For Conservatives... an Advantage? (Part 1)

I started writing this back before the election. I was thinking the whole time, "Wow, this is so important for people to read. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Gotta blog on this baby!" Then I started thinking of insights I wanted to share about the way Catholic Conservatives versus Catholic Liberals are dealt with by the Church. So I put off posting it, and I kept putting it off until now. [Note: I wrote this paragraph on Tuesday, 2/12/19]

Yes; I put this off several more days because I kept thinking of more things to say. Finally I decided to break this up into smaller pieces, this being the main one. So hopefully next week I'll post more thoughts—I have to travel again.

This is a very insightful Quillette article by Matthew Blackwell written about a year ago. Blackwell It examines temperamental differences between conservatives and liberals (Blackwell uses the term progressives). Excerpt:

Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold. To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives. This he calls the ‘conservative advantage,’ and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

Haidt’s research echoes arguments made by Thomas Sowell in A Conflict of Visions and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate. Both Sowell and Pinker contend that conservatives see an unfortunate world of moral trade-offs in which every moral judgment comes with costs that must be properly balanced. Progressives, on the other hand, seem to be blind to, or in denial about, these trade-offs, whether economic and social; theirs is a utopian or unconstrained vision, in which every moral grievance must be immediately extinguished until we have perfected society. This is why conservatives don’t tend to express the same emotional hostility as the Left; a deeper grasp of the world’s complexity has the effect of encouraging intellectual humility. The conservative hears the progressive’s latest demands and says, “I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but I think you’ve overlooked the following...” In contrast, the progressive hears the conservative and thinks, “I have no idea why you would believe that. You’re probably a racist.”

Does this ring true to me? Certainly, and I am glad we now have scientific evidence to prove what we have experienced as outspoken conservatives for years. I can vividly recall the fierce accusations of a hardline leftist in a heated interaction; most of the heat was coming from his side. When trying to reason with him about why conservatives dislike the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), he told me "You just want people to die!" Had I responded, "Well, you just want to have everything for free, bite the hand that feeds you, and..." then that would be a response in kind, and this "argument" would fall flat. But I rarely hear this sort of rhetoric on the right, and when I have, there is an immediate distancing by other conservatives in the vicinity. Thinking conservatives do not want to be lumped in with unconstructive accusation.

[Side note: In fact, most conservatives do not want to be "lumped in" at all with anything. That is why MAGA hats are such a new phenomenon.]

My friend Nate noticed the same tendency in a very good recent post on his blog, Rotten Chestnuts:

Both sides often make relevant points about important data, and both sides seem to avoid what the other one is addressing leading to a frustration of everybody talking past each other. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that the [Trump] fans seemed to make an effort to confront the counter arguments a bit more often – the [Trump] skeptics rarely so. In fact the skeptics seemed to go out of their way to [avoid] even acknowledg[ing] competing evidence.

(I hope Nate doesn't mind my slight correction – it is what I think he is trying to say. We all could use an editor.)

My theory is that there are really two possible reasons we conservatives don't respond in kind as I described. One is that we don't presume to know motives. I don't really know that someone pushing for Obamacare is trying to stick it to the man and get handouts. The other one is that even if I suspect that this might be his motivation, there is no rhetorical value in throwing this at him. He reduces his chance of winning the argument by accusing me of murderous intent, but I'm not about to give ground by assertions of larcenous intent. Even if I was right I would lose in the mind of onlookers who thought my opponent's motives were pure.

Two conclusions from the leftist's behavior are easy for me to imagine. The first conclusion: the liberal has no desire to convince me I'm wrong or a bit "off" in my thinking. He just means to assert his opinion, usually loudly and in a derisive way which is difficult to rebut. He wants to silence my voice. Whether I shut up out of shame or out of frustration, this is his best hope of "winning" — a forfeit from his opponent. I believe this is why we were all so gratified to hear Brett Kavanaugh swinging back at the "coordinated effort to destroy [his] good name" by false accusations in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. He wasn't having any of it; he wasn't going to give up. We're use to people on our side sitting by and "taking their lumps".

