J’Accuse!
Bookworm on Feb 04 2009 at 9:56 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
I was listening to a talk show host railing against Obama’s announcement that, henceforth, all government owned businesses (which will soon be all businesses), are going to have salary caps. For me, the problem with this move, aside from the fact that the Democratically-controlled Congress just awarded itself a huge pay raise, making this the ultimate in gross hypocrisy, is the government’s interference with the free market — but I guess that’s just the libertarian capitalist pig in me.
The radio talk show host had a different problem. He was incensed that that government is punitively targeting business men and women, while doing nothing to clean its own house. If the government can’t police itself, considering its manifest personal corruption (taxes, anyone?) and its major, indeed primary, contribution to the market collapse, it certainly is in no position to insist that ordinary business men and women suffer.
It occurred to me that the talk show host’s ire was misdirected. The fact is that few people or entities are good at policing themselves. The notion of policing contemplates an internal organization that theoretically doesn’t have a dog in the vote, and will be willing to point the finger of blame and purge or punish malfeasors. In a democracy, the role of “policeman to the government” shouldn’t be the government, it should be the voter.
While we voters may not police our pols by sending them to prison, we have the huge power of firing them. Except this time, the voters didn’t fire anybody, at least anybody in the Legislative branch. Thus, while one can excuse the Obama vote on the ground that the voters were voting against Bush (despite his imminent, automatic departure), rather than for Obama, there is no getting a way from the fact that voters, rather than punishing a Democratic Congress that had an approval rating deservedly skating near the single digits, rewarded it big time by giving it an overwhelming majority.
Even if the real malefactors weren’t up for election this year (the Rangels, Reids, etc.), the voters could have defanged them by failing to vote in any of their political compatriots — but voters didn’t. Instead, voters gave a huge, smacking kiss to the whole kit-and-kaboodle of corrupt, idiotic, and/or foolish Democrats.
I’m going to continue to poke at individual Democrats at my blog in order to reveal their hypocrisy, ignorance, stupidity, cupidity, etc. That information needs to be part of the public information database and arsenal. Nevertheless, as I do it, I still know that, looking at Dems en masse rather than individually, it is the nature of the Democratic beast to do precisely what it is doing: chip away at individual liberties, destroy the free market, erase our borders, and weaken our national security.
Democrats do what Democrats do. It is we, the members of the public, who are supposed to curtail those Democratic excesses, and we failed abysmally in that task. In the primaries, Republican voters chose the weakest candidate, one who never had more than a faint hope of victory. In the halls of Republican power, politicians and their minions failed to communicate the coherent, rational, moral message of true conservative thought. And in millions of homes across America, average voters, those who are not politically committed, failed by allowing themselves to swallow, hook, line & sinker, the propagandistic crap being fed to them by the mainstream media — and that despite the fact that the voters readily acknowledged the media’s unparalleled bias, and have had shown to them time and time and time again the media’s willingness to bend or ignore or misreport facts in order to feed that bias.
To the extent that the first two weeks of the Obama presidency presage a miserable time of it at home and abroad, I blame the American public, which could have thrown the bums out, but chose instead to hand them to keys to the kingdom. J’Accuse, oh Americans. Let’s hope you get it right the next time around, assuming there is a next time.
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Actually, Franks and Pelosi are members of the House of Representatives, so they are up for re-election every 2 years.
Unfortunately, they’re from Massachussetts and San Francisco, which probably wouldn’t vote Republican no matter how bad it gets.
“Thus, while one can excuse the Obama vote on the ground that the voters were voting against Bush”
No excuse, Book! They should have done their homework both on Bush (most didn’t bother getting a clue about what Bush did and why) and Obama (the Obama voters were too busy or careless to research his background and the issues for which he stood). As someone remarked, people would have been far more demanding of the credentials of an airline pilot that they had for the Captain of our ship of State).
“Let’s hope you get it right the next time around, assuming there is a next time.”
“assuming”…yup!
You’re right, Brian J. I fixed it. Thanks.
