Creative Self-destruction

That's my term for what Oswald Sobrino calls the "silver lining" of people being their own worst enemy. He gives some examples of the evidence:

1. The bartender who can't help aggressively intruding on your private conversation;
2. The rude manners that get someone no slack or sympathy from a restaurant server;
3. The insecure who bore you with their clay pillars of self-esteem to the point that you don't want to hear any more about their school, their exercise regimen, their ancestry, or their possessions and investments;
4. The sexually promiscuous who expect to be accorded the honor of a virtuous Roman matron or a biblical Joseph;
5. The patronizing Christian who consistently mimics a Pharisee;
6. The pedant who expects people to want to interact with him;
7. The panhandler who thinks bullying will get him a donation.

Boom.

It seems to me as though the good Mr. Sobrino may have run into all these profiles recently within a short period of time and had some time to reflect on them.

I guess I would just add as a corollary to number three that some people talk about all their problems which are all the fault of others. That's probably a sign of insecurity also.

"Television is furniture"

I saw that quote on a T-shirt once.



I agree with his point. The stupidest creative act is a superior use of time than passive consumption. This axiom can be used to guide the use of time in a number of ways. For example, it explains why it's good to have your kids help set the table or in some other way help with preparing dinner. I suppose it might be some justification for Est Quod Est, although maybe we should take a vote.

Nerd GOP Wonks

Funny yet thoughtful article on "Republinerds". Starts out as a riff on the "One Tough Nerd" Superbowl ad, which I think is pretty effective.

Here's an excerpt from the end of the piece.

So are the nerds taking over the GOP?

I posed that question to a friend of mine, Benjamin Nugent. He wrote the book on nerds, really, "American Nerd: The Story of My People."

"It's funny that you should spring this on me. I live in Iowa City now. And Iowa City has this diner where I write every morning, where basically every politician in the country comes to," Nugent told me. "I was minding my own business and suddenly these Republicans come in and start setting up posters and they hand me the little postcard about Branstad. And it's a muskrat with glasses. The youngest person to ever become governor. He is the nerdiest!"

That's former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. He wants to be governor again. Classic over-achiever.

"The entire tone of the event could not be more different from Sarah Palin-land or Mike Huckabee-land. Branstad had these huge glasses and looked like he got the shit kicked out of him in college," Nugent recounted. "And he makes a speech. It is the nerdiest speech. No mention of 9/11. No mention of military anything. No Palin-esque Fox News language. It was entirely jobs, balancing the budget, how responsible I am. And as president of Des Moines University, how effective I was.

"And the GOP hardliners were eating this up," Nugent added. "It made me think that my people have their moment in the GOP."

Personally I'll vote for any nerd over Mike Huckabee.

Peter Wehner Examines and Refutes Evan Bayh's Excuses

A much needed corrective to Bayh's lame emanations about partisanship, ideology, and what comprises the "people's business". I liked the whole thing; several excerpts follow:

Actually, the people's business is getting done. In this case, "the people's business" was to stop ObamaCare, which the public opposes in significant numbers (the spread between those who oppose ObamaCare and those who support it is 15-20 percentage points). Most Americans think the Democratic health care plans are badly flawed and a majority of them want Congress to begin over again.

The dominant narrative manifests a particular cast of mind, one that equates "the people's business" with passing legislation that increases the size, cost, and reach of government. In fact, sometimes the people's business involves stopping bad ideas from becoming law.

To use an analogy, heavy machinery is safer when equipped with brakes.

It's worth recalling that the Founders set up a system of government with what James Madison called the "auxiliary precautions" of American government -- meaning the separation of powers, bicameralism, and other checks and balances. Madison, who was shipped what he called a "literary cargo" of books on history and politics by Thomas Jefferson, rigorously studied the historical record of past governments. Out of that study Madison and his colleagues decided to put the emphasis on braking mechanisms, which they thought would help preserve liberty by limiting the power of government.

Then Wehner takes on an issue near and dear to my heart: the liberal's tendency to engage in word-twisting. "[I]deology can also be another word for convictions -- and one person's 'ideologue' is another person's principled politician." That sentence sums it up better than I ever could have. He takes on the "partisanship" canard in the same way, clarifying that it's not really the issue for the critics.

Many of the greatest political figures in American history -- whether we're talking about Reagan or Roosevelt, Lincoln or King, Jefferson or Hamilton -- are recognized for substance rather than process, for their commitment to American ideals rather than bipartisanship, for what they did rather than the manner in which they did it.

Yes, more substance, please. Wehner's conclusion:

It's worth recalling that in 2005 George W. Bush made a big push to reform Social Security. I thought then, and think now, that his plan was wise and necessary. But it was also undeniably unpopular, and the effort failed. Its failure did not trigger the kind of Camus-like despair we are now seeing. No one in the commentariat argued that America was, in Joe Klein's phrase, a "nation of dodos" or that Social Security's failure could be laid at James Madison's feet.

We are not facing a governing crisis today. What we are seeing is an emerging crisis for modern liberalism. And the reason is fairly straightforward: the public, having been exposed to a liberal governing agenda for the last year, is repudiating it. Liberals cannot seem to accept that, so they are lashing out at everything else. It is unwarranted and somewhat childish; and it will only accelerate The Fall.

Italics mine. Because I think it worthy to note who are the grownups in this country and who are the perpetual whiners. It's great to learn that although James Madison's "auxillary precautions" might be a little squeaky when applied at high speed, they still grab.

[Here's a related Wehner piece from a week ago to which he alludes in passing.]

Photographic Analysis Reveals Real Number of Protesters at the 9/12 March

Here's a link to the source of this report. The short answer that Zac Moilanen's research supports is that there were about 1.8 million people at the 9/12 March on Washington, DC.

The Real Number of Protesters - Zac Moilanen

A Completely Different Angle

In his WAPO piece "Blaming deregulation", Sebastian Mallaby delivers an analysis of the origins of the credit crisis from a demand-side point of view.

The real roots of the crisis lie in a flawed response to China. Starting in the 1990s, the flood of cheap products from China kept global inflation low, allowing central banks to operate relatively loose monetary policies. But the flip side of China's export surplus was that China had a capital surplus, too. Chinese savings sloshed into asset markets 'round the world, driving up the price of everything from Florida condos to Latin American stocks.

Interesting. Of course, I've noted time and again that Americans always tend to focus on one side of shady transactions (i.e., a transaction they don't like) usually to deaf ears.

Reminds me of Issue 5, which I just voted "no" on. Oh, yeah, by the way I just "early" voted.

I was thinking of putting up a post called "Regulation is the new Elitism" which would focus on the words themselves. The line I would be reacting against is "Oh, conservatives don't like elitism, but what about elite surgeons and soldiers?", ignoring the fact that there are multiple forms of elitism. Likewise, now we see the pinning of the anti-regulation badge with the simplistic false syllogism "Regulation would have stopped crisis, conservatives say 'regulation bad', therefore conservatives caused crisis." Again, this ignores the different kinds of regulations which were targeted and who targeted them.