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Monday, August 24, 2009
Sigh. Dr. Zero
belongs here.
Coincidence? My favorite avatar from 'Mortal Kombat' was Sub-Zero.
IS
THERE A ZERO IN THE HOUSE? Yeah, we've praised him before. It galls
me every time one of his well written posts appears at HotAir with the
patronizing notification that it has been "promoted" from the 'The
Green Room' (er, the minor league sidebar where the second-raters play
whiffle ball while Allahpundit and Morrissey jack off with Big League
questions like which moderate Democrat is sounding reasonable today and
which atheist group is making less a fool of itself than usual.).And I
know my growing contempt for HotAir is not helping matters, in that
many of you probably miss it when Doc Zero pitches another two-hitter
in an empty ballpark.
So I'm begging you to check out the little gem called Why Sarah Palin Should Not Leave The Room, which is damn near a perfect game. He takes on Charles Krauthammer, splitting the difference between my own pro and con views of him, and in the process brings into focus precisely what is so damned important about Sarah Palin. As I often do with good writers, I'll give you a taste without pretending it's the "bottom line" of the essay. (That's actually an insult to any good piece of writing, which would ennoble Glenn Reynolds to realize...) It's just the forkful of haute cuisine that makes the discerning order the whole entree for themselves:
Now that I know you'll all go read it I can finish in a minor key. He really should be here, even though he's probably getting more attention there despite the green type that constitutes the yellow star of the backbenchers at HotAir. Why? Because I think he'd love to have commenters like we have here. I mean, has anyone read the commenters there? It's enough to make a blogger think, "Why bother?" I'd rather pique the minds of five of you than five hundred of them.
Not that I'm suggesting Doctor Zero doesn't know what he's doing. I'm sure he does and I wish him nothing but the best.
So I'm begging you to check out the little gem called Why Sarah Palin Should Not Leave The Room, which is damn near a perfect game. He takes on Charles Krauthammer, splitting the difference between my own pro and con views of him, and in the process brings into focus precisely what is so damned important about Sarah Palin. As I often do with good writers, I'll give you a taste without pretending it's the "bottom line" of the essay. (That's actually an insult to any good piece of writing, which would ennoble Glenn Reynolds to realize...) It's just the forkful of haute cuisine that makes the discerning order the whole entree for themselves:
The death panel doesn’t have to take
the form of nine robed Sith Lords, stamping your grandmothers’
termination orders with a giant red skull, then handing them to a ghoul
in surgical scrubs. It will be no less deadly if it consists of
thousands of faceless government drones in cubicles, processing Quality
of Life spreadsheets and crossing out the unlucky Social Security
numbers with pink highlighter pens. In fact, my only quibble with
Palin’s prediction is that, given the style of the current
Administration, it is much more likely that we’ll have a Death Czar.
Using the same Noonan-swooning judgment that gave us a tax cheat for
Treasury Secretary, Obama will appoint a serial killer to the position.
The Death Czar’s first official act will be spending $2 billion in
taxpayer dollars to hire a Brazilian company, which will extract organs
from Americans after they receive their end-of-life counseling, then
ship them overseas for use in foreign patients.
What Palin brings to the health-care debate is the energy, wisdom, and wit to make complex ideas understandable to ordinary people. Let me once again restate my admiration for Charles Krauthammer before saying, with regrettably brutal candor, that Sarah Palin had more impact on the health-care debate with one Facebook note than everything Krauthammer has written in the past year. That’s not because people are shallow, and didn’t pay attention until Palin kicked off a media firestorm. It’s because they understandably seek out leadership on complex issues, and leaders have a knack for rendering fearfully complicated issues down to their essential truths.
What Palin brings to the health-care debate is the energy, wisdom, and wit to make complex ideas understandable to ordinary people. Let me once again restate my admiration for Charles Krauthammer before saying, with regrettably brutal candor, that Sarah Palin had more impact on the health-care debate with one Facebook note than everything Krauthammer has written in the past year. That’s not because people are shallow, and didn’t pay attention until Palin kicked off a media firestorm. It’s because they understandably seek out leadership on complex issues, and leaders have a knack for rendering fearfully complicated issues down to their essential truths.
Now that I know you'll all go read it I can finish in a minor key. He really should be here, even though he's probably getting more attention there despite the green type that constitutes the yellow star of the backbenchers at HotAir. Why? Because I think he'd love to have commenters like we have here. I mean, has anyone read the commenters there? It's enough to make a blogger think, "Why bother?" I'd rather pique the minds of five of you than five hundred of them.
Not that I'm suggesting Doctor Zero doesn't know what he's doing. I'm sure he does and I wish him nothing but the best.
