National Review vs. Trump

1. I get it. Really, I do.
As a conservative, the idea that Trump could be the GOP nominee is terrible. Hell, as a human being, I find this idea repugnant. But honestly, the question for me is “When the media and the Left (BIRM) have taken their best shots at Mr. Hell Toupee, and he and his followers (I’d say supporters, but in truth, I’m not seeing much to differentiate them from Obama followers, and we all know why we use that word to describe them) have just laughed them off and doubled down, to great applause, what does National Review believe that this will accomplish?” At best, this is an exercise in preaching to the choir; and at worst, it makes as much impact as a fart in a hurricane.

2. Principles matter.
People like me are glad to see that some people who identify as Republicans are now on board with this idea have decided to join the rest of us. Perhaps if a few more self-identified Republicans had been as vocal on this point when those elected in 2008 and 2010 declined to fight the fights that matter, the fights we elected them to fight, regardless of their assessments of success in doing so, then we wouldn’t be facing the apparent possibility of a Trump candidacy, let alone the horror of a Trump nomination. Instead, usual suspects continued to support the Marquis of Queensberry Rules and the Imperial Rules of Engagement, and rendered all their talk hollow and cheap to a frustrated electorate. So when the party and its institutions point out that Trump