"Hypocrisy is a force multiplier to ideological prejudice."

I'm really enjoying this new theme of Victor Davis Hanson's

Here's where he talks about Juan Willians being fired by NPR.

Standard stuff, don't say things the libs won't like, don't go to places they don't like, and don't question them, unless you want to get fired or worse.

So Williams wakes up in the morning a respected journalist and goes to sleep a few hours later with the burden of proving that he is not a bigot, and not unhinged and not under medical care in the eyes of his employer, and not guilty of a litany of additional but unspecified crimes. All this comes from soft-spoken contemplative NPR, which prides itself in being the antithesis of intolerant shock-jock right-wing talk radio. Hypocrisy is again a force multiplier to ideological prejudice.

...

Isn’t the network that takes public money supposed to be the more tolerant? Is this a reflection of audience taste and assumptions: Fox knows its viewers don’t care whether liberal Williams works at a liberal network; NPR fears mightily that its intolerant audience can’t stand anyone who is associated with Fox?

Tolerance. As long as you don't rock the boat.

Notice that ideologue and partisan George Soros just offered NPR nearly $2 million to hire 100 reporters — and NPR accepted the gift. Would it have accepted money from, say, a more soft-spoken but conservative philanthropist such as Charles Koch who might target where NPR needed “help”? And, if it is a publicly funded agency, why do zillionaires have the right to donate and determine hiring for their pet causes? Maybe Bill Gates can offer to hire some IRS auditors, or Warren Buffet can fund a new branch of the SEC?

Good question. It's like NPR wants to have it both ways, screw the rules. Which is fitting, after all the greater good is more important and rules, like taxes are for little people.


Meanwhile, prominent Dems in entertainment and politics, even the Whitehouse are going after the idea that it's crazy to question the President's great plans and wonderful acomplishments.

Hmm... questioning Dear Leader being a symptom of insanity. That sounds... familiar.

Reality brings... cheer

Margaret Thatcher's old line really strikes home: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Monty at Ace of Spaces has some sobering thoughts.

Half of the US population, in short, lives not by the fruits of their own toil but by the (coerced) charity of others, as filtered and distilled through the hand of the government. This can not -- it can not, by the laws of economics and simple physics -- continue. The mathematics of the problem trump even philosophical issues of fairness, of governance, of ethics or law. The mathematics simply will not allow it.

Consider the French. They are rioting over a proposal to raise the national age of retirement from 60 to 62. Germany's is 65 (going to 67) -- how happy will German workers be to subsidize the early retirements of their French neighbors? The French labor unions are on a rampage, denouncing the move as a violation of a "promise" the country made to the workers. (If this reminds you of California, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan -- well, the situations are closely analogous.) The word "promise" is illuminating: people have stopped thinking of social welfare as a "benefit" or a "perquisite", and have begun instead to think of it as a "right" or a "promise"... Reality will assert itself, one way or another.

Mean old reality and facts. It also gets into the falling birthrates and the question of immigration. Hmmm... familiar.

If the governments of the West have an excuse -- however weak and puling -- it is this: they meant well. It is not wrong to wish that every citizen have free health care, free food, free housing, and some money to spend even if they have no job. It's not wrong; it's just impossible. Health care is a service that has huge costs associated with it. These costs cannot be "magicked" away just because we find them inconvenient. Food must be grown, transported, packaged, and prepared -- all costs that must be accounted for. Shelter does not precipitate out of thin air.

But if we mean well then it has to work! Otherwise, well, it'd all be unfair!

I'm remined of this bit I saw on Robb Allen's blog where he gives up on a gun-banner due to her... specialness.

She doesn’t bring up any valid points, and is as lost as they get.
She believes it’s legal to sell guns to a felon because felons can get guns. Logic like that is impossible to argue against since you can only bring facts and logic is wasted on the illogical.

