Archive Listing
October 12, 2007 - October 5, 2007

Thursday, October 19, 2006

PRINCIPLE. On the whole, we agree with Rush Limbaugh about the state of the Republican Party with respect to the upcoming elections. You just can't get any dumber than announcing your own defeat before people even have the opportunity to vote. We also agree that "premortems" such as the one penned by Glenn Reynolds earlier this week are counter-productive and off-point, because when Republicans lose, it's not the office holders who are the victims but the electorate. Maybe Frist and Hastert deserve a shellacking, but those of us who care about the United States don't deserve a naive and cowardly foreign policy, higher taxes, and the torture of a vengeful Congress seeking to impeach the President of the United States. Rush is right on about all that.

But now we'll say what Rush won't. Republican politicians are stupid. There's really no end to just how damn dumb they are. When they have the majority, they continue to act like losers, giving Dems the benefit of every doubt in hopes that when the tables are turned, the Dems will treat them the same way. Never gonna happen. Why? Because the Dems are smart. When you have the power, use it ruthlessly and never stop trying to annihilate the enemy. You'll never see Democrats conceding an election beforehand. Let's face it. The executive and legislative branches of the United States are presently being run by an Army of One who's a dead ringer for Mortimer Snerd. Republican politicians inevitably fall into every trap set for them by Democrats in the Congress and the mass media. They over-react to nonsense like the Foley scandal, and they under-react to opportunities like the Harry Reid scandal boring real estate deal.

BUT... and this is a big BUT... that's precisely the reason Republicans should be in control of the government. Yes, you heard me correctly. Republicans should be in charge because they're stupid. Smart Republicans know better than to work for the government. They start businesses, they do real work, they prosper in privacy, and they don't seek the empty acclaim of the mass media. It's just the opposite for the Democrats, who send their best and brightest to the political front, where rhetoric and wit are valued above honest achievement. Look at the Kennedys. Since Joseph Senior acquired his fortune through bootlegging, what Kennedy has ever put in a day's labor at anything real? It's no accident that the greatest Dem heroes are silver spoon boys -- FDR, JFK, and, uh, JFK (Kerry's the punchline here, for you dumb Republicans). Government by the dumbest is surely what the framers had in mind, because Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin were well aware that Britain had erred horribly by sending its best and brightest to Parliament. That's why they tried to make the Constituion idiot-proof., including a Bill of Rights that any well educated person would have regarded as superfluous in the emotional aftermath of a successful revolution.

Have you ever obsserved the sheer delight Dems take in Bush's constant verbal missteps? That's because they think the most essential component of leadership is intellect. Let me repeat that. They think the most essential component of leadership is intellect. It sounds plausible but it's dead wrong. Does anyone here think that Wellington was smarter than Napoleon? Well, if you do, you're wrong. Wellington was an idiot. The only thing he knew was that Napoleon had to be dealt with. He didn't know why exactly, he didn't know how for sure, but he knew that he couldn't yield until the matter was handled. That's the level of intelligence most political issues require. When you get leaders as intellectual as Neville Chamberlain and Clement Atlee, it's time to find the guy who graduated at the bottom of his class at Cambridge/West Point/Yale, some predictable clown named Churchill/Eisenhower/Bush.

Successful business executives are almost never intellectuals. Of course, the intellectuals who write about successful people aren't happy about this and they have a habit of downplaying the importance of stupidity in the realm of great accomplishment, but facts are facts. Great specifiic talents are almost always conferred upon people who are otherwise remarkably stupid. Picasso spoke to the public about his art once. Then his publicist ordered him to shut up forever.

As with so many subjects, the great British idiot P.G. Wodehouse provided the most insightful guidance about how we should appraise our governance. In a story whose name I no longer remember, a corporate CEO used a game of golf to determine who should be his company's chief accountant. The protagonist, a likeable but stupid young man we were all rooting for, seemed to scotch his chances by losing his temper and hurling his club into the woods after a particularly bad shot.. He got the job BECAUSE of this dumb move. The CEO explained that when he trusts his money to someone else, the most important thing is to be able to detect deception. The safest choice is the person who is too stupid to succeed at decepttion.

So -- despite Schiavo, Miers, Rumsfeld, and Foley -- I give you the Mortimer Snerd of political parties, the Republicans. Dumb enough to run the free world.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

THE GOLDEN SMILE. Bill Clinton loves to break precedent. He was the first President from a trailer park Arkansas, the first to have sex in the Oval Office and blame his political enemies for the resulting scandal, the first ex-president to promote his wife as a political successor, and the first ex-president to come close to physically assaulting a journalist on TV. It's all okay, we guess, because everybody still loves Bill, but it's also interesting to examine the consequences of broken precedents.

