Leftism

A Culture War in Miniature

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A debate about a 4th-grade basketball game illustrates, on a very small scale, some of the primary cultural and political divides facing America today:

A few days before the game, Jay’s father called me. He and the other parents of his son’s team were “very, very concerned.” Even alarmed. Apparently, as the championship game neared, the boys were doing a lot trash-talking at each other. Surely we could all agree that the real reason for the competition was to teach the boys cooperation and sportsmanship. Playing the game would mean one of the teams would lose, which would lead the winning team to “bragging rights in the schoolyard.” And that would not be healthy. It would undermine the real lessons to be learned about self-esteem and mutual respect.

He dwelled on these points for a while, finally landing heavily on the notion that this was a wonderful opportunity for us, as parents, to “frame the situation as a teaching moment.” Eventually, he got to the money point: He and the other parents of Jay’s team wanted to cancel the championship game. After all, we could all agree that both teams were already winners, right?

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Quote of the Day

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Andrew Garland, commenting on this post by David Foster:

A tyranny is not just one willful man, but a large faction that says the law and constitution does not matter. If the populace is so stupid as to support or endure this lawlessness, then we have an established tyranny.
 
This is asymmetrical warfare. The Democrats flout the law, then say “under the law, you can’t do anything except vote us out”. The desire for law and order among most people is used as a shield against any action to stop the lawbreaking of that group.
 
Obama’s and the Democrat’s actions are not just allowing more destruction by oil in the Gulf. They are weakening the rule of law, or possibly are revealing that the law in our great country is a thin tissue, long hiding the arbitrary power of the government and the tyranny of Congress.

Read the whole discussion.

Helen Thomas and Rod Blagojevich

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What do they have in common?

Their colleagues publicly treated both of them as members in good standing of their respective professional communities, until they did things that embarrassed those communities. In each case it was the embarrassment, not the bad behavior, that was the problem.

Thomas was widely known as a left-wing crank who abused the deference she was shown at press conferences to engage in rude harangues of officials under the guise of asking questions. The inappropriateness of her behavior was obvious not only to her fellow journalists but to anyone who watched her performances on television. Conservative media commentators and bloggers complained about her for years. Yet her behavior was not an issue in her professional and political circles until she publicly made anti-Jewish comments that merely echoed what she had said for years in private in the presence of other journalists.

Blagojevich, the disgraced ex-governor of Illinois, was a corrupt hack. Everyone in Illinois knew it. Yet he was a member in good standing of the Democratic establishment until he got caught on tape in the act of attempting to sell a Senate seat. Like Thomas, he became an instant pariah. Also like Thomas, he became a pariah not because of his corruption but because he was clumsy or cocky enough to let himself be caught.

The petty sagas of these two people reveal more about the values and integrity of our media and political establishments than they do about Thomas or Blagojevich as individuals.

Helen Thomas the Harbinger

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Today, Helen Thomas’s racist comments forced her retirement. This is not a victory. It is a harbinger.

Within five years at most, those very same comments will be accepted wisdom by the leftmost 1/3 of the American political spectrum and they will routinely voice such views in the public discourse without shame or remorse. No one will lose their job because they advocate the destruction of Israel.

The evolution has already begun. Scan the comments on the story at Huffington Post. Clearly many on the left already don’t find those sentiments shocking or beyond the pale.

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Deepwater Horizon – Random Thoughs with a dash of Hypocrisy

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Back on May 4 I posted some random thoughts about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Surprisingly, all of them still hold true.

-The human cost still has taken a major back seat to the environmental cost
-Almost zero people reporting on the story knows anything about how a deepwater drilling rig works. I was taught that the word “busted” was not to be used when I was growing up, but I am reading a lot of stories that say things like “busted pipe”. That is a grammatical digression, I admit.
-I still think BP is trying everything they can muster to stop the leak(s)
-The market still seems to be doing a big shoulder shrug over the whole thing. The collapse of the eurozone and the poor jobs reports seem to weigh much heavier on the markets. And oil prices are going down.
-I did say that the federal response was quick (for them) but really can’t tell at this point if it is. A lot of people are slagging the Obama administration for acting slowly, but I don’t live there so maybe one of our commenters could clear that up.

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