulty, and many would argue that, had it been constitutionally possible for him to run for a third term, he would have been easily elected again. It is a fact that historians will have to take into account, for it is central to the success he enjoyed that William Jefferson Clinton was a formidable personality, at least in one sense:
Face-to-face, it was almost impossible to dislike him. Indeed it was difficult not to like him very much. As Tony Blair put it to me: "I found I had to like him, despite all the evidence."
Yet who, or what, was one liking? Other men who have gotten into trouble in the White House--one thinks of Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon--were distinctive personalities, to be made the subject of deeply etched portraits. They could be grasped. Clinton was, and still is, elusive.
Like Ronald Reagan, he was a consummate actor. But whereas Reagan devised his own part, wrote his own lines, and passionately believed in both, Clinton ad-libbed. He believed in nothing, or perhaps one should say in anything, since most positions received his fleeting endorsements at one time or another.
He certainly believed in himself, that is, in his capacity to occupy high office, and this self-justification by faith carried him through all the embarrassments and humiliations to which he was subjected during his eight vertiginous years of power. One day he would (as in 1994) be answering questions on the MTV Network from a silly teenager about his underpants; later that same day he would pick up the phone and speak to then Russian President Boris Yeltsin, seemingly unaware of any incongruity.
This confidence in his star and his survival was not attended by arrogance. There was nothing subjectively arrogant about Clinton; had there been, he would have been much easier to destroy. His power, rather, lay in his capacity to edit unwelcome reality out of his life. This may have been hereditary. Clinton's family background was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and there is no more to be said about it other than to applaud his strength in rising above it. His mother, Virginia Kelley, provided a clue in explaining how she survived her rackety life: "I construct an airtight box.
I keep inside it what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. . . . Inside is love and friends and optimism. Outside is negativity, can't-doism, and any criticism of me and mine." Bill Clinton would not have been able to describe his defensive technique so clearly. But that is what he did, with great success. As a result, while never arrogant, he was always secure.
He was clever, quick, and capable of huge efforts over short time spans. He has been compared to a geyser. From a marshy launching pad in Arkansas he got himself to Georgetown, to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, to Yale Law School, and to a law professorship at the University of Arkansas. This quickly propelled him into the attorney general's chair in Little Rock, then to the governorship. He was barely thirty-two when first elected governor in 1978 and, though he lost his reelection bid in 1980--his only defeat at the hands of the voters--he thereafter served another ten years, 1983--92, relinquishing power only to take up the presidency.
This performance can be taken either way. When he ran for the presidency, one commentator noted: "Anyone who has been elected governor of Arkansas five times cannot be an entirely honest man." On the other hand, his record in winning and holding voters was there for all to see. In particular he learned exactly how to befriend and win over the local opinion-formers whereever he went from town to town in Arkansas--"the car salesmen if white, the funeral parlor owners if black," as he told his staffers.
He was affable, easygoing, uncontentious, friendly to all. It is true that as governor he accomplished little or nothing. But there were advantages ininactivity: Clinton got to Washington with few enemies and virtually no intellectual baggage. He had a bland support for all "progressive" left-wing causes, but this was a veneer over the innate conservatism of a man who knows he can always persuade voters to give him good jobs.
Such baggage as he did possess was the property of the clever woman he met at Yale and married, for better or for worse. Hillary Rodham, a year younger, came from Chicago and quickly became a fierce Democrat partisan courtroom fighter, her first significant job being as counsel on the staff formed to impeach President Nixon in 1974.
Hillary gave an ideological edge to Clinton's general fuzziness when he got to the White House. She also stuck a left-wing feminist finger in appointment pies, especially of women, sometimes with embarrassing, indeed hilarious, results. Thus Tara O'Toole, nominated assistant secretary of energy, turned out to be a devout member of a Marxist women's reading circle. Roberta Achtenberg, assistant secretary for fair housing, revealed herself as a militant lesbian who persecuted the Boy Scouts for not allowing homosexuals as scoutmasters. Joycelyn Elders, made surgeon general, after many public rows, had to go when she advocated compulsory sex education for children far below puberty, even to the point of teaching about masturbation.
It has to be said that, from start to finish, there was always a comic aspect to the Clinton presidency. Funny things happened to him on his way to the White House, and in it, and wherever he went. The scandals began early in his first term and never let up, some trivial, even surreal. You had to laugh. Clinton held up traffic for an entire hour at Los Angeles International Airport, one of the world's busiest, while a barber came on board Air Force One to give him a haircut. When he stayed on the supercarrier George Washington, members of his staff were accused of carrying off embroidered bathrobes and fancy towels as souvenirs. Clinton said it was an outrageous lie and blamed the media for the thefts, but a White House payment of $562 told a different story.
Also comic, but to many Americans shocking, was the news that Clinton had agreed to let celebrity seekers sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House in return for hefty donations to Democratic Party campaign funds. More serious, indeed deeply serious, were the allegations that campaign contributions had been accepted from communist China.
There were also, as the Clinton presidency progressed, endless stories of business corruption involving Clinton and his wife in their Arkansas days, senior staffers in conflict-of-interest accusations, associates like Vince Foster and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who mysteriously died, and White House people who went off to become lobbyists. But most of these stories were complex and dreary to follow, hopelessly enmeshed in contradictory evidence. And there were too many of them. One clear, deadly scandal bullet is more likely to finish off a president than a scattering of scandal shrapnel coming from all directions.
Moreover, scandals about money and death had to compete with sex--a topic that eventually came to dominate the Clinton presidency. Indeed, it could be said to have been Clinton's salvation. His womanizing cropped up early in the presidency when it was revealed that, as governor, he had used state troopers to round him up partners. This was nothing, especially to Democrats hardened by covering up for John F. Kennedy. Presidential illicit sex in the White House, which gradually emerged, albeit of an uncomfortable, hurried, and furtive kind, might have been another matter if Hillary had taken offense and begun divorce proceedings. But she kept her eye on the real ball: Each presidential peccadillo led her to demand and get more political say, with her own future political career in mind. So long as Hillary was forgiving, the nation could be too.