The second possible conclusion: he really does want to convince me he is right and thinks this is the best way to go about it. This is less likely in my opinion, but I admit it is possible. It would mean that I have to "change my mind" in a sort of nominal way to be able to go with the flow — his flow. There is still no logic involved, and probably no real willful change of heart or mind. Maybe the liberal imagines he can pull off the ol' Jedi Mind Trick?

Going back to Blackwell's beginning paragraph:

When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to receive from those on the Right and Left when expressing a difference of opinion. I am not, as it turns out, the only one who has noticed this.

I remarked to my wife last night that reading this made me want to be even more empathetic in by use of rhetoric and conciliatory in my tone when I debate with anyone, especially liberals. I never ever want to respond in kind. It is obvious that Trump is not so worried about this, but I don't think we have to imitate him by any means just because he is the de facto head of the more conservative political party. But typically the people in the Trump Resistance camp are even worse at seeing the other side because they respond in kind almost reflexively and with barely any self-awareness. It's like Cleveland talker Mike Trivisonno famously stated two years ago, "The people who hate Trump the most don't realize how much they're like him."

[In my next installment, I'll talk about the effect this phenomenon has had on the Catholic Church.]

Democrats are Walking Away from the party

Really interesting new group of people disgusted with liberalism and the democrat party called the #WalkAway Movement or alternatively, the Unsilent Majority. The de facto leader is Brandon Straka, a gay dude from Nebraska who is sick enough of the intersectional groupthink lunacy of the left that he has formally left and is leading a movement out. Naturally he is good friends with Candace Owens, and therefore you are going to hear about taking the "red pill" if you hang around their pages.

The #WalkAway movement has a Facebook page. I don't think they have a regular site yet.



Oh yeah: they also have a Twitter page. I like to listen to them because they're bold, fresh and unfiltered. Their movement is really new and so they have all kinds of equipment failures during their live feeds. I guess Straka's phone actually overheated once and blew up his presentation. But watching the recording actually inspired me to do my own show. It's just raw conviction. They will someday be laughing about this stuff on CRTV or Fox — wherever they end up.

One thing that characterizes all of them is a sort of joie de vivre that you don't see with former-conservatives—especially the anti-Trump Evangelicals—who have become staunch liberals. Usually those people are really anger driven, grew up in a fundamentalist home, etc. Both groups are rebelling against a certain type of self-righteousness, but whereas the #WalkAway people are stressing free-thinking and reason the Christian Leftists are mostly advocating for a more different, ideologically strict self-righteousness based on their newly found leftism. I just had a combox convo with some of them... hoo-boy.

How's that working out for you?

I was wondering when we'd here about this in some kind of anniversary "Where is he now?" thing. But it turns out that it has only taken three months for the idealistic Dan Price and his credit card processing company, Gravity Payments, to reap the "benefits" of over-paying staff members. Excerpt:

Gravity Payments financial manager Maisey McMaster didn’t pull any punches in her critique of her former boss:

“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn’t get much of a bump,” she said.

Another former employee, Grant Moran, echoed a similar sentiment:

“Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he said. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

Dan Price’s own brother Lucas, who owns 30 percent of the company, even filed a lawsuit, seeking millions of dollars in damages.

According to Dan Price, his experiment in wage distribution has made him ill-equipped to handle it:

“We don’t have a margin of error to pay those legal fees,” he said.

The company has also lost customers, who were displeased with the decision. Price finally relented, admitting that, perhaps, raising the minimum wage at his company to $70,000 wasn’t the best idea:

“There’s no perfect way to do this and no way to handle complex workplace issues that doesn’t have any downsides or trade-offs,” he said.

I skipped the part about his reducing his "salary" from $1 million to $70,000 because that is a silly red herring of a thing to say about a business owner. But these problems shouldn't surprise anyone who understands economics. When I first heard about this on Limbaugh's show my initial thought was "$70,000? Why not $80,000?? What a cheapskate."

If the world was perfect, these kinds of company problems would never happen. But if the world was perfect we wouldn't need credit card processing either, would we.

Shocker! Rich Guy Buys Magazine!

