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Month: July 2011
The Economy Will Default!
I accidentally DVR’d the President’s speech on Sunday night. I didn’t watch the speech itself, because I don’t watch any speeches these days, but I did catch Brian Williams’s (MSNBC) intro to the speech and it was an eye opener. Here’s my transcription of the intro with Williams’s verbal emphasis bolded:
President Obama has requested air time from the television networks tonight to speak from the East Room of the White House and tell the American people that unless the debt ceiling is raised the US will suffer incalculable damage and the economy will default. And in keeping with the back and forth nature of what has become a toxic debate in Washington, two minutes after the Presidents finish we will go to the Speaker of the House.
The “economy will default”? What the hell? And since when is the opposition response considered part of a “toxic” debate?
Note also the phrasing that turns the President’s expected assertions into statements of objective fact. He will “tell the American people that…” instead of something like, “he will make his case to the American people that…”
I can’t decide if this scares me, disgusts me or heartens me. It scares me to see how deep the major media are in the tank for the Democrats. It disgusts me that they continue to use public resources to promote their partisan agenda. However, it heartens me to see how incompetently they go about it.
“The economy will default”. Heh.
King of the Word People
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR:Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
(Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth)
Yesterday, Andrew Klavan put up a post titled Just Words?, in which he describes Obama in these terms:
The president, in short, has a problem with his mouth: words keep coming out of it that have nothing to do with the truth. He doesn’t even speak plainly. In matters that might be controversial or unpopular, he almost never calls anything by its proper name. He talks about “cutting spending in the tax code” when he means raising taxes; about “making investments” when he means more government spending. And the parts of what he says that can be clearly understood almost never describe his true intentions or his ultimate actions.
and
During Hillary Clinton’s losing nomination fight against Obama, the Clinton camp famously charged that while Obama’s speeches were impressive, his record was virtually non-existent. “When all is said and done, words aren’t action. They are just words,” the Clintonistas said.
and
Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to care what his words mean, only how they sound, only what they get him. The answer, then, is yes, when this president speaks, it really is just words.
As I’ve previously observed, a large and increasing proportion of Americans earn their living through the manipulation of words and images–lawyers, writers, entertainers, journalists, professors outside the hard sciences, certain types of consultants. For people in these professions, there is a constant temptation to over-value their own and related activities such that they wind up implicitly believing that nothing really matters but words/images and their deployment; that all other forms of human endeavor are trivial in comparison. Not all people in these fields fall prey to this fallacy (Klavan, after all, is himself a writer) but many do. Obama is the avatar of such people.
Upcoming Chicago Tea Party Events
The Chicago Tea Party is sponsoring a TeaCon 2011 on September 30 – October 1, 2011. Check it out.
Before that, the next Chicago Tea Party meeting is on August 3, 2011. The speaker will be Otis McDonald, plaintiff in the critically important case of McDonald v. City of Chicago — which is worth reading, even if you are not a lawyer.
I plan to be at both of these events, hopefully wearing my new shirt:
Around Chicago July 2011 (more)
Upper left – the state of Illinois building lit up at night. I still remember the building in that movie “Running Scared“. Upper right – glad we have inspectors on duty. Nothing wrong with that shack in the car lot, is there? This lot is on a super heavily trafficked street too. Lower left – I like goodbye kitty. Lower middle – we went to a fantastic Chinese restaurant in the North in the Uptown area and I ate so much I thought I’d explode; they had a great “lazy susan” and kept filling it with food. Lower right – oh Lord, won’t you buy me, a Mercedes Benz…
Cross posted at LITGM