This also shows a naive and deluded trust in the power of the state and the compliance of the populace. It's very magical thinking, all that needs to be done to stop something is to pass a law and everyone will fall in line.


Just like how "free things are nice", people should get free things, therefore the goverment should and can give free things to people.

A party like itself.

So if someone was cautioning the Tea Party to not "party like it's
1773" would you screech about them being historically ignorant, given the declaration of independence was signed in 1776.


Or would you realize that maybe telling the Tea Party to not party refers to some other event in US history. Maybe something tea and party related. Maybe something that did happen in 1773. Nah... better to just assume Palin's a moron and try to revel in your own elite status.

Ed Driscoll asks: "Why don’t elites know their history — or at least how to use Google?"

Because they're so super-duper smart they knew Palin was being stupid and meant to talk about 1776 (again when the Declaration of Independence was signed, not when the rev war was won, or when the constitution was written or enacted).

And these are the goons that think they're so superior to you that they and their allies can and should run your life because you'll just screw it up.

As Rand often says: "I wouldn’t mind quite so much if they were really, you know, elite, instead of someone who managed to get a piece of paper from Harvard or Yale."

Though to be fair to brain trust behind this latest attack, Kos: Northern Illinois University (B.S.), Boston University School of Law (J.D.). But at least Kos hates the right people, and has "good" intentions so that's what counts.

Now shut up you mouth-breathing, American history-citing, gun-clinging, Hayek- reading ignorant hayseeds.

Mean old reality, Part XIX

Well, looks like someone tried to sell a bag of rocks and call 'em diamonds.

Sold to the American public as “sort of God,” marketed as a political
savior of such extraordinary intelligence and giftedness that there
had simply never been anyone like him, Barack Obama so misrepresented himself that hundreds of pundits are still trying to make sense of what went wrong.

When reality met branding-myth, the whole thing fell apart.

Truth happened, you nitwits.

See previous Left views on how it's always failure to brand and label.

Tsk. Tsk. That would be one mighty big class action suit if
politicians had to follow the same credibility rules they set for
business.

Hah! Imagine. Holding a monopolistic organization with legalized violence to the standard one holds a hotdog vendor.



Know what's racist now? Noting which border most of the people illegally entering the US use.

This is a typical leftist tactic, when faced with a reality they don’t want to acknowledge or be forced to defend the simply go on the offensive and charge ‘racism’. What racism exactly is never mentioned because it doesn’t exist and even if it did, the charge and change of subject is all they are ever really after in the first place.

Remember in the aftermath of 9/11 the image of the three firefighters raising an American flag over the rubble of the towers? When it came time to create a statue of that iconic image, the PC crew wanted to change the three white men into something more diverse, more inclusive, more untrue.

That same type of thinking is at work here. Reality doesn’t meet Serwer needs so he simply demands that it be changed. Are there Europeans and Asians and Africans who stay here illegally? Sure. Do some cross over a border? Probably, though most in those groups are people who come here legally and overstay their visas. But that’s inconvenient, so Serwer simply wants the world portrayed in a way that isn’t true but fits his narrative better. Failure to accommodate him is simply “RACISM!”.

Again. Reality == Meanie.


And speaking of lazy, incompetent, charges of racism...

On one level, as Douthat points out, this is a lesson about desperate liberals making up comforting myths. (”The Democrats are weeks away from a midterm thumping that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the liberal mind is desperate for a narrative, a storyline, something to ease the pain of losing to a ragtag band of right-wing populists.”) But it is also a cautionary tale about the willful ineptitude and outright laziness of the mainstream media.

A single intern did what not a single mainstream outlet, with collectively thousands of cameramen and reporters, refused to do: get the facts. The mainstream media eagerly recited false accounts of racial epithets but could not be bothered to do a systematic report on the Tea Partiers’ actual message.

But it's the rightwing that is anti-science and hung up on fantastical
delusions taken as faith.

"The only problem with that: facts."