Carson Holloway, which is kind of an awesome name, writes about the irony of liberals lamenting the impending transformation of The New Republic from one type of thing to another type of thing as a result of the desires of the new ownership. Excerpt:

Why is this interesting?  The New Republic is a progressive journal, yet its editorial staff think of it in conservative terms.  The people who made up The New Republic are all progressives in relation to American politics, yet they are all conservatives in relation to the identity of The New Republic.  They say it is a public trust.  This means that it does not really belong to the people who happen to own and manage it for the time being.  Rather, it is bigger than they are, and they have an obligation to preserve its traditional identity and pass it on to the next generation.

That is a fine way to think about a long-established journal.  It is also a fine way to think about one’s country.  Yet the staff of The New Republic have not thought about their country that way for as long as I can remember.  They have instead been in favor of the transformation of America in both law and morals.  There is irony here.

Maybe the people at The New Republic have been implicitly committed to an enterprise that could not, in the end, be sustained. After all, if you dedicate your energies to convincing people that they are not bound by their country’s traditions, you should not be surprised if a new owner has no respect for the traditions of a mere magazine.

Liberals wants to keep their cake on display in a museum and eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and twice for dessert. If they write for a publication like TNR then they'll have you know that they are doing it for the noble good of humanity. But on payday, let me tell you, those people who think they work in the front office sure as hell better shell it out to them, man. Wait—where'd they get that money? Do you mean this magazine is run like a business concern? I thought it was done for the sake of goodness, truth and beauty! Did someone actually decide that the magazine's operations could be moved to another city? Like, in moving trucks?? Did anyone think of how that might displace people or, even worse, upset the harmony and balance of the universe?

Do these people think they can make those kind of decisions just because they call themselves "owners"? Can someone named Marty Peretz actually sell TNR? Can someone named Chris Hughes really buy TNR? They didn't build that! What about the guys in hardhats who built roads and bridges?

To me, all the hand-wringing and depression is akin to the uber-cool kids in college who were "into R.E.M. before they were popular." Some of those kids didn't want to admit that Get up or The one I love were actually pretty good songs. It seems like some of TNR's "mourners" are going to have a hard time admitting that their favorite magazine still has something to offer them. Of course, I might agree if it starts to be mainly about a bunch of gay stuff.

Scott Walker's win proves that success sells

I believe that Scott Walker's victory in Wisconsin is just as important as the Republicans winning the Senate. His model of fixing states can and will be copied by many Republican governors in years to come. This is because the model is successful, and success sells. Here's an excellent article about this from the Weekly Standard, and here are my favorite paragraphs about how Walker not only destroyed the democrats and their special interest groups but ate their lunch by taking away their base voters:

The key to Walker’s success was his performance among middle- and lower-income voters. Walker won those earning more than $100,000 by 20 points, just as Mitt Romney had in 2012. But he won voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 by 17 points; Romney only won them by 1. Those earning less than $50,000 Walker lost by 9 points—whereas Romney lost them by 25. As reporter Molly Ball pointed out in the Atlantic earlier this year about that last group, “whether Democrats win these voters by a 10-point or a 20-point margin tells you who won every national election for the past decade.”

Walker won over more of the middle- and working-class for one reason more than any other: His decision to balance the state’s budget by curtailing collective bargaining ultimately proved successful and popular. But it was far from clear that this would be the case when he took on the unions soon after he entered the governor’s mansion.

These people in Wisconsin that voted him would have voted democrat 50 years ago. Why? People used to think the Democrat Party stood for the little guy. And many times they did. But their policies used to work out fine because they didn't consider government intrusion to be their defining quality like they do now. Now that their policies like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, weaponized EPA, etc. actually hurt all Americans, they are losing their formerly staunch supporters.

I'd really like to see Walker run for President in 2016. There's no reason he couldn't get the Reagan democrat and practical independent voting bloc nationwide. And he'd get the conservative vote out handily.

As the man said, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser." Like what's-her-name.

New York Times starts crying

Oh, the agony! Such a deep, deep sadness has come over Jay Sullivan and David Schanzer that they are compelled to write this article: CANCEL THE MIDTERMS. Here's the key paragraph, in my opinion:

The realities of the modern election cycle are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.

