Honestylog.com

Kennedy

I'm sitting here at a bar in a casino (where else at 5:30?) the TV is going, sound off, no subtitles, and it's wall to wall Teddy.

Did he check out, or do I need to start praying?

How Do You Do It?

I caught like five minutes of Terry McAuliffe on Tim Russert yesterday as I was packing up in San Fran.

It's all just automatic lying, all the time, and everyone is perfectly happy to play along. Disgusting. I don't know what I'd do if I thought that ultimately, what I make of my life somehow necessitates a daily dose of the bullshit they're peddling.

I don't think the nightmarish disaster that is national politics will in any way be solved until people lose interest in the spectacle, beyond derisive ridicule and moral condemnation for the whole lot of it, without distinction or equivocation.

God Bless the Intertubes

Delicious.

(Beck snagged that from Soja)

The Vote is In

And apparently, nobody is buying shares in the Republican Party.

And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.

On a plain practical level, I can't understand why a person in the world would give a hoot about the Republicans, when they can simply get The Real Thing™ from the Democrats.

It's far and long from the time and place where there was any difference between Coke & Pepsi worth caring about, if there ever really was.

(Via a link from Billy)

OMG - White People Can't Clap

Oh, laf. Via Steve L, just right now in email (who's apparently a reader), Chuck Love and the oh, so, Reverend, Wright.

And I'll Keep Saying It

Fuck Obama. And his pretentious, stupid bitch.

Caroline Glick has her number.

Speaking in February of the man she knows better than anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination Barack Obama, is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their "broken souls."

She also said that her husband's unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his countrymen's broken souls. He will redeem them.

But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't place the whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for him. As she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

Outrageous.

(link: Art)

I Told You

Right here. And right on queue, the stupid bitch delivers:

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

Fuck Obama, individually and severally. This one happened to be belched from the geul of Michelle, but it doesn't really matter. They both ought to be pelted with rotten fruits and vegetables and run out of town.

Look: this is really simple. Health care, education, brake linings...all things -- values -- that must be produced. There isn't a thing in the world special about them on the principle of value production. Now, from that perspective, you tell me by what logic any intelligent person could possibly believe that the means to produce values and deliver them to a marketplace requires that some have their values taken away from them by force.

Did Bill Gates computerize the world by taking computers from some people and giving them to others? How about Henry Ford? How did two cars end up in every garage?

I don't know what's worse, a stupid, out of touch, business and historically ignorant political class, or those who fall for this most ancient of political scams.

(link train: Beck, Breda, Tamara, Morrissey)

Word

I don't know that you can put the whole political enchilada any better than Kyle Bennett does here.

I don't vote. I don't believe in voting. I don't believe in democracy. I'm a capitalist and an individualist, and those are, separately but especially in combination, wholly incompatible with democracy. I believe in the ideals of the Declaration, and that the Constitution was a repudiation of them. I believe in governance by the *unanimous* and individually revocable consent of the governed. The only forms of governance that are consistent with that are self-governance or governance for hire by individuals.

Voting is a way of distributing power over other people's lives. I don't want any power over other people's lives, and I don't want anyone having power over mine. The only power I want to share in is the power to trade or not to trade, to associate or not associate, to respect or not to respect. Government itself is the second biggest scam ever pulled over on the human race, and it is the cause of most of the problems in the world today. Those that it is not the cause of are nearly insolvable because government won't get out of the way.

There's no utopias, but there is real freedom, real happiness, and a truly good life available to human beings. Government is an obstacle to that, not a benefit. Rules are absolutely necessary for them, but government is about the arbitrary, and the lawless when law is defined as natural law. Government is chaos.

Attention Shoppers

Gene Healy is back blogging, and has published his first book. The Cult of the Presidency.

They say that when you’re writing a book, you should have a two-sentence answer at the ready in case people ask you what it’s about while you’re on the elevator. For a long time, mine was “it’s about the presidency. I’m against it.”

That elevator pitch was enough for me.

Pathological

How anyone could even consider letting this pathological liar, Hillary Rodham Clinton, within a furlong of the White House is completely beyond me.

Actually, that's not true. I think most people love lies and liars. It's only the nature of what is being lied about where they discriminate.

(Balkolink)

Indeed

(From Chris K, in email.)

Hitch on Hillary

In Slate.

There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

The whole thing, if you please.

Loyalty: The Bludgeon Of Con Artists and Scammers

I have no like or respect for Governor Bill Richardson but I did take a moment of pleasure at the thought of him delivering the Automatic Liars a good kick in the teeth.

