Rhetoric

Quote of the Day

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A comment by ArtChance in response to this NRO piece by Stanley Kurtz:

We few out in the Country who actually practice adversarial public sector labor relations knew what Comrade Obama was the second we laid eyes on him. By “adversarial” I mean work for a Republican government in a union state where you actually have to bargain with unions. In Democrat controlled states, the government conspires with unions against the people and the legislature.
 
When I saw him make his famous speech at the ’02 (IIRC) convention I said to myself, “I know you, you’re the one they think they can dress up and pass off as reasonable.” He’s pretty much a by the book communist/union organizer and anyone who deals with him should know Alinsky like a Baptist minister knows the New Testament.
 
Somebody like Obama is almost impossible for “nice guy” Republicans to deal with. The Republicans get their ideas about negotiating from “Getting to Yes” while Obama and his ilk get theirs from “Rules for Radicals.” In the recent debt debate, Obama didn’t want a deal, he wanted a political process that could be played to his advantage, and he was very successful against the “nice guys” in getting that. Typical of an Alinskyite, he never made a concrete proposal, just some pie in the sky positions, and made the Republicans negotiate with themselves to try to come up with something he would buy. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a public employee union knows that game. If you start from the position that a agreement with them is your objective, you wind up compromising yourself into their position, which is exactly what Boehner/McConnell did. Both of them are too much from the “nice guy” tradition to understand that the only way to bargain with a communist-trained negotiator is to start out with a position that if he is forced to accept it, will kill him politically or economically and make it so that the default from his not reaching agreement is having to live under your untenable for him conditions. In other words, you really do have to do what the Ds were accusing the Tea Partiers of, you hold a gun to their heads, a political or economic gun of course, and quietly say, “be reasonable so I don’t have to use it.”

Civil Discourse

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It’s been reported that Joe Biden referred to Republican opponents on the debt issue in the following terms:

They have acted like terrorists.

Biden now denies that he used that phrasing. But there’s no question that Democratic representative Mike Doyle, who was in the same meeting, said:

We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.

Numerous other Democrats and Democrat-leaning media types have used the T-word or close synonyms of same in referring to their American political opponents, for example NYT columnist Joe Nocera, who refers to the Tea Party Republicans as having “waged jihad on the American people” and Maureen Dowd, who approvingly quoted “some Democrats” as having described the Tea Party as “the Republican Taliban wing.”

Note that this vitriol is coming from a party which rejects the idea of calling actual terrorists “terrorists.” They prefer to call terrorist attacks man-caused disasters, and to refer to wars as overseas contingency operations.

I’m reminded, as I often am, of something Neptunux Lex wrote in 2008:

The innate character flaw of the political right, with its thrumming appeals to the logic of blood and soil, is its lamentable tendency to go in search of enemies abroad. The left, on the other hand, with its own appeals to the politics of envy and class warfare, is content to find mortal enemies closer to hand.

Today’s American leftists view American citizens who strongly differ with them politically as enemies to a much greater extent than Islamic terrorists or any hostile nation-state.

Regarding Mike Doyle’s complaint about it having been made “impossible to spend any money”…the Democratic politicians are like teenagers who have been unwisely been given a credit card and who, now that consideration is being given to not raising the credit limit yet again, whine that “you won’t let me spend any money at all“…indeed, they also follow the typical teenage pattern of whining “but all my friends get to spend more”…in this case their friends from Europe…while ignoring the little problem that their friends’ parents are being driven into bankruptcy even more rapidly than their own are.

Links: James Taranto

Sister Toldjah

Neptunus Lex

The era of the condescending President

Some of the above links via Instapundit and Maggie’s Farm

Modern Bigotry

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Many of the comments in response to a John Tierney piece about why conservatives avoid grad school are remarkable for their smug, unreflective hostility toward and ignorance about the people they criticize.

A typical comment:

Republican scholar is an oxymoron, by definition the right/conservatives of today are anti-intellectual and have more in common with Maoists than they do with the traditional American conservative movement. And this article in it’s false effort to be fair and balanced refuses to report on what’s real and true. How can those who deny science and academics somehow become 50% of our college faculity?

But a few of the commenters get it:

Many of these comments stink of the closemindedness and lack of tolerance that they claim to despise. Perhaps the pot is calling the kettle black. What sane person would self-select to learn in an environment so intellectually narrow and toxic to dissent?

Needless to say, there are many more comments like the first one above than like the second one.

Comments on the piece have been closed. I wonder why.

High-Handed Outrage at Utica

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Abraham Lincoln like to start his Cabinet meetings with a little humor to relax everyone. On  September 22, 1862 he began the Cabinet meeting by reading the following little nugget by the then popular humorist Artemus Ward (spelling in the original.)

High-Handed Outrage at Utica

In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Uticky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.
 
The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.
 
1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.
 
“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.
 
Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” and he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.
 
Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air’s a wax figger–a representashun of the false ‘Postle.”
 
Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

I have no idea why this story is supposed to be so funny. That in turn tells me that I am missing an important understanding of the culture of the era and the mind of Abraham Lincoln and others of that generation.

Supposedly, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton didn’t get the joke either and grumbled about the waste of time. To placate Stanton, Lincoln hurried along to the real work of the meeting: announcing his intention to finally release the Emancipation Proclamation. Stanton didn’t think that was funny either.

I think that the trivial and/or popular works of an era tell us more about the tenor of the times than do the tiny minority of works in any era that time eventually elevates to canon.

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Quote of the Day

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Commenter hdgreene at Belmont Club:

The uniting concept in the Leftist economic program is the politically controlled Cartel — whether in health care or energy or finance. Cartels force the consumer to pay higher prices for a lower quality product. They force workers and suppliers to do more for less. They exist, in short, for the benefit of those who control the Cartel. In this case that is bureaucrats, technocrats, politicians and their cronies.
 
Of course they do not promote these Cartels by announcing the real purpose. Instead they tell you it will save lives or money or the entire planet. Salesmanship is important — especially when selling lemons.