Here are the 4 Democrats (not counting Harry Reid) who voted against the Manchin-Toomey Gun Control Bill:
Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.)
Max Baucus (D-Mont.)
Mark Begich (D-Alaska)
Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)
And guess what, 3 of them are up for re-election next year. So, to the Republicans that will run against them, your message to your prospective voters is simple: “How would they vote on the same bill in 2015?”
Simple. Easy.
MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry has become the latest bête noire of the so-called right and I use that French term like bait on a proverbial hook in a pond stocked-full of white liberals. She is black and politically she is a “beast,” but the semantics and hyperbole of the term are more ironic than axiomatic as you’ll soon see.
Harris-Perry has been under fire for comment she made on a network promo that children do not “belong” to parents but rather belong to the community. In light of the criticism, she has held firm to her rhetoric and defended her position, though with just a dash of sedation.
“This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property. This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good. And that is exactly the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years.”
Quite right, Melissa, quite right! That is indeed what it’s all about and I applaud you for sticking to your guns and standing firmly on the side of fascism. In this age of mushy moderates and Senators not wanting to stand next to other Senators in public after politically fornicating with them in private, this radical stand is a breath of fresh air despite the gust of tyranny that soon follows.
In that foul year of our Lord, 2012 (to paraphrase Dr. Gonzo), the political discourse was littered with an arguably unprecedented number of straw men divisions unleashed on America’s political battlefield. For someone of the political right to offer up the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the federal government didn’t need to spend tax dollars to fund cowboy poetry festivals, the notion was quickly equated to wanting a form of anarchy in America akin to something out of the Road Warriors putting us all at the mercy of Master Blaster. This platform of anti-libertarian hysteria won over a public far too enamored with Snooki’s pregnancy, their Instagram accounts and, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, an insistence on calling me “maybe.” Couple that with a still demented fear of doing anything that might easily be construed as racist by the high council of race relations on Manhattan’s upper-east side, and you had the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States. This is a Cliff’s Note version of my answer to William S. Burroughs famous question: “When did I stop wanting to be president?” But that’s for another time.
Harris-Perry is quite right that battle between individual freedoms and the “common good” is a fight we’ve been having for some time whether it be hundreds or thousands of years. For our purposes here, let us stick to the last 50 or so. The true believers of the political left has always been experts on playing long ball. They know that events like the Democrats losing the House of Representatives in 1994 are mere speed bumps on a very long road that F.A. Hayek urged us all to avoid. They know full well (as do the bigger brains on the right) that once a government program is in place, it’s easier to move a mountain than to remove the program from layers of bureaucracy and public complacency. Republicans play prevent-defense, or play not to lose, you choose your sports metaphor…thus, they almost always lose except when a once-a-century leader comes along. But the likes of Reagan and Thatcher could only slow the descent so much before they are stabbed in the back by their own palace guards whether they be named Bush or Cameron. But still, the fight between individuality and collectivism continues in its many forms. Harris-Perry has shown some moxie in sticking to her position publicly even if said position may be even more radical privately. But as compassionate human-being, I feel compelled to warn her that she mustn’t forget that while she calls for all of us to be part of the “collective,” she will always be subservient to a sub-collective known as white liberals. The hard truth is, they call the shots.
When someone utters the “N-word,” who is the first to get the vapors? When the Amos-and-Andy radio show started getting criticism, where did it come from? When Robert Crumb drew black caricatures in his comics, from where was he feeling the heat?
White liberals put up with black punditry as long as they realize that they are and will always be victims. When they stray from this, shall we say, plantation? the consequences are dire. Dr. Ben Carson has been told by political pundits and public universities in no uncertain terms that his speech is not deemed by them to be worthy of First Amendment protection and therefore must not be uttered. They understand they can’t legally stop him from speaking, but to paraphrase Arte Johnson “We have vays of making you not talk.”
For white liberals, the scourge of the planet is quite simply white people. They are the imperialists, the rapers of the western lands, the bible-thumping, anarcho-capitalists who refuse to show the proper respect for cultures prone to cutting and appositioning the labia minora and/or the labia majora of young girls. These scoundrels are also deemed guilty of referring to anyone not white as “brown people.” Peculiar then, the only time I hear that term “brown people” is from media entertainment produced in Hollywood, California. But I’ll take the bait. Brown people = good. White people = bad. That’s perhaps the most sacrosanct decree from Democratic Republic of the Limousine Liberal, so let’s go with it.