Now Radley has commentary on that most giant of lying pricks, that enormous fuckwad James Carville. But the politics of the thing are peripheral to what really interests me.

I’ve always though the alleged virtue of loyalty is way overrated.

Look, it's even simpler that that. The only reason the concept of loyalty really exists is to con, guilt-trip, or scam someone into signing onto something for which there isn't sufficient reason, value, or desire in it for them to do so on those bases alone.

Loyalty is for stupid suckers, unless of course one is talking about loyalty to truth, honesty, justice, reality, morality. But if you really pay attention, loyalty is most often employed in the attempt to circumvent all of those.

I have never in my life admonished loyalty to anything but reality. I would consider it an effrontery to do so.

Damn; He Beat Her to It

Peggy Noonan has up an absolute must read on Super Hillary! at the WSJ. I'll leave you to the more serious elements, though this would be a good except:

She is concussed. But she is a scrapper, a fighter, and she's doing what she knows how to do: scrap and fight. Only harder. So that she ups the ante every day. She helped Ireland achieve peace. She tried to stop Nafta. She's been a leader for 35 years. She landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.

And this, quoting an eye witness account.

"Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy." Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. "She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself." Then she turned to his wounds. "She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood."

(via Dr. Eades)

Later: Oh yea. This may have been what the guy was referring to. Kyle Bennett pointed that out in a comment on a previous post.

Nukes

I had no real intention to blog about this; just something that automatically came to mind at the time. But what the hell. I'm on an afternoon roll.

I'll make it short. I would not expect you to be aware, but as a young and fresh Navy ensign, one of my collateral duties was the security over eight nuclear weapons on the USS REEVES (CG-24). If you don't know how the security over nukes works, here's a brief primer: two-man control. In the U.S., there is never less than two people in the presence of a nuclear weapon at any time.

Both have loaded and un-safed sidearms in readily accessible holsters at all times. Had I ever wanted, I could have created one hell of an international shit storm. So could and can to this very day thousands of others. In a sense, your life hangs on their whim.

Analogy: commercial airliners: two-man control.

The People Who Dictate Your Affairs

Jay says:

Jerry Springer nation is voting your life away one hoof-marked ballot at a time.

Billy adds:

Why on earth would you submit anything remotely having to do with your rights to these peoples' opinions?

Indeed; why on earth? Whatever for do you see the necessity? Now, I'll stipulate that I care not a wit how clueless, shallow, and ignorant these morons are, or remain. I couldn't care less how they manage their peaceful affairs. What's more, I don't care that you seem to see the necessity of making these idiots the managers of your own affairs -- knock yourselves out. I can't on earth see why, but it's an inescapable logic that you indeed want them to run your lives each time you fill out a ballot.

Go ahead and deny it, but your plain actions belie your words. It's Jerry Springer nation to be sure -- a nation of morons -- and if you vote you're enthusiastically going along for the ride.

I will never, ever waste my time with voting again. Even if it were a morally valid way to "run the country" (a phrase I loath for its implications) -- which it's not -- you'd still have to contend with the reality that even if you're a smart and informed person that would generally make the "right call" on matters of "public policy," there is simply no way on earth that you will ever be able to out-compete the moronic masses. (Just look at the evidence over the last two hundred years.)

Consider the often quoted and alluded to idea: "voting empowers the people." Question: why on earth do you want to "empower" fucking idiots? Huh?

I don't know what's worse, fucking idiots who believe themselves worthy of a general opinion because they carry the moniker of "voter," or the minority of seemingly smart and informed folks who "empower" them.

Fat Nannies

The last sentence of comment number two on Boston's trans fat ban pretty much sums it up.

What next, setting a bedtime for us?

Number 14 isn't bad, either.

I would like to see a ban on politicians. They make people sick and poor.

I'd add stupid.

There are a few other good comments and good points, and it's in some measure gratifying to see that Boston isn't totally devoid of human adults; but if you want to get a good taste of the collectivized, eusocial mentality of most people, go read those comments.

Oh, and get a look at fat face Boston Mayor, Thomas M. Menino. The difference between a fat fuck like him, and a formerly fat guy like me is that I took it upon myself to do something about it.

Do you have any idea to what depths I hate people like this?

"Character"

This is 100% down the line spot on, I think. It is definitely worth a read, all of it.

