Month: September 2004

With friends like these. . .

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Another Karl Rove plot?

John Kerry’s secret weapon, no doubt. It would be a grave error to underestimate the numbers and political influence of ex-USMC officers who have Che stickers on their cars and spell America with a “k”. Oh yeah.

He’s Tan! He’s Rested! Kerry in ’04

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So I’m flipping channels last night and catch a picture of Kerry on the News. The guy has a tan like an Oompa Loompa.

I point this out to my teenage daughter who says, “Tan in a bottle. It’s too dark, too even and too orange to be natural.”

I scoffed at the idea, not because I know anything about chemical tans but because I didn’t think Kerry would be so dumb as to dye himself. The potential blow-back would be enormous were it ever discovered. The mocking would never end.

Then I remember that I had initially dismissed the idea that the CBS Memos were crude forgeries because I reasoned that CBS and Dan Rather would not be that incompetent. Whoops.

Today The Drudge report has a story that the tan appeared suddenly before Kerry arrived in Michigan. He also has a neat before-and-after collage image.

It is said you can’t grow broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. I am beginning to think that you cannot go wrong underestimating the arrogance and poor judgment of our institutional elites.

(Update: I realize I got carried away with the Oompa Loompa thing. (but boy does he look orange). I have no real idea whether Kerry’s tan is legitimate or not. My real thought was that previously, especially before Rathergate, I would have assumed that the tan was real because I had more confidence in the judgment of major figures at least when it comes to political acumen. Now I’m no longer so sure.)

(Update: Best of the Web stole my Oompa Loompa bit! Plus, possibly for karmic reasons, I’ve had bits and pieces of the Oompa Loompa songs stuck in head all day.)

There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come …

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There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come – and gone. One perennial favorite of the left is stakeholder theory as a system of business ethics. Under this theory, suppliers, customers, employees, stockholders, and the local community are defined as stakeholders. A corporation is obliged to act in the best interests of all stakeholders, and all stakeholders must participate in the decisions of the corporation that might affect them. Note that stockholders are outnumbered five to one by category, possibly even more by head count. Without a theoretical limit to how remote the connection of a stakeholder, or how small the impact, before they can be disregarded, the number of stakeholders is impossible to determine.

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