Like that most recent one. It was Bill Clinton who reinjected himself into the American political scene when he could have done all his hundred-grand-a-pop speechifying and screwing out of the limelight. But he missed the limelight. Which is why he decided, unlike George H. W. Bush, that he should start criticizing the current administration on the record, on camera, to the press. Then, when somebody dared to ask questions about what he had or hadn't done about the most urgent issue of our times, he took umbrage, almost physically, because ex-Presidents -- i.e., elder statesmen -- are supposed to be immune from interrogation about anything more serious than the state of their golf handicap. So Bill came this close to decking Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

The message he sent to the press is that it's unacceptable to ask hard questions of an elder statesman. So now we have elder statesmen coming out of the woodwork to promote their own agendas, and the press is giving them a total pass. For example, Jimmy Carter of all people is now criticizing the Bush administration for -- don't you just love it? -- its policies with regard to North Korea:


Missing from the article, which you can read here, is any question to Carter about who it was who put the "deal" in the wastebasket. Or about who gave the North Koreans nuclear technology in exchange for transparently empty promises that the avowedly Stalinist state wouldn't use the gift of nuclear technology to make weapons of mass destruction. You see, that would be rude, because Carter is an elder statesman and past the age of accountability. Jimmy should send a basket of Florida oranges to the First Adulterer thanking him for his immunity.

And then there's Gorbachev. Remember him? He's on the record today with this:

Come again? A wall to keep illegal aliens out of the United States is the same as a wall built to keep prisoners of Soviet communism inside a continental gulag?! Geez. But there's no sign that anyone in the press asked this question of Elder Statesman Gorbachev before he rode home in his limousine. Gorby should send a gift to Bill, too.

I kind of liked the old rule: once a civilian, stay a civilian and the press will only ask you about whether you had a bran muffin this morning. I'm adamantly opposed to the new rule: once a civilian, mount any dais you can find, launch your idiotic attacks at will, and the press will only ask you about whether you had a bran muffin this morning.

I can't wait for the next installments. Saddam Hussein's perspective about how to balance Kurdish nationalism with Shia jihadism. Idi Amin's wisdom about how to end the genocide in Darfur. Kofi Annan's enlightened thoughts about how to exterminate the Jews once and for all.

I don't reallly want to know whether Saddam had a bran muffin this morning. But I would like to hear what ex-President George W. Bush really thinks about the press in the free world. If the new rule applies to him as well, maybe I'll send Bill a basket of fruit myself.

Monday, October 16, 2006

A LIGHT IN THE EAST. Yes, the time is truly at hand. Come November 7, the forces of darkness and evil will be overthrown, and a new day will dawn in the world. Then the righteous will rise up in the House, and they will speak in the sacred tongues of the enlightened, and their words will be like stones, and the stones will break the bonds of the imprisoned ones whose only crime was to desire our heads on pikes, and our women entombed in living shrouds, and our children enticed to suicide.

And the false words of the War on Terror and National Security and Axis of Evil will melt away into silence, even as the tongues of the Great Secular Caliphate of DC form new words, which will blaze like a burning bush and consume the lives of the condemned, who will crumble to ash inside a great fiery pit, like unto an eternal congressional hearing, from which there can be no return.

And everywhere else in the world, the mouths of the righteous will fill with song, and they will sing with great freedom of the joy of killing, and beheading, and bombing, and ruling the infidel pigs, who will also sing with them, in becoming harmony, of the abiding glory of a constitution which protects all equally, from the most helpless and indigent to the most powerful and murderous, unless they be of the eternally condemned ones, the unspeakable Republicans, who shall languish and expire in the pit.

And miracles will blossom across the face of the earth like gigantic flowers, as all human problems fade away, and the enmities of centuries will be swallowed up by negotiations, and the inconvenient atoms which had begun to divide in hostility and war will be reunited by the panaceas of bilateral talks and rhetorical compromises in the Security Council, so that the blessed humanity of North Korea and Iran and the Palestine will suddenly yield up all their intransigent hatreds, and they will be as soothed and tender as is a troubled child who has been reassured. And, lo, all the killing will end in the land of Eden, between the Tigris and Euphrates, as the evil war-making ones are sent home in disgrace, and the blessed humanity of Mesopatamia is left alone to sort things out for itself.

And there shall be inexorable commandments given down from on high, which will quiet the turbulent oceans of evil radio waves, and the false visions of the slyly satanic Fox, and the few loathsome voices of dissent in the ivory towers of wisdom, and the wicked pen of the evil sorceress who is the pale horse of the Apocalypse. And she shall be cast down, utterly, and her tongue ripped out, and fed to the hyenas of the New York Times Magazine section.

And great trumpets shall be blown from the sacred forests of holly in the west, and, yea, the beautiful ones will beam and bask and bray their adoration, even as they fly toward the blessed east, whence cometh their salvation.

And all of us will admire them, in all humility, on bended knee, with faces covered as we bow down toward the sacred east, even unto Mecca, as we wait for our own inevitable punishment and ruin.

In short, it's gonna be great. Don't fight it. The show alone will be worth the price of admission.

UPDATE.  Don't know for how long it will be available, but InstaPunk has posted its first video at YouTube. It should be self explanatory.