How absurd. Could it be that the crippling of the agenda is possibly the fault of selected president? If the star receiver is selected to catch the ball on the final play and he drops it, should we cancel the football game? I'm pretty sure there was no similar article written for the Times in 2006.

Republican wonks like to talk about political capital, but I think the concept of the Divine Right is operative among liberals and democrats. The way most of us see it is that Obama has burnt all his capital, squandered his good will and used most of his trump cards. If you are one of the leftists at the New York Times you shout "Not fair! He gets a do over!" If you're a conservative you simply say "Well, time to punt, big guy."

This is what real journalism looks like

Jason Mattera shows journalists how it's done. J-Carp, are you watching this?



"The disgraced bureaucrat Lois Lerner."

Hat tip Director Blue.

Sometimes hatred turns to pity

Sometimes hatred turns to pity. And I think that's kind of a Christian thing. I think Tolkien wrote something about that in one or two of his books.

A reader emails us:

A belated response to the Damon Linker suck-up post.

I've long since given up regular visits to Rod's blog (for reasons we all are familiar with) so it's good to drop in here and see the capsulized chronicle of Rod's decline and fall—something I do have the time for.

I used to hate Linker, seeing him as an opportunistic snake in the grass, a 21st century Maria Monk.

Then I saw a video of his wife, and now I think I just pity him. To imagine him picking up small change here and there as a freelancer and online "editor" but mostly surviving as a house-husband to a shrill, strident, man-jawed associate professor is to imagine something I would view as a living hell. As he writhes in the flames of this torment, I can understand if his cries are blasphemous and his shrieks are libelous.

The video is proof that even Ph. D.'s can be brainwashed.

Here's some supplemental reading material which might shed some light on the subject.

For Me, Not For Thee

I am registered at The Daily Kos blog under the name of Gary. So I get all their blast emails about how we all need to support Obama, kiss Elizabeth Warren's butt, throw the Koch brothers in jail for something, etc. I do this because I think it's good to know what the enemy is yammering on about. Here's the latest one I got, with my emphasis in italics:

Gary, almost 90,000 people signed our pledge to boycott Hobby Lobby after an ultra-conservative Supreme Court ruled that for-profit corporations are not only people can have religion, but people who can impose that religion on their employees.

Your signature is missing. Please add your name: Boycott Hobby Lobby.

We can vote with our dollars to register our dissent.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers, Daily Kos

I would be the last person to disagree with the statement "We can vote with our dollars to register our dissent." But ironically that is what this entire case is about! The people who own Hobby Lobby are willing to pay for 16 different types of birth control but believe that 4 types are morally reprehensible and they don't want to be forced spend their dollars on those. They don't tell their employees not to go and pay for these themselves any more that they force them to attend mandatory Bible study meetings.

Minor point: the notion that the Supreme Court is ultra-conservative is almost as silly as Harry Reid's suggestion that Justice Clarence Thomas is white.

Rights Versus Entitlements

Megan McArdle explains what is going on underneath the Hobby Lobby furor. Here's her first home-run paragraph:

I think a few things are going on here. The first is that while the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts. That emotional disconnect makes it hard for the two sides to even debate; the emotional tenor quickly spirals into hysteria as one side says “Sacred!” and the other side says, essentially, “Seriously? Model trains?” That shows in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, where it seems to me that she takes a very narrow view of what role religious groups play in the lives of believers and society as a whole.

So that is part one, kind of a "don't hold your deeply-held beliefs any deeper than anyone who doesn't have any deeply-held beliefs" on the part of the secular left.

The second part of the explanation is the classic rights versus entitlements struggle. Conservatives want rights, liberals want entitlements. McArdle describes these as negative rights and positive rights.

All of us learned some version of “You have the right to your beliefs, but not to impose them on others” in civics class. It’s a classic negative right. And negative rights are easy to make reciprocal: You have a right to practice your religion without interference, and I have a right not to have your beliefs imposed on me.

This works very well in situations in which most of the other rights granted by society are negative rights, because negative rights don’t clash very often. Oh, sure, you’re going to get arguments about noise ordinances and other nuisance abatements, but unless your religious practices are extreme indeed, the odds that they will substantively violate someone else’s negative rights are pretty slim.

...