I disagree with a least part of this premise. The American public held Bush and the Republicans more responsible for the current mess and emphatically fired them! We may think the public handed out the pink slips to the wrong people, but it unquestionably handed them out.
There is no question the Republicans did make a mess of things. I believe, as you do, that the Democrats will make an even bigger mess of things, but I can’t really blame the American public for rejecting the status quo and at least trying something different. The Democrats offered a solution. Okay, a bad solution, but a solution. The Republicans offered no solution at all. That was the perception and it was unfortunately very close to the reality.
We conservatives should not acuse America. We have only ourselves to blame.
But DQ, aren’t you forgetting that, for the two years preceding this election, the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate?
There is no question the Republicans did make a mess of things.
That’s the same word you used to describe Iraq: a mess. You didn’t know how to fix things then and you don’t know how to fix things now. This, however, is no proof of Republican doings. It is just proof that you personally didn’t have a clear line of sight to the end goals, whether war or domestic.
Bush had clear foreign and domestic goals. In so far as fighting a war while dealing with traitors, quislings, and Democrat saboteurs on the homefront is a mess, it is one not asked for nor created by Republicans. It is the ultimate situation that results from the conflict of forces.
We conservatives should not acuse America. We have only ourselves to blame.
I don’t remember supporting identity politics nor do I remember Bush engineering economic and foreign policy disasters in order to booster his approval ratings. That was the work of the Dems. And now you say it is the result of conservatives? It is the result of conservatives compromising with Dems, but conservatives are not nearly as skilled in propaganda and execution of false flag operations as you imply, Don.
Picked this up on another blog – comment by a commenter, not the post. The post was about the disconnect between the campaign promise “Change” and the appointment of Clinton retreads (plus the lobby connection factor). But I did think this was an interesting observation…
“The reasons behind the Panetta appointment by Obama is a “no-brainer”. He needs someone to watch his back in the CIA. He doesn’t trust them. Why else would you bring in an outsider with no intelligence experience?”
In the primaries, Republican voters chose the weakest candidate, one who never had more than a faint hope of victory.
Didn’t Dems get to register as Repubs and vote for McCain in the primaries? And we still didn’t have all the Republican vote in. Only some of the vote in, in some of the states. That’s such a waste and not very democratic.
DQ – how can you “fire” Bush when he was being forcibly retired anyway?
Plus, much as I disagreed with McCain being an ideal candidate, I would have to be very intellectually lazy to conclude that McCain was another Bush.
I think, bottom line, that McCain wasn’t perfect but he still stood a very good chance against Obama until subprime mortgage crisis hit. It was intellectual laziness on the part of the voter to associate the ensuing collapse of the economy on Bush and the Republicans rather than the Democrat-controlled Congress where blame resides…although I concede that McCain hardly did himself any favors in projecting confidence in his ability to address the crisis.
Ok…to be honest, I’ve never read Das Kapital. I’m familiar with it through references but have never read it myself. So…has anyone here read it? Is this an accurate quote? (also from the same blog as the quote above – from an anonymous commenter) If so….!!!
“Karl Marx 1867
“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the country will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.” (Das Kapital, 1867)”
DQ, your assertion in #4 is kind of from Mars. There is not “no question,” there are all kinds of questions about whether or not the Republicans made a mess of things (I mean, beyond the routine messes that all politicians routinely make; “thinking” not being their metier), and the answer is rather more elusive than your conclusion. Bookworm is quite correct: the Democrats held the reins for twenty-four months leading to up to the “splat” moment for the economy, and it was their various networks even when they were out of power that led more or less directly to the housing issue, which may – probably properly – be said to have driven the whole thing.
Even when the Republicans held both houses, the Black Democrat Caucus, their community agitating pals at organizations like Acorn, and schmucks like Barney Fwank and Chris Dodd were doing everything they could – which turned out to be considerable – to undermine fiscal responsibility. (You know, there’s Fwank up there forty days before the whole house of cards collapsed asserting that “Fannnie Mae and Fweddie Mac” are just swell.)