Quote from Goldberg article where he looks at Obama's admission that the whole "shovel-ready" idea wouldn't work in the real world.

It seems to me that, if I were president, and I not only staked vast swaths of my credibility but gambled the prosperity of the country generally on this concept of “shovel-ready jobs,” I might be a bit miffed with the staffers who swore that shovel-ready jobs were, like, you know, a real thing.

And yet, if you read Peter Baker’s Obama profile, it’s clear that Obama isn’t mad about that. In fact, he still thinks he got all the policies right. Baker writes that Obama is “supremely sure that he is right,” it’s just that the president feels he didn’t market himself
well.

It's not about facts or results with Obama et al. as always it's about marketing and narrative.

As Goldberg says: "This is an old progressive lament: Our product is
perfect, we just didn’t sell it convincingly to the rubes."

And here's some more.

But wait a second. If they spent “much more time trying to get the
policy right,” how come nobody said, “Uh, Mr. President, these ‘shovel-ready jobs’ you keep talking about? They’re sort of like good flan — they don’t exist.”

Mean old logic. Why do facts have to get in the way of the earnest desire to do "good" and be glorified for it.

Repeated from an earlier comment: lacking experience in the real world is a source of pride for these "elites". As is the incomprehension of empirical arguments (Y has been tried in the past and has failed every time) or functional logic (if you make X more of a hassle you will get less of X). Most beam with never having to meet a budget, show a profit, or be measured by the real world.

It's akin to a dandy showing off his baby-soft hands to prove he's untainted by manual labor.

Speaking of a new aristrocracy, here's Bill Whittle:



Watch it all.

And these people want to control your healthcare...

and your finances and your thermostate and your car and...

Organizing for America decided to put a big old list of names and phone numbers avaliable to -well- anyone.

This is a massive security problem for anyone whose name is on that list, which appears to include identified Democrats and Independents. And it’s caused by the Democrats and Organizing for America. With full names and phone numbers easily available, there’s probably enough there for identity thieves to go to work.

This is more boneheaded than anything else. And these clowns want more power? And think they can run your life better than you.

You don’t just let any person wander in off the street, rifle through your voter files and make calls on your behalf. But that’s just what the DNC and OfA are doing here. And these are people who want us to trust them with our health care?

Exactly.

Of course we've seen what such hubris brings.


Victor Davis Hanson notes:

Add all that to new health care and financial regulations, and the message is clear the American private sector is suspect rather than industrious and critical to our nation’s economic life. “At some point”, after Obama’s slurs against Fox, the Republican leadership, insurers, Wall Street, doctors, police, the people of Arizona, or opponents of the Ground Zero mosque, fairly or not, a lot of people
conclude that he does not like them or what they do or what they represent. So trillions of dollars in capital are waiting on the sidelines until November and proof that the Obama agenda is stalled. Even the SEIU or Nancy Pelosi cannot change that fact."

As Goldberg said in today's GoldBerg File (sorry email only)

Just for the record, a bunch of readers and a few commenters seem to think I am now an anti-elitist; I'm not. Never have been, never will be.

I'm anti-snobbery, anti-government meddling, anti-government condescension, anti-all number of things. But I'm not anti-elitist per se. I just don't like much of what passes for the current elite.

Yup. That these goobers are so inept makes their grubby power grabs all the more insufferable.

I'll end with this gem from VDH: "Hypocrisy is a force multiplier to paranoia."

Greeeeaaat

From Maetenloch's Overnight Thread.

According to this story out of Greece the the Benefits Division of the state insurance provider has decided not to provide special footwear to diabetic patients anymore since amputation is cheaper. But don't worry - under Obamacare if you like your foot, you'll be able to keep it. For now.

You gotta love State Healthcare. The goal of removing heartless capitalism from healthcare leads to even more impersonal, dehumanizing penny-pinching.

It's like trusting the State to be compassionate with monopolistic power over your body is a bad idea.