Ms. Harris-Perry, you have shown resolve and fortitude in sticking to your guns (no, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, that’s not a veiled message) on the virtues of collectivism. You are special. You could be wasting time ladling soup to the homeless or building houses for the downtrodden, but you’ve gone beyond that. You host a show on an extremely low-rated, hysterical “news” network where your message can be heard by literally hundreds of people. Showing us such bravery, it’s time to take things to the next level. Your masters’ have decreed that white people are the scourge of the planet, so it’s time for solutions. It’s time for these high-minded white people on the upper-east side of humanity, who truly understand the evil that lurks in their epidermis, to do what must be done: commit mass suicide.
Albert Camus wrote in the The Myth of Sisyphus:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer [the questions of suicide].
For white liberals and their cultist followers, the answer to this question has to be indisputable, incontestable and irrefutable. If planet earth is to be saved, white people en masse, as many as possible, must commit suicide and allow the “brown people” to finally, at long last, live in a grand, unfettered utopia, free of individualism and all of the unpleasantness and inconveniences that freedom and liberty bring. You, Ms. Harris-Perry may just be the right person to bring to the fore a solution who’s time has truly come. And if you feel any pangs of doubt, just remember that Janet Reno is available if you feel the process needs a gentle nudge.
Best of luck to you and yours.
Thus Spat Zarathustra
[Editor's note: If you fail to grasp the irony of this blog post, please include yourself in the hopefully eventual kool-aid party that will be held at Sardi's on West 44th street. Invitation only.]
British cartoonist Gerard Scarfe wouldn’t be known if not for the fact he did the animation for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Like Roger Waters, Scarfe is one of those leftist who believes what he believes without any intellectual honesty whatsoever. It’s really an anti-Western type of ideology. Despite the fact Scarfe lives in the all the luxuries that western civilization offers, his ideology dictates that he must hate all things western, i.e. democratic and support all things despotic and anti-humanist. He’s in the news because of a political cartoon featuring Benyamin Netanyahu building a wall using the blood of Palestinians for mortar. And not coincidentally, the cartoon was published on Holocaust Memorial Day. This will provoke some outrage and get Scarfe some media attention he can lap up and use to score points with despots and act morally superior. I’m sure Anonymous has already nominated him for sainthood.
But as readers of this blog know, I’m a free speech absolutist, so I have no objection to him doing this cartoon. What I object to is the hypocrisy. Shed yourself of the comforts of the West, Gerard, and then we’ll talk.
Had an interesting Twitter exchange with haters of “Big Oil” the other day:
It was at this point that I was at a loss. Essentially, I’d just been told by Connor that the Sun is not hot, but in fact, it’s cold.
It’s mind-boggling how so many people find it in themselves to hate that which gives them life. I’m not talking about mommy…I’m talking about that black stuff in the ground. Everything we have in our lives is thanks to oil. The way we live, the way we travel, the tools we use, the food we eat…it’s all thanks to oil. Oil drives society. It’s the reason my house is 72-degrees right now. It’s why I was able to eat a delicious breakfast. It’s why I’m able to travel to places I want to go at speeds exceeding 60 miles-per-hour. And before you say, “Well, that’s natural gas, or that’s coal” yes, that’s true in many things, but what gets those things working? Coal didn’t get the guy working at the coal mine to work. It was oil. And yes, we have solar and wind power…and what lubricates the gears and mechanisms to those alternative energies? Oil. What makes all the synthetic plastics used in pretty much every industry? Oil.
But I’m supposed to hate oil. I’m suppose to hate the oil companies. I’m supposed to hate the guys that invest billions to study land masses to see if they have oil, buy expensive equipment to drill for the oil and refine the oil and then, directly or indirectly, sell it to me so I don’t have to start a campfire to keep warm or hope and pray my food hasn’t spoiled while sitting in a hole in the ground or have to walk miles to get a haircut. What bastards!
The hatred of oil – for those who aren’t merely sheep following the liberal line – is a hatred of humanity. They don’t hate the oil so much as the fact that they hate humans ruling the planet and living in comfort while the rest of G-d’s creatures (outside of man’s realm) fight for survival on a daily basis. There’s nothing wrong with expecting the oil companies to be environmentally responsible, but that’s not what the environmental movement is about. They, like al-Qaeda, want to take the culture back centuries. They are not progressive, they are regressive. Don’t be fooled.
UPDATE: This ties in nicely to my above thesis. Told you.