In this context, “Do what you want, as long as you don’t try to force me to do it, too” works very well, which is why this verbal formula has had such a long life. But when you introduce positive rights into the picture, this abruptly stops working. You have a negative right not to have your religious practice interfered with, and say your church forbids the purchase or use of certain forms of birth control. If I have a negative right not to have my purchase of birth control interfered with, we can reach a perhaps uneasy truce where you don’t buy it and I do. But if I have a positive right to have birth control purchased for me, then suddenly our rights are directly opposed: You have a right not to buy birth control, and I have a right to have it bought for me, by you.

I think this all is worth taking a lot of time to meditate on. For example, I'm a parent. In a sense it's true to say that my kids are entitled to "free food" since they can't earn it themselves. However, to me, it is much more true to say that my wife and I have the responsibility to feed them than it is to say they have the right to free food. So I have to figure out how to earn the money to do that and my wife has to figure out how to deliver meals to them three times a day, etc. Any entitlement they could claim is secondary and subsidiary to my actions in carrying out my duty.

The language of positive rights or entitlements devoid of any discussion of reciprocal responsibilities is what is found in many places on the left today. For example, people on unemployment are suppose to be looking for work and applying for so many jobs a week. But do they really? If you are out of work you can get low-cost or no-cost tech training in most states; I have a friend who did that. He hated being taxpayer-subsidized, but I'm afraid he's an exception. I've run into many more people who are sitting around waiting for the factory to re-open, content to subsist and blame whoever they dislike for their predicament.

I could go on with more, but you get it. Not only do our negative rights not clash with each other, they fit hand-in-glove with the personal responsibility that is part of the inherent dignity of the human person. On the other hand, so-called "positive rights" are the opposite of personal responsibility. Do you have a right to health care? Of course you do, but you have to pay for it. Do you have a right to food? Yes, and you can pay for it in the self-checkout line or the line with the cashier.

What if you walk into my wig store and hand me money for a wig and I don't want to sell it to you because you are a Zoroastrian? To bad for me; I have to sell you a wig. Otherwise I'm discriminating and trampling your rights. But you don't have a right to free wigs whether or not you are a Zoroastrian. However the entitlement mentality would state that if someone wants a wig but can't pay for it then they should have a right to it. The taxpayers should pony up to make sure there is "economic justice", yet another synonym for the entitlement mentality.

We need to continue the attack the left's constant assault on our personal liberty and the true nature of the rights we have as human beings which the state recognizes and protects. The government's job is not to enumerate ever more "positive rights" to squeeze out the true freedoms and the true nature of our personal responsibilities. We also need to teach our kids this, first by throwing propaganda like The Rainbow Fish into the garbage can, then by explaining the difference in how a Christian views our rights and responsibilities as citizens and how secular leftists like Obama and Ginsburg defines them. And of course by trying to fulfill our duties and respect the true rights of others.

Hobby Lobby Decision Makes Liberal Heads Explode

You have to look at this stuff. Here are my favorite freak-outs:

Because women still have to deal with vagina-hating coots like Alito and Scalia #yesallwomen.

At least he didn't write cooter-hating coots. That would just be confusing.

I hope Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Kennedy drown in a sea of birth-control pills. #hobbylobby

I didn't realize birth control pills were liquid. Well you learn something new every day, especially if you are a misogynistic mantard like me.

Hobby Lobby to mandate employees to eat the blood and flesh imaginary jews on Sundays. #whatwillittake

There it is! Wondered when we'd hit the anti-Catholic stuff, even though the Hobby Lobby people aren't Catholic. Guy Benson has a good article on Townhall about the reflexive attacks. Excerpt:

Leave it to Harry Reid to make the cheapest argument imaginable, which naturally fails to mention that a key related ruling against the overreaching mandate at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals was handed down by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an African American woman. It's time that our white male Senate Majority Leader stop telling black woman jurists how to do their jobs. And I, for one, "can't believe we live in a world" in which a privileged white woman [Elizabeth Warren] can shamelessly traffic in an entirely unsupportable "ethnicity" claim throughout her career, drop the pretense once she's reached the pinnacle of her profession, and still get elected to the United States Senate as an anti-privilege, populist liberal.

