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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
YouTube Wednesday
AGAIN! According to Drudge this morning, Mike Huckabee is now claiming that his support for a federal smoking ban has been misrepresented. View the clip of his original comments above and decide for yourselves what you should believe about his philosophy of governance.
But the sad news is that he's not the one who's out of step in the current social environment. The ones out of step are those of us who think government interference in matters of personal health and personal vice is the most dangerous slippery slope there is.
Even the alphabet networks concede that the 'nanny state' isn't just a paranoid neologism. Here's an acknowledgment from NBC.
And ABC News correctly identifies that the pioneer of much of the blatant social engineering being written into our laws is the State of California.
Smoking, obviously, is not the be all and end all of government's invading our homes and cars and workplaces with their superior knowledge about how we should all live. Practically everything else is on the list too, particularly guns, but also such staples as transportation and food. Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker of the House for one year and has accomplished practically nothing legislatively. But she has managed to inflict her native Californian faux-haute cuisine on the congressional representatives of all 50 states:
According to Politico, the cafeteria in
The U.S. House of Representatives is now a very different place.
The processed cheese has been replaced with brie. The Jell-O has made way for raspberry kiwi tarts and mini-lemon blueberry trifles. Meatloaf has moved over for mahi mahi and buns have been shunted aside in favor of baguettes.
The menu transformation is part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "Greening the Capitol" plan to make the House campus more environmentally friendly and "socially progressive."
Some employees are complaining that this new "socially progressive" campus is also becoming progressively more expensive...
When you actually read what some of the new meal choices are you really can't help but laugh. The food sounds good, but it just seems out of place in the congressional cafeteria.
You can now get pan-roasted Chesapeake rockfish with sweet potato fennel hash and yellow pepper relish. Or something a bit lighter like Pears with Stilton cheese and watercress.
Staffers who find themselves emotional and weary after a long day fighting for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq might wish to dine on Cumin-scented leg of lamb with almond couscous.
There are also vegetables with funny names, like bok choy, arugula and jicama. There are baked goods with Italian names, like biscotti, focaccia and frittati.
With the immigration debate raging it only made sense to put something besides "Juan Valdez" in the vending machine that sells coffee.
Employees can now enjoy more politically neutral coffee from famed chef Wolfgang Puck, in flavors like "Vive la Creme Caramel" and "Tropic of Chocolate."
The processed cheese has been replaced with brie. The Jell-O has made way for raspberry kiwi tarts and mini-lemon blueberry trifles. Meatloaf has moved over for mahi mahi and buns have been shunted aside in favor of baguettes.
The menu transformation is part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "Greening the Capitol" plan to make the House campus more environmentally friendly and "socially progressive."
Some employees are complaining that this new "socially progressive" campus is also becoming progressively more expensive...
When you actually read what some of the new meal choices are you really can't help but laugh. The food sounds good, but it just seems out of place in the congressional cafeteria.
You can now get pan-roasted Chesapeake rockfish with sweet potato fennel hash and yellow pepper relish. Or something a bit lighter like Pears with Stilton cheese and watercress.
Staffers who find themselves emotional and weary after a long day fighting for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq might wish to dine on Cumin-scented leg of lamb with almond couscous.
There are also vegetables with funny names, like bok choy, arugula and jicama. There are baked goods with Italian names, like biscotti, focaccia and frittati.
With the immigration debate raging it only made sense to put something besides "Juan Valdez" in the vending machine that sells coffee.
Employees can now enjoy more politically neutral coffee from famed chef Wolfgang Puck, in flavors like "Vive la Creme Caramel" and "Tropic of Chocolate."
Everything we consume and do is now supposed to be "environmentally friendly and socially progressive." That's how it's possible to make smoking objectively evil while the far greater health risk of homosexual promiscuity is beyond subjective criticism. They've succeeded with smoking, and they're presently hard at work trying to accomplish the same trick with eating red meat and other real foods that taste good. How hard is it to imagine the day when barbecuing a juicy burger becomes a disgustingly unmentionable underground activity? Like so:
That clip is from the movie Demolition Man, which seems to do a pretty good job of imagining the California of the future. Who will be the Che-esque freedom fighters then?
That's right. The valiant underdogs will be people who just want to live their lives without some damn food prude or psychosomatic asthmatic autocrat looking for excuses to lock them up. What, you ask, does a "cigar the size of Cincinnati" look like? It looks like this.
But forget it. Your future isn't going to include anything like that. Not in a free country like this one. What you're much more likely to inherit from the populists who care so damn much about you that you can't wait to vote their controlling asses into office is this:
If they can take the fun out of eating, there isn't much they can't take the fun out of. Eventually, they'll get around to everything, but the very next item on their long list is your personal transportation. (No, you don't have to watch the whole thing. But you really really should.)
NASCAR. They're pretty sure they can get away with selling us idiots on hybrids. Because those of us who object are a bunch of dumb NASCAR types, too stupid and inbred to get out of our own way. What they don't realize is that us NASCAR fans are actually pretty damn smart, and we can prove it.
Maybe we should be just a little bit worried.
POSTSCRIPT. One of our more disreputable contributing bloggers has strayed once again into the ranks of the MSM with an op-ed piece in the Providence Journal. If you like, you can see it here. It's about a past that wouldn't begin to understand today's entry.