Obama’s denunciation of Wright’s bigotry amounts to too little too late. The time to stand up to him wasn’t now, when his association with Wright is sinking his hopes for the White House. The time to have stood up to Wright was when Obama was just another member of his church. If he truly believes in what he says he believes, he should have walked out of Wright’s church or grabbed Wright’s microphone and told his fellow churchgoers that Wright was wrong and that they mustn’t hate. In twenty years of attending Wright’s church, why didn’t Obama once stand before his fellow church members and tell them that they mustn’t hate their country and their fellow Americans?

The fact that he didn’t, and the fact that he upheld this man until just a few months ago as his spiritual mentor and still refuses to condemn him and his deeply flawed character tells me everything I need to know about Barack Obama. I think that he is an opportunistic, weak man. I hope and pray that he doesn’t become President.

There's a silver lining to all of this in my view. It's exposing something right out there in the open for all to see: perhaps the bigger racial bigotry problem in America is minority bigotry against whites. Or, at least, they have been getting a pass on it for four decades. Maybe not so much, anymore?

Want an example, right up in your face almost every day? How about this bit of pretentious nonsense: "people of color." I, for one, have never missed the implications and overtones in that -- what amounts to -- racial smear of colorless white people.

A great many of the ordinary racial bigots I've ever known have been black people. That may not be your experience, but it has been mine.

(link: Beck)

The Size of It

Either Obama is too stupid to see how "deep" this country's problems are -- a goodly portion of which are manifest in fulminant barking like the right Rev. Wright's -- or he knows exactly how deep they are and he likes the look from the bottom, all while he's confident that he can convince you of his vista from the sunny uplands of racial harmony.

Yep. There's very good reasons why Obama was and in a member of that congregation. Even if you buy the notion -- though I don't -- that he sincerely would like to end racial divisiveness as a deep-rooted problem in America, he's plenty happy to use it as a springboard, pivot, or catapult in the meantime.

In the end he, just like everyone else who's ever talked "harmony," has and will find the political mileage delivered by such politics too tempting to give up.

{ahem}...As I was saying...

Yea, nope, Obama's skin color hasn't a thing to do with any of this. Here; just listen to his pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

McPhillips found that and Billy linked it. Don't miss the part about how he loves the hell out of white people "[his] enemies," and won't stoop to their level of "hatred" and "bigotry" (this, after a 3-minute, hate and bigotry-filled rant against white people that no prominent white person could ever get away with in reference to blacks).

The Scandal: Honest Truth

It's like I told a guy the other day at the gym as I was just finishing up with the after shave and whatnot at the sink, TV overhead bleating out some sort of particular nonsense about the general nonsense that constitutes the national nonsense of the presidential election: "I'm so glad I don't care."

I really don't. One of three people are going to be the next "good king," there's nothing I can do about that, and each and every one of them is an absolute horror to contemplate as president. Which one would be worse? Hell, you can make a million arguments in all different sorts of directions. Here's the deal: any one of them will be bad enough, and that's for sure.

But I did happen to catch this bit, just a minute ago.

Ferraro stirred controversy with her recent remarks that Obama's campaign was successful because he was black.

Now I ask you: unless there was solid truth to that (and I don't see how you can honestly call it any other way), why else would such remarks "stir controversy?" It's not like we're seeing blanket widespread condemnation, or anything. Nope. The conceptual tags surrounding it, rather, are things like "controversial" and "distancing" and "stepping down." It's all quite civilized for something Obama & Co. would wish to imply is a vicious lie.

You all do what you want. Me? I would never shame myself by getting within 100 miles of a process where the goddammed plain Jane black & white honest truth is "controversial."

I am gratified about one thing, though. As far as I'm concerned, I'm tickled pink every time one of those Democrat assholes has to back track, shut up, distance themselves, or otherwise shy away from the plan truth of the matter with respect to Obama and his racial heritage. For four or five decades, now, they have used race as a divisive wedge, they have all benefited mightily, and now they're getting fucked right and left with the same club they've been beating "racists" over the head with for years. It's a good show, and I'm lovin' it. Let Obama just rub their faces in their own hypocrisy until the end of times, as far as I'm concerned.

Just like with that Spitzer fuck: I'll take my justice anywhere I can get it.

General Presumptions

Wanna know how to take in news, like this item today, totally in stride, without the slightest whiff of surprise? General presumptions. So now it's NY Governor Elliot Spitzer admitting some sort of involvement in a "prostitution ring" (that's the euphemism designed to get you to recoil, not think).