Obamacare Karma

H/T Dennis Prager. It's always a great story when the cheerleaders get their comeuppance. Dennis highlights this paragraph:

It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people — liberal, concerned with social justice — who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.

Obamacare is a bitch that bites the hand that feeds it.

Barack Obama and I are bad people

Barack Obama and I have a few things in common, I'm sure, and one of them that I know of is that we both send our kids to private schools. So according to Allison Benedikt, we are bad people. Michael Miller reports this here, and I really don't have the stomach to read or quote from Benedikt's article, so I'll excerpt his.

Ms. Benedikt’s “rationale”? [Yeah, I use the term loosely.] Incredibly selfish parents who send their kids to private schools are “ruining one of our nation’s most essential institutions in order to get what’s best for their own kids.”

Benedikt goes on to say that, in her way of thinking, “if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.”

Oh, good, then “every single child” would learn “every single thing the same way” and “every single “progressive” in America would be pleased as punch, huh, Allison? I don’t want to get too melodramatic here, but that sounds like it could’ve been a great selling point for Hitler’s Youth Camps.

Benedikt then gets downright hilarious:

“This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”

Yes, America, screw your kids and your grand kids – we’re all in this for the “common good” of future generations, right? Yeah, no.

My guess is that Allison Benedikt is against vouchers and tuition tax credits. Also probably the Catholic church.

It all comes down to the left wanted to "spread the misery around" under the guise of "spreading the wealth around." Simply ridiculous. In the article she mentions that she has a public school education. Really, I would never have guessed.

International Sustainability Kool-aid from Prince Charles

I promised a post on this intersection of crunchiness and royalty, so I'm delivering on that, albeit a little late. Excerpt from Prince Charles's remarks:

With so much growing concern about this, my International Sustainability Unit carried out a study into why sustainable food production systems struggle to make a profit, and how it is that intensively produced food costs less. The answer to that last question may seem obvious, but my ISU study reveals a less apparent reason. It looked at five case studies and discovered two things: firstly, that the system of farm subsidies is geared in such a way that it favors overwhelmingly those kinds of agricultural techniques that are responsible for the many problems I have just outlined; and secondly, that the cost of that damage is not factored into the price of food production. Consider, for example, what happens when pesticides get into the water supply. At the moment, the water has to be cleaned up at enormous cost to consumer water bills; the primary polluter is not charged. Or take the emissions from the manufacture and application of nitrogen fertilizer, which are potent greenhouse gases. They, too, are not costed at source into the equation.

I'm laughing about the entire thing, including the comments, and I really don't know where to begin. First of all: check out the first sentence of the blog post: "In the next issue of TAC, I’ll have an essay about the Prince of Wales as a Traditionalist." Gee, can't wait until that comes out.

Also: here's a royal guy who probably never gets his hands dirty talking about organic farming and how all those big, bad corporations are doing it ALL WRONG. Prince Charles states: "as things stand, doing the right thing is penalized." What is the right thing? The elephant in the middle of the room to me is that these food fascists want to make a lot of money doing their organic thing and they can't because their inability to crack into the market. This whole thing about environmental cost is a big bunch of blather. Industrial farms and slaughterhouses have to spend beaucoups bucks on pollution control, that all gets factored in to the final cost. And their product is still cheaper. And I know what I'm talking about here; federal inspectors live at large meat-packing plants.

Another reason I'm laughing at the whole conversation involving Prince Charles and food is that I recall a really funny segment of Michael Savage that I heard several years ago when he used to be on WHK. Savage was going off on one of his many food tangents (Savage was a published nutritionist before he started doing whatever it is he does on the radio.) The topic was about how Prince Charles would sit downstairs, constipated with expensive French cheese, while his wife, Princess Diana, would bang her lovers upstairs. Then he riffed on this whole tragic speculation until a conspiracy nut called stating that Diana's murder was somehow related to Prince Charles's desire to join the Eastern Orthodox Church. I just shook my head and shorted at the time, but I should have known that this all was somehow related to crunchy conservatism.

Comment away, Pikkumatti.