Now three days after the shooting massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, the country is steeped in moral superiority. Heard on the radio this morning Syracuse Basketball Coach Jim Boeheim using the event of his 900th win to speak out against “assault” weapons:
“If we cannot get the people who represent us to do something about firearms, we are a sad, sad society,” Boeheim said Monday night. “If one person in this world, the NRA president, anybody, can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots – this is our fault if we don’t go out there and do something about this. If we can’t get this thing done, I don’t know what kind of country we have.”
As usual in our country, we ask all the wrong questions. Whenever you hear the word “need,” uttered by any public figure, be on your guard. This word is their “assault” weapon, for when it comes down to it, there’s very little in life we actually “need.” We need food, shelter and clothing…that’s about it, the rest is a matter of lifestyle, so this argument is weak. However, they counter with “If he had clips with fewer rounds or a gun you had to cock for each shot, that would mean fewer people killed.” Maybe so, but we have to take the argument above a third-grade reading level if we’re really serious about stopping this kind of tragedy.
Remember back in the 1980s there was a famous moment on the Phil Donahue Show with actress Laura Dern, the daughter of radical leftist actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, crying out about having to live every day knowing she could be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust. Well, what’s changed since then? Sure sure, Reagan and Gorby signed some papers and we cut back on our respective arsenals, but now nuclear arms are everywhere. Israel has them, India, Pakistan, the UK, France and worst of all, China, North Korea and maybe Iran. Funny how this isn’t the issue it once was. I guess crying about nuclear war isn’t as fashionable anymore now that Reagan is in the ground. And isn’t it funny how world leaders signing papers hasn’t kept the world’s bad guys from amassing nuclear weapons?
Atomic bombs were invented and they can’t be uninvented…no more than guns can be uninvented, and no laws or treaties are going to eliminate what’s already been produced. We can go over the hypotheticals of an unarmed society and the consequences, but frankly it bores me at this point. On November 6th of this year, the majority of the American public (that voted) decided no matter how bad things were, they just weren’t bad enough to risk being called racist, so how am I going to convince any of these people that banning guns puts us in danger?
Many scoff at the idea of teachers or principles being armed or even having armed guards at schools. Okay, if that’s off the table, then the only intellectual argument you have is that the government must disarm our society. And how would the government have to do that? You know the answer…and even I think that’s a bridge too far for even the most radical members of our government. So, Coach Boeheim and company, you’re never going purge “assault” weapons from this earth…what now? Any new solutions given these facts?
No, they will wrap themselves in the flag of the SS Moral Superior and look down on us from on high, solving nothing, judging everything.
On a final note, concerning these schools that proudly display signs telling everyone they are a “gun free zone,” I did an internet search looking for signs for sale that say “This is a gun-free home” or some such. Couldn’t find any that weren’t ironic in nature.
Funny. Peculiar.
Thus Spat Zarathustra
It’s hard for me to figure out the union mentality. You get a good job, have union protection and killer benefits but then are faced with the knowledge that because of these entitlements, the state you live in and your friends and neighbors are suffering under the current economic conditions. Someone says, maybe you should pay a little bit of a co-pay when you go to the doctor or get a prescription at Walgreens? To a tried and true union member, this is unthinkable. No concessions. Economic reality be damned.
Michigan is on the verge of passing a “right to work” law. What does that mean? The unions say it means no more collective bargaining and it allows corporations to run over their workers like a steamroller. A routine lie. Right to work means that if you get a job at a company that has a union, you don’t have to join that union and pay its dues. Thus, the “right to work” on your terms and not according to the dictates of a union boss. What on earth could be wrong with that?
Well, to socialists, everything. Right to work means freedom. It means making your own decision and more importantly it means you don’t have to fund politicians you don’t want to support. The union bosses know this. Now, the people you see tearing down the Americans For Prosperity tent…they don’t know this. They’re not smart enough. They believe the bilge that is fed to them on a daily basis. Lots of them really believe this bill will end collective bargaining. They are pawns in an evil game. Unions served a purpose in the early 20th century when working conditions were criminal and people were paid slave wages, but we, in the year 2012, live in an age of OSHA, government regulations and living standards that make the year 1920 seem like the year 920 by comparison. The once benevolent unions now are just as greedy and corrupt as the companies they once fought in the age of the flappers. It’s all about political power now.
I still can’t get my head around this mentality by the average union guy. They talk and talk about “corporate greed” but yet they want to hoard benefit after benefit at the expense of their fellow man. “Nine-point-1 percent unemployment rate in Michigan. Who cares? I’ve got mine.”