Spitzer, 48, built his political legacy on rooting out corruption, including several headline-making battles with Wall Street while serving as attorney general. He stormed into the governor's office in 2006 with a historic share of the vote, vowing to continue his no-nonsense approach to fixing one of the nation's worst governments.

Time magazine had named him "Crusader of the Year" when he was attorney general and the tabloids proclaimed him "Eliot Ness."

Why is it that elementary school children have a keen eye for poseurs: do-gooders, tattletales, and teacher-pets whom they can see right through in an instant; yet the moment they're handed a voter registration card they become complete morons?

I generally presume that politicians are the sorts of people who want to enforce the rules against everyone else, but see no particular need to restrain themselves. In Spitzer's case, I never had an inkling of a microscopic doubt about exactly and precisely who he was. But I was always baffled about how he was able, apparently, to fool so many others. Or not; I keep forgetting my other general presumption: most everyone nowadays, in a political context, is a commie that would have you either toiling on their behalf, or doing time in the Gulag. In that sense, perhaps no one is really surprised about Spitzer. He's just exactly the kind of guy everyone wants doing their dirty work.

Like I Said Back When I Said It...

...Fuck Obama and His Stupid Bitch.

I meant it. And here's the latest from Michelle Obama, the stupid bitch.

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation and that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed – you have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eights years from now, you will have to be engaged.”

Fuck you, bitch. Who the fucking fuck do you think you are? And Tell Barack he can take his "require[ments]" and just fuck right off along with you. Understand: I hate people who talk like that.

That's via Billy, who de-euphemizes that pretentious "seat at the table" bullshit and rot. That Protein Wisdom link has a lot more.

Later: Here's another one, from that Protein Wisdom piece:

“in 2008 we should be in a place where children can dream any kind of life for themselves regardless of their race, their gender their socio-economic status. They should be able to dream big dreams and know they are going to have the love and resources of this entire nation behind them. That is the least we can do for our children. But the truth is we are not there yet.”

Vacuous, contemptible bullshit.

More later: Krauthammer:

There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: Bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity — salvation — for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”

“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”

Charles is only partially right, though. Yea, you can get people to buy something that's free. You can also get them to buy even more, and more, of the very thing that is at the root of their despair. Government is the problem. There will never be an ounce of solution in any measure of it, in any reconfiguration.

Not that the Doprahs preening after Obama are considering anything at this level. They're too busy being "hopeful" for "change." But it's what you asked for: democracy. In practical election dynamics, it means that less and less substance will be necessary to con more and more voters.

Even more later: Do I really think she's "stupid," or is that just ad hominem? Yes, I think she's stupid, as I think anyone is essentially and fundamentally stupid who has either lost, or never gained the ability to think, reason, and integrate facts proceeding from general principles as it is the human capacity to do. I don't think she ever had the ability. These are people -- her especially, from everything I've heard -- who "principally" hold facts and their logical relationships to one-another as mostly irrelevant. What's important is merely a whole slew of feelings, whims, desires, inspirations, hopes, fears, dreams, passions, and so on; and of course they all come in conflict with one another from the perspective of an integrated, hierarchical, rational view of the nature of man. That's stupidity, and the most charitable I can be to her is that she's in good company; in the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions.

The Clintons

If you're into that sort of thing, a pretty interesting commentary by Martin McPhillips on Hillary's apparent demise.

That was via Beck, who delivers on insight of his own.

That'll Teach 'Em!

Appears someone has inevitably bowed to awesome U.S. Power to wage economic sanctions, trade embargoes, and travel restrictions. Only took 50 years.

Listen: I get not doing business with scoundrels, but since I'm delving into practical geopolitical realities, look at this: We're dealing with a puny island nation that couldn't get off it's ass to produce much of anything anyway (though the cigars are fab), so what we essentially accomplished was not to cut them down, but if anything, to keep them from rising up (economically, as international traders), which would have made it increasingly difficult for Castro to hold power. Now, one could understand doing something like that to a Japan, a China, a Taiwan -- but Cuba? The former would undoubtedly be harmed tremendously, so sanctions would have real practical clout. For a Cuba, all it did was empower "them."

I have believed for 20 years that U.S. economic sanctions are essentially what kept Castro in power. The U.S. handed him his half-century fiefdom. Our actions made it easy for him to play David, and who doesn't love David?

To play Devil's Advocate with myself, Cuba was unique, being a Communist nation 90 miles from our shores; and The Cuban Missile Crisis undoubtedly etched quite a scar on the American psyche for a generation, at least.

Well, I for one will welcome some sort of détente, even if it isn't in the manner I'd go about it.