Tough to blame Republicans for that – although feel as free as you like to blame them for going along with it. (Though George Bush did indeed try to bring up the problem and do something about it two years before it blew up. He got laughed at, of course.)
And I remain a skeptic as far as what the “American people” were up to, and who they were issuing pink slips to. I am not an admirer of the American voter, because the American voter is demonstrably the least-informed, least-educated, least economically knowledgeable, least au courant voter on the planet. School children in Sweden can name more US supreme court justices than adults in Los Angeles or San Francisco seem to be able to. The American voter is who you see Jay Leno talking to on the sidewalk.
And you think they’re making rational and reasoned decisions in the voting booths? You think they’ve actually thought something through and are indeed deliberately issuing pink slips? You think they’re voting with an actual larger purpose in mind? You think they could actually explain their vote in terms of punishment for job poorly done or reward for job well done?
Forgive me if I require a couple of tons of salt to buy into that one.
No, I’m not forgetting that Republicans already lost the Congress before the 2008 election, or that Bush was leaving anyway or that the Democrats did their best to make trouble when the Republicans were in charge.
What I am saying that the the American public held Bush and the Republicans responsible for their problems (both domestic and foreign) and voted for a change. They started this procees years earlier (which is how the Republicans lost their Congressional majority to begin with) and continued it with renewed vigor in 2008.
I agree that most Americans are not as attentive as they should be and do not take their responsibility as informed voters serious enough. But it does no good to blame the audience for not getting the message. We have not been making the message effectively and I, for one, did not get a feeling that the Republicans even had a message as to how they would fix the economy if given control.
Keep in mind, FDR’s solutions were arguably bad for the country and prolonged the depression for many years. But he kept getting re-elected because he had a solution, however bad it was. His opponents were seen as not having a solution. Essentially, the same thing is happening here.
See the post I wrote the other day in a different thread: FDR kept getting re-elected because he bought votes by the million -not because anyone saw him as having a “solution.”
Once people discover they can vote themselves money, they will. That’s the secret of FDR’s success, plain and simple.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of holding individual voters responsible for the actions of the officials they elect into office.
I don’t mean holding them legally responsible but calling them on the carpet for the consequences of their vote.
For example, when I talk to someone who voted for Obama, I ask them: How do you feel about him knowingly appointing people who decided they didn’t need to pay taxes?
I ask them to explain to me their understanding of the stimulus bill, its size in comparison to the Iraq War or other similar ventures, and how they think it will help the economy.
I also want to know if they are comfortable with Obama’s overture to Iran and Iran’s response. Are they even aware of Iran’s response and the fact that Iran is testing missles and demanding that we do as they say?
I have never really enjoyed engaging in that sort of discussion – one in which it is clear that I am accusing them of something – because I want to be polite. But their ignorance, lack of attention, and willful blindness are affecting me.
One thing occurred to me this morning: If (when) we are hit again inside this country, I strongly believe the response of many Americans will be very, very different than our response after 9/11.
After 9/11, at least for a short while, most Americans focused on the enemy outside. It was rare to hear people remark that Americans were responsible for what happened.
Next time? I suspect many Americans would hold those who voted for Obama responsible and would not shy away from stating it publicly. We know who supported Obama (they wouldn’t shut up about it) and we know that people who voted for Obama did so in part BECAUSE Obama promised he would approach national security and defense in a radically different way.
I can see people, furious and fearful, demanding some answers not just from the elected officials but their neighbors, family members, and friends.
God forbid that that happen – it is what I fear the very most. But this business of reminding them that they voted for these and a million other changes and are thus responsible for the consequences is something I want to start hammering home now.
Given that the American public didn’t know who was responsible for what and ended up electing the people who set up this economic depression in the first place, the Republicans fell into a public perception hole that only coincidentally produced a mess for those involved. And the solution to that has always been the solution discovered in Iraq, that oh so convenient inconvenient war that people couldn’t see the benefit of. Counter-insurgency, defeating entrenched cultural and political views utilizing propaganda and a slow turning of opinion, all were used successfully, along with kinetic operations, against AQ and the Sunnis.
