"What conservatives say is that we will protect you against idealism, we will protect you against the liberal faith that government can make something straight from the crooked timber of human nature."
-George Will on "The Colbert Report"
Stephen Colbert: "What's the difference between conservatives and liberals?"
George Will: "It's the difference between truth and confusion, basically..."
"Duty is not collective; it is personal."
Months ago, I pontificated on the prevalent American ideology of the last thirty years...infantilism. George Will coined the phrase back in the mid-1970s, describing the basic political position of the vast majority of Americans as being intensely desirous of a full, heaping, frequently replenished platter of government services without the commensurate willingness to pay for those services in the form of higher taxes...willing the ends while abhorring the means...an ideology that any six year old could comprehend and embrace...
Today's Field Poll of California's registered voters reveals, unshockingly, that infantilism is alive and well in The Golden State...67% of California's voters wanted the budget deficit chasm closed with spending cuts and not tax increases, and 70% favored a two-thirds legislative majority to raise taxes (thereby rendering tax increases very nearly impossible to enact).
However, those same voters, when polled, opposed by the same margins, cuts in the following areas of the state budget...
Water storage and supply facilities (63% opposed cuts here)
Mental health programs (66% opposed cuts here)
Higher education, including public universities, colleges, and community colleges (67% against)
Child care programs (66% opposed cuts here)
Health care programs for low-income Californians and the disabled (72% against cuts here)
Public schools (73% opposed cuts here)
Law enforcement and police (74% opposed cuts here)
The only area where a clear majority of polled voters favored making cuts was state prisons. While undoubtedly expensive, the prison system is at most 10% of the overall state budget.
Californians remain, like most of their countrymen, wildly unwilling to pay for all of the government services that they clamor for...and therein lies the great dilemma of modern governance in the greatest democracy in the world.
"Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong."
"I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say."
"Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you."
"Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped."
-Calvin Coolidge
Obama should heed the first quote, Biden the second, I personally struggle with the third, and the whole country would benefit from taking the fourth to heart...
I've acquired an admiration for our thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, the poster boy for limited government and parsimonious behavior...I'm hereby instituting a daily tribute to that paragon of "masterful inactivity" in The White House...here is the first installment of Coolidgeisms...maxims and morsels of insight from the president who napped two to three hours a day...
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb; Education will not; The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
-Calvin Coolidge
It pains me to say this, but I'm not sure that I can continue to support Jon Stewart's career any further...The other night on "The Daily Show" he said that Harry Truman was a war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
I've tried to square it with a somewhat analogous situation...Spike Lee periodically blasphemes Larry Bird, but he frequently makes good movies ("Inside Man"), so I'll cut him a modest amount of slack...but lumping Truman in with Hermann Goering is a different order of magnitude...
"Since time immemorial, the policy rap on the Democratic Party has been that their solutions amount to stuffing cannons with money and aiming them at amorphous, and occasionally invented, social ills. Since Obama entered the White House in January, the cannonades have been nearly unending. The government has spent money at astonishing rates with little reassurance that the efforts will pay off."
-Mark Hemingway, today's National Review
The basketball equivalent of The Western Front in 1916...sluggish, ugly, grim...
My dad, retired engineer turned swimming instructor, runs lifeguarding classes for 15-17 year old would-be lifeguards.
At the end of training for lifeguardianship, the students are asked to address an envelope to themselves so that their lifeguard certification can be mailed to them.
My dad reports that the vast majority of these kids cannot address an envelope to themselves...Don't know where to write what on the envelope, which side of the envelope, etc.
Being charitable, he ascribes this illiteracy to the advent of the Internet...I, on the other hand, see Revelations fulfilled...
Canned goods and bottled water people...stock up now...
The most shameless act of opportunism this year...The senior senator from the Keystone State has demonstrated that his overriding ideology is Re-Election Uber Alles...
Yes, that was Dubya that Brookhiser was so accurately depicting...
Richard Brookhiser on the 43rd president...not only right on the money, but quite possibly channeling the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald...
"He spoke badly out of confidence and indifference, believing that whatever he said was said well enough...when he passed through the crowd shaking hands he moved like a lightweight heading up to the ring for an easy bout, perhaps because it was fixed."
-Richard Brookhiser
"The Establishment--the academic and policy elite, Wall Street, famous sexy people--are more invested in Obama than they've been in any president in decades. If Obama fails, a whole system will go down with him."
-Reihan Salam
"What makes it hard at the moment to write sympathetically of Barack Obama is the loud chorus of approbation arising from his supporters in journalism as they mark the hundred days. Drudge calls it the "Best President Ever" campaign. It is marked by an abandonment of critical thinking among otherwise thoughtful men and women who comprise, roughly speaking, the grown-ups of journalism, the old hands of the MSM who have been through many presidents and should know better. They are insisting too much. If they were utterly confident, they wouldn't be..."
-Peggy Noonan
Any remaining doubt has been removed...From today's Washington Post...
"The networks have given President Obama more coverage than George W.Bush and Bill Clinton combined in their first months--and more positive assessments to boot.
In a study to be released today, the Center for Media and Public Affairs and Chapman University found the nightly newscasts devoting nearly 28 hours to Obama's presidency in the first 50 days. (Bush, by contrast, got nearly eight hours.) Fifty-eight percent of the evaluations of Obama were positive on the ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasts, compared with 33 percent positive in the comparable period of Bush's tenure and 44 percent positive for Clinton...in the New York Times...73 percent of the assessments in front-page pieces were positive."
-Howard Kurtz
The G.O.P. would like to depict itself as the party of fiscal rectitude. However, after the last eight years of budgetary incontinence, it is manifestly NOT a credible alternative to the impending deluge of spending and programmatic expansion from Obamanon and the Dems.
The perpetual promise of painless tax cuts is not enough. It is not sensible or responsible. In short, the G.O.P. needs to get back to "No."
As George Will once said, "conservatism can be defined in eight words or less...No. Stop. Cut it out. Less of that."
Or as I would put it more crudely...I don't want to pay for your BS...
George F. Will is one of my heroes, and this week's Newsweek features an especially acerbic gem of analysis of Obamanon's First Hundred Days...Here are some of the highlights...
"It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man."
-Calvin Coolidge
