Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The difference between a politician and a statesman is the breadth of their horizons. But have we ever seen people with horizons as limited as our modern Congress? Of course their ratings are low – we return their judgment of us. They think we have no sense of deferred gratification; they think we are children – and not very bright, not very disciplined children at that. We return the compliment.
This could be big! Or not. It should be fun in any case.
We’re going to meet next Monday after work at a convenient location in Northwest DC.
If you want to join us, please email me: jonathan at chicagoboyzdotnet.
We are the bloggers we have been waiting for!
Or something.
Now, Obama is supposedly some kind of genius, as well as being a messiah-figure who transcends politics, and maybe can even fly and turn sand into rice, like Kim Il-sung used to do. He inspires heart-felt music videos, unlike John McCain. Also, he May Not Be Mocked, much like Louis XIV, Hirohito (in his prime) or Ramses II.
Yet, this super-being just said he will be dealing with foreign leaders, presumably as president, for the next eight to ten years.
Knowing that Presidents are limited to two, four-year terms, is mandatory, basic knowledge that should be, and usually is, second nature to every single reasonably educated American. Everybody knows this. Children know this.
This guy was some kind of Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago. He went to Harvard. Now say “ooooh!”
Yet, this kind of thing happens a lot with him, oddly enough.
This is my proposed Quayle Test. Ask yourself: How each time Obama says something stoopid, would the press would have crucified Dan Quayle for it?
Each day, each new gaffe from Obama, imagine Dear Old (supposedly) Dumbsh*t Dan saying it. Then compare what would have happened to him compared to the response Sen. Obama gets from his cheering gallery in the Press.
Obama, and the MSM, are failing this test almost daily.
If I had time to monitor it, I would put a Quayle-O-Meter on the blog.
But I trust we will all be keeping track informally of errors of “J. Danforth Obama”.
The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It’s a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.
John Robb has related, more generalized, thoughts on resilient communities.
Appealing to a man’s strength is a coquette’s trick (& a man’s weakness), but it works. Calvin Trillin repeats his father’s advice – “You might as well be a mensch.” A man wants to be heroic, virtuous, strong, manly. My daughter explained her husband’s appeal: she could count on him to take care of her. That view of him was her appeal. (My somewhat strident daughter stands at 5’10” and holds many fully formed opinions – she doesn’t appear dependent. But she leans on him.) A boy becomes a man by finding his strength; however, heroism – rescuing a community from plagues and a princess from a dragon – has taken a sentimental turn. We’ve always found vulnerability attractive, but a pattern has emerged in which the hero rescues the most vulnerable – seeing in a child his own unformed self. The rescue redeems. The hero’s transcendence, increasingly difficult in our ironic world, remains possible with a fragile baby or toddler.