And for the Republican side of things here in the US, they have Steele ready to change the message-propaganda component of the Republican party. Whether this will succede or not will wholly depend upon whether Republicans can overlook their principles concerning honesty and emphasis on action over words to become as good at propaganda as the lying Dems currently are.
Democrats are very good at manipulating people because their own constituents are easily manipulated and corrupted. Democrat base voters don’t make Dems pay for unethical behavior, tax evasion, or corruption. They reward such naked grabs for power. And the Democrat politician has evolved with such things in mind.
The Republican base is full of independent people who aren’t going to be lectured to or made to do things they refuse to do. This means Republican politicians are ultimately far less interested in trying to work on the skills of emotional manipulation, misrepresentation, and the various other tools the Left have mastered.
This produced a perception crisis for the Repubs, given that most Americans believed a huge number of false things concerning Bush, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Deana, one response I have is to tell people, without pointing fingers, that “America got exactly what it voted for. If only they had done their homework”.
I visited my local printer (an old friend and Obama supporter) this morning. I brought up the economy and he practically broke into tears. I think that he knows that he is going to lose his business, go broke and he will be too old to start all over again. Needless to say, I kept my mouth shut.
Uh, Rangel is House of Representatives, too.
A rule of thumb: The nutbars are in the House, the windbags are in the Senate.
Here’s one to watch:
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/02/stephanopoulos-has-participated-in.html
Hi Danny –
Your remark is a good option when circumstances call for that kind of a response.
I realize that if I am angry and belligerent, those who voted for Obama who are “middle of the road” folks will simply shut down and not listen. No one enjoys being made to feel like they were fools.
But people simply need to be made to understand that their votes have consequences and sometimes those consequences can be devastating.
I want to know: does it even matter anymore how good they felt when they voted for Obama or while they were watching him on inauguration day? Those dream-filled days are ephemeral and in the end, meaningless.
All of us are NOT to blame for where we currently find ourselves. You, me, and millions of others have advocated for fiscal responsibility (which would have results in the U.S. avoided the housing fiasco and significantly minimizing the national debt), limited support for social programs, a strong defense – I could go on and on.
But the majority of the voters indicated by their votes that they want something else. I want these people to be reminded that they voted for this, that the problems we are seeing are simply the results of the choices they have made.
I guess I feel that we need to be upfront, direct and frankly, somewhat confrontational. That doesn’t mean that we need to be (as Obama said) “in their face” and ugly – but we need to be persistent and specific and ask these people whether this is what they voted for.
If we believe we are responsible for our actions and we live in a country where we have the right to vote, then why are we not responsible for the representatives and senators we vote into office who actively engage in behavior that can only lead to damage and ruin?
Thanks, Brian J. I’ll just take the big “L” off my forehead now. Yours is a good short hand for remembering the distinctions.
I’ve got to stop rushing things so much. These are the mistakes I make when I fire off something in the quiet moments between tasks. All my synapses are firing, but I forget to check the details.
Hi Deane – just a thought…I believe people are easier to convince when they are led to these conclusion themselves.
Here’s a scary story: my better half was in an adult class last night (in education administration) where many of the people are from other fields trying to get into teaching (now, why could that be? Duh!). The teacher asked the class what “democracy” meant. My spouse tells me that most had no idea. Neither did the teacher (a PhD). Many thought that it meant “equal access to resources”. Others said “diversity”. Talk about products of a Lefty education system. These were “educated” ADULTS! Talk about our whole concept of government being in danger. I used to think that those ninnies that Jay Leno interviews in his “Jaywalking” segements were exceptional. Maybe they really are the norm.
I know that all of us that frequent this blog are highly educated and interested in politics and history. However, we may be talking way over other peoples heads on policy issues. Maybe we need to go all the way back to basics.
Folks, we are in big, big trouble.