But I see no reason for optimism. Governor Snyder will probably sign the Right to Work bill but it’s a tiny drop in a very large bucket and our intellectual well has run dry. America, we hardly knew ya.
The federal government will not rest until it regulates every aspect of society…human or otherwise. This from the Christian Science Monitor:
Key West has a well-earned reputation as a haven for misfits, outcasts, and free-spirits. The locals don’t even consider themselves part of the United States of America. They refer to the place as the Conch Republic.
So it is more than a bit ironic that Key West is also the location of a knock-down, drag-out fight over the federal government’s power under the US Constitution’s Commerce Clause to regulate… cats.
And not just any cats, either. The cats being subjected to federal oversight are the descendants of the famous six-toed felines raised and cared for by former Key West resident and author Ernest Hemingway.
[...]
At some point several years ago, a museum visitor expressed concern about the cats’ care. The visitor took that concern all the way to the US Department of Agriculture and, literally, made a federal case out of it.
Soon USDA inspectors showed up in Key West. They said that if the museum wanted to display cats it needed an exhibitor’s license as required under the federal Animal Welfare Act. (That’s the same law that regulates circuses, zoos, and traveling dog and pony shows.)
Federal officials advised the museum that it also needed to take action to: Confine the cats in individual cages each night, or construct a higher fence around the property, or install an electric wire atop the existing brick wall, or hire a night watchman to keep an eye on the cats.
The museum was ordered to tag each cat for identification, and add additional elevated resting surfaces within the cat’s enclosures.
USDA officials also advised that the museum would face fines for noncompliance.
I can’t summon the words.
Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard has an obit on Gore Vidal that is worthy of Vidal’s former student, the late Christopher Hitchens.
From the 1950s, before Ike had even left the White House, Vidal was announcing that the right-wingers had seized the Republican party from the sensible members of a generation before; a generation later, the right-wingers had seized the party from the sensible members of a generation before; and so on, for half a century. In his world “the generals” were always two ticks away from declaring war and imposing martial law; the theocracy would be arranged before the decade was out; he saw the dying embers of capitalism; and the dark curtain of fascism was falling even as you were reading his words.
Try keeping that up for 50 years! No wonder he was a hero to the Personages. For them too every day is Groundhog Day, bringing fresh news from the day before about what won’t happen tomorrow. His career must stand as a great reassurance.
He ends the piece with one of the greatest sentences I’ve ever read:
If you’re wrong in the right way, all will be forgiven, until everyone forgets that there was ever anything to forgive.
There’s been a lot of talk about Barack Obama’s statement “You didn’t build that.” What did he mean? Those of us that have paid attention during the almost four years of the Obama Administration know that in the President’s heart he means that no capitalist is anything without government.
Now his defenders say it’s just common sense. Can’t take your goods to market without a government-built road to get you there. That’s all fine and good but the President wants us to believe that this isn’t merely a 50/50 split between government and capitalists but more like 90/10 at best with the government making everything possible; no businesses, no commerce possible without the government.
In light of the 100th birthday of the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, here is one of his most famous monologues involving a simple pencil:
No “commissar” made any of these people involved in the production of the pencil do what they did. They did it out of self-interest, and by committing such actions of self-interest they improved the lives of their fellow men, men that as Friedman said may hate each other if they knew each other personally. It’s an amazing phenomenon.
This is not how Obama and his followers see the world. They see this notion of self-interest as evil even though they practice it themselves sometimes without knowing it.
A movie from 1992 called “Orlando” had a great scene involving a nobleman and Queen Elizabeth I. The nobleman is attempting to entertain the monarch and says: “Now, what would please you? All that is mine is here for your pleasure.” The Queen responds: “All you call yours is mine already.”
This is the attitude of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, et al. Everything that you think is yours is actually theirs. They are the government; they are the philosopher kings, and without them, you are nothing.
Howard Dean has another one of his psychotic episodes, this time on Larry Kudlow’s show, first by spouting the usual Fox News hatred (which is becoming passé, as Fox is becoming more and more establishment). Anyone, here was his nugget of “wisdom:”
“You made a lot of money because you live in the United States of America,” Dean said. “We owe something to the government to grow up in this great country. And I’m tired of hearing people in the private sector talk like they don’t owe the government anything because we do. This is a great country because we all pay into it. It’s about time we all pay into it. It is not nonsense. You’re damn lucky to live in America and you ought to pay the right bill for it.”