Rep versus Rev

Donohue asks the question "What if Rep. Weiner were Rev. Weiner?" Excerpts:

Priests who engage in lewd conversations with teenagers are suspended from ministry for committing a "boundary violation," and are charged with sexual abuse. But Rep. Anthony Weiner can send pornographic images of himself to young girls and he is free as a bird. Indeed, the majority of New Yorkers say he should not resign.

Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle says Weiner's "biggest sin may not have been sexual"—it was "lying." Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine says that "Lying is unforgivable," but has no comment on his sexual offenses. Joan Walsh of Salon confesses that "The lying is what disturbs me." S.E. Cupp's article in the New York Daily News is flagged, "The disgraced congressman should resign, but immorality has nothing to do with it." Similarly, Leslie Savan of the Nation wonders, "How can you be so stupid?"

...

In other words, if the guilty party were Rev. Weiner, he would be sanctioned by the Catholic Church's "zero tolerance" policy. But because he is Rep. Weiner, there are no penalties. As usual, it's not the offense that matters—it's the status of the offender.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... William Donohue is always going on like this. Only... he's absolutely right. We'll call the policy in effect for House and Senate Democrats the "infinite-tolerance policy", infinity being the opposite of zero.

The only insight I have on the Weiner apology is that the line "In addition, over the past few years, I have engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, email and occasionally on the phone with women I had met online," is meant to alert all the cool people that he can do better than Gennette Cordova.

Sore Losers

Sore losers are never attractive, never sensible and never properly place the blame. Jennifer Rubin reminds us that this hold true in politics as well. Excerpt:

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate — what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally? We had a somewhat artificial debate between traditionalists and reformers. If anything, the anger was directly (unfairly, in my mind) against George W. Bush (whose tax cuts even many Democrats now want to extend, and whose strategy in Iraq allowed Obama to withdrawal troops in victory), and to the hapless McCain campaign (which spent the final days of the campaign ragging on its VP nominee).

This is yet another confirmation that the right and left look at America – and Americans – quite differently. The leftists view their countrymen as in dire need of supervision — by elites like them, of course. Americans are not competent to make decisions on their own, and left to their own devices, will run amok. Wall Streeters are greedy, New Yorkers are xenophobes, and the rest of us are Bible- and gun-huggers. And here we go again — acting out and acting up. Obama, the poor dear, just can’t talk sense to us.

This is entirely true in my experience. Post 2008 election discussions and arguments in which I participated were themed around candidates and strategies. Questions posed: Did Sarah Palin hurt the ticket? Would Romney have fared better? Should McCain have gone after the Rev. Wright stuff? My crazier friends suggested that McCain could have won if he'd brought up the birth certificate issue, but even they didn't blame the voters.

It would be wonderful if this were the year we finally buried the "blame the angry voters" meme altogether, however, I'm too realistic to hold my breath until I hear shoveling. But think about this: when liberals blame voter "fear and anger" like President Obama did in his Parma speech ("...the easiest thing for the other side to do is to ride this fear and anger all the way to Election Day....") they are really accusing independent and swing voters of possessing the anger, not right-wingers. We could wake up to find that we inherited a half million dollars, that our son just won a full scholarship to our favorite college and that we landed a long sought after promotion―and we'd still go vote Republican and conservative even if there were not a cloud in the sky and the home team was winning 10-0. We are not swayed one bit by emotion or lack thereof. It's the swing voters to whom these remarks refer; indeed, they are the intended targets of an attempted shaming. The left will chose this tactic over admitting that their policies are unpopular or that they are out-of-touch with the middle or that their message is outmoded, weak and ineffective.

I don't think it's going to work this year. That hope and change doesn't float anymore.

Ich Liebe Lieberman!

Obviously this is yesterday's news, but I wanted to link to it for my oh! so clever title.

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill.

Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats and is positioning himself as a fiscal hawk on the issue, said he opposes any health care bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out of the program, as Reid has said the Senate bill will.

"We're trying to do too much at once," Lieberman said. "To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now."

It's funny reading the libs on this. One site I went to had enraged commenters saying they were going to hit him with a two-by-four and throttle him. One person called him a whore. I was going going to point out that the politically-correct word is "sex-worker", but didn't have the heart.