That Clinton covered up his womanizing by lying on oath was dangerous, of course, because courtroom perjury and obstruction of justice might be construed as "high crimes and misdemeanors." Indeed they became the engine of the eventual impeachment proceedings. The trouble, however, was that the independent counsel made them the sole engine--questionable dealings with communist China, for instance, were left out.
Clinton clearly lied, glibly and easily, unselfconsciously and gaily--even unnecessarily--all his political life, often justifying his deception by legal quibbles on words, a skill he honed to perfection; his admission that he "smoked" marijuana but "never inhaled" was a characteristic distinction.
But to try to nail him for lying about sex was a serious tactical, indeed a strategic, error. Most men, including most members of the Senate, have lied about sex at some time. Of all the different kinds of lies it is the one that carries the least opprobrium, either among colleagues or with the public. This was probably the real or main reason why the impeachment proceedings, though serious enough to barely clear the House, could not succeed in the Senate.
But in the meantime, the Clinton presidency had come and gone. It is most improbable that it could ever have been a success story, even on Clinton's own terms. He was indeed a fountain of energy, a geyser, but a spasmodic and uncontrolled one, propelled by galvanic appetites and generating chaos.
Aides testified: "He reads half a dozen books at a time." "He relaxes not by watching a basketball game on TV or reading or picking up the telephone or doing crossword puzzles, but doing all simultaneously, while worrying an unlit cigar." "When he would eat an apple, he would eat the whole thing, core, stem, and seeds. He would pick up a baked potato in his hands and eat it in two bites."
The womanizing fitted in well with this dynamic but incoherent approach, but careful and systematic policy planning did not. Indeed to the question "Did Clinton have a strategy in the White House?" the answer must be no. His foreign policy was a long list of failed, aborted, or abandoned initiatives, punctuated by bouts of somnambulation, which, in the case of international terrorism, was to have serious consequences in the future. However, most of Clinton's time and energy as president were spent not on policy or executive activity but in defending himself against accusations. The theme of his presidency might be described as "The Inconvenience of Sexual Appetites." Clinton in fact did nothing. It was not so much masterly inactivity as mistressly inactivity.
That inactivity had one outstanding virtue. It turned the Clinton years into one of the longest periods of laissez-faire free enterprise in U.S. history. If Clinton had been a continent man, and so with the time and focus to be a left-wing activist president, the consequences would almost certainly have been disastrous for the American economy. As it was, with the president busy elsewhere, the nation thrived mightily, as it always does when politicians do not meddle. The stage had already been set by the Reagan years, but under Clinton all surged forward. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, more than $5 trillion in real terms was added to America's gross domestic product. This was the central paradox of the Clinton presidency, and of course the leading reason why he remained popular.
Not even Clinton's notorious end-of-term list of pardons for notorious gangsters and corrupt former pals could quite extinguish popular support for the man. The charm continued to work, not only in America but abroad. I last saw Clinton near my own house in the celebrated Notting Hill district of London in 2002. He decided to do a walkabout, and plunged into the crowd, an activity he enormously and palpably enjoyed, and which delighted everybody. No one ever matched him as a simple campaigner. It was the thing he did best. It might be said, indeed, that he almost never did anything else.
In Notting Hill he was not running for office. The locals were not his voters. But he behaved as if they were and they loved it. The old political master was in his element. He found himself in a pub and ordered drinks all round. All cheered. The news spread to the vast crowd outside, and it cheered too. Adrenaline racing, fists thumping chests, hugging and handshaking, wisecracking and slogan swapping, Clinton worked that crowd for twenty minutes, leaving it hoarse and exhausted, delighted and deeply impressed when he swept off in his limo. There was however, one unhappy man -- the bartender, who was never paid for ol' Bill's round.
****
Mr. Johnson is author, most recently, of "Art: A New History"
(HarperCollins, 2003). From the book "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House," edited by James Taranto and Leonard Leo. Foreword by William J. Bennett. Copyright 2004 by Dow Jones & Company Inc. A Wall Street Journal Book, published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Creating a 5th Column at home
Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado, described "a secret plan to destroy America."
In a speech to a stunned audience in Washington at a conference about immigration reform in 2004, he described how an enemy within could destroy his own country:
1. Make America a bilingual-bicultural country.
2. Invent multiculturalism and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture.
3. Make the Southwestern United States a "Hispanic Quebec." Celebrate diversity rather than unity.
4. Make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated.
5. Get big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money.
6. Establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties.
7. Place these entire subjects off-limits, make it taboo to talk about them. Use words like "racist" and "xenophobe." Make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws.
Enemies within are more dangerous than terrorists. People and nations living in moral defeat are blind and therefore cannot detect them and believe their lies. To use other people's money to bribe your own potential voters makes matters worse.
In a speech to a stunned audience in Washington at a conference about immigration reform in 2004, he described how an enemy within could destroy his own country:
1. Make America a bilingual-bicultural country.
2. Invent multiculturalism and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture.
3. Make the Southwestern United States a "Hispanic Quebec." Celebrate diversity rather than unity.
4. Make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated.
5. Get big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money.
6. Establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties.
7. Place these entire subjects off-limits, make it taboo to talk about them. Use words like "racist" and "xenophobe." Make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws.
Enemies within are more dangerous than terrorists. People and nations living in moral defeat are blind and therefore cannot detect them and believe their lies. To use other people's money to bribe your own potential voters makes matters worse.
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