Danny –
Wow. I don’t even know what to say.
How could this have happened? I guess I was kind of like you – I thought those people whom Jay Leno interviewed on the streets were unusual. You know, the “there’s one in every crowd” kind of people.
That just makes my heart heavy. You are right. We are in trouble.
Deana
P.S. It’s interesting that people are going back to school to become teachers. I just finished a bachelor’s in nursing and, after I pass the boards, I can start working as a nurse. The problem? Most of the hospital systems in the greater Chicago area have hiring freezes for nurses. Yeah. You read that right. For nurses. I did NOT go into nursing because of the economy – I made this decision when the economy was doing fine. But I’m in shock nonetheless. And thankful for my family.
A friend of mine at the bus stop (another closet con) told me that he has a friend who always used to say, “I’m not sure, but I know for a fact….” That’s the world, isn’t it?
Considering that nurses are the backbone of every hospital, Deana, it does not bode well for the citizens of Chicago that there is a hiring freeze.
I work with educated professionals such as engineers, hydrologists and meteorologists and you would be surprised by how many of them have bought into man-made global warming. It’s not so much the science, since evidence does suggest a warming trend over the last century, but what the cause is and what we can do about. They have bought into the hype that it is man-made and all that comes with it. My point I guess, even educated profesionals (not liberal arts) still buy into this type of crap. Heck over half of the scientists and engineers I work with bought into Obama. Coronation day… er, I mean inaugration day was interesting. Everything just stopped in the office as staff watched it and applauded. It was all very creepy.
I ramble.
Spiff
Spiff –
You are not rambling.
I’ve been thinking about this and truly can’t figure out how this happened. Obama got the votes of the groups who live on the polar opposite ends of the spectrum.
He got the votes of the uneducated inner-city masses AND the majority of the votes from the super-educated, professionals. These two groups should not have that much in common and yet they do.
It’s weird.
Perhaps psychology and emotional make-up play a more significant role in all of this than I believed.
These people seem to have no internal “warning signals.” I mean, months and months ago, I would see Obama on TV and little red warning lights started flashing inside of me.
I get why the inner-city folks went for him. What I don’t understand is how all of these people who I went to school with and worked with and shared so much could have falled for him just as hard.
I thought this was important. It’s off topic…well, maybe not…it’s an Obama thing.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/wm2274.cfm
We were right about him – he intends to destroy this country.
Deana, we can’t overlook that many people panicked in the face of a collapsing bank system and economy and that John McCain’s response to the crisis came across as inept. Obama…just didn’t have any response except to look and act cool (clueless as he might have been). He also outspent McCain by a huge, huge margin, much of it (illegally) funded by foreign interests and credit card scams.
The question that I pose…how much of this economic collapse was engineered by key members of Congress to coincide with the election? I have really, really wondered about the why, when and how of Chuck Schumer’s engineered run on IndyMac last summer http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland/2008/07/feds-cite-schum.html and Harry Reids famous (and spurious) memo warning of the impending failure of a major insurance company, causing insurance stocks to plunge http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/03/business/fi-moneyblog3. They seemed too perfectly timed to be coincidence – were those that matches that set off the conflagration?
With a financial manipulator like Soros behind the campaign, it behooves us to ask serious questions about the sequence of events that got us where we are today.
Perhaps psychology and emotional make-up play a more significant role in all of this than I believed.
One of the reasons for my focus on psychology and psychological warfare was due to the impact of such fields upon the human aspect of war.
Since war can be an extension of political goals, the same also applies to politics, for politics also deals with people in similar fashions although the methods (kinetic vs propaganda) are balanced differently.
I would see Obama on TV and little red warning lights started flashing inside of me.
Classical liberals or those rooted in a solid foundation don’t tend to get carried off by the regular class 5 hurricanes of the world. Our roots are dug deep and overlaid with the work of generations of others, our forefathers and ancestors. That is a strength totally independent of classical liberal philosophy.
Most of AMerica, at least the leaders, used to be classical liberals. The ones that weren’t, were simply isolationists or ancestor worshippers. But when they were called upon to do their duty to preserve the Union, they did it. When this crop of Americans were called upon their duty to save America, they relied upon Bush and the US military to do things. Then when Iraq looked too hard while sitting on their couches and buying stuff at the mall, they went and voted for Obama.
There are always going to be around 22% in a free society that won’t go with the program. Our 22% just happens to be all traitors. This wasn’t true in the Civil War, for example. Their 22% were secessionists or Confederate sympathizers. Then you had the other side of the coin. People like Robert E Lee in the South that hated slavery and wanted to ban it, but felt a loyalty to their state strong enough to kill and die in the defense of such. That is true bipartisanship, but it really is a misnomer. What most people think of bipartisanship is really a Loyal Opposition working with the Party in Power.
Robert E Lee was a Loyal Opponent. Democrats in the North, weren’t. Democrats today, aren’t. Republicans in WWII were the Loyal Opposition. Democrats in the Vietnam War, even though it was started under Democrat Presidents, weren’t the loyal opposition, in fact they were the ruling power after Nixon’s resignation.
These are the facts of the matter. Facts that no amount of demoralizing and traitorous propaganda about Iraq will ever change.
But it does no good to blame the audience for not getting the message.
As if even a Reagan level message could convert demoralized people into virtuous individuals. Southerners were already thinking about voting Republican, cause while the Democrat party remained as racist as ever, the people of the SOuth were changing and adapting to the new standards, without losing core Southerner traditions and values. This was a decades long process, nothing Reagan cooked up in 4 or even 8 years. When people have abandoned personal responsibility and ethics in response for race and identity politics, what message are you going to say, in 4 years, to change the re-programming results of 40 years?
It does tremendous good to recognize that the “audience” is weak and vulnerable to such things, if the Republicans are going to adapt to such things as Democrat demoralization and cultural dominance.
From a lawyer’s perspective, it may look like reason and changes in certain wording and polices can produce different results. From a sociological, psychological warfare perspective, that’s not true. And history has proven that out.
I visited my local printer (an old friend and Obama supporter) this morning. I brought up the economy and he practically broke into tears. I think that he knows that he is going to lose his business, go broke and he will be too old to start all over again. Needless to say, I kept my mouth shut.
Why not adopt a facade and call him on any of his regrets, sadness, or disappointment by holding him to the standards of wealth redistribution and race politics? Demand why he should not be grateful and joyous for paying his “fair share”. Demand to know why he is feeling less enthusiastic about Obama now that he is in power. That way, if he gets angry, he’ll get angry at the facade and not at the reality. A reverse psychology derivative.
If we believe we are responsible for our actions and we live in a country where we have the right to vote, then why are we not responsible for the representatives and senators we vote into office who actively engage in behavior that can only lead to damage and ruin?
That’s a position of reason. People are ruled more by their emotions, especially if they have personal things invested (money, status, position, influence, reputation, family members, etc.) A more effective tool would be to make the obama supporters angry. Angry at someone other than us, for example. Angry at Obama, and then finally, angry at themselves. Anger is a powerful tool, for it manipulates people’s beliefs and actions. And with enough sadness, there will be anger. Just got to dig deep and bypass people’s mental defenses of denial, projection, displacement, etc.
These were “educated” ADULTS! Talk about our whole concept of government being in danger. I used to think that those ninnies that Jay Leno interviews in his “Jaywalking” segements were exceptional. Maybe they really are the norm.
The problem with classical liberals is that our standards are too high. Socrates, for example, drank hemlock because he believed that it was better to obey the law, even when it ruled against you, then violate the law and set a precedent for the dissolution of the rule of law. We believe in such things, but it is often too easy to forget that so many others do not hold to such high standards.
Given that barely 55% of the 300 million Americans vote, “most” would be just about right even if you count 25% of the 55% voters.
There’s a reason why voting is a right and not just a duty. For those that can’t satisfy that duty, they should have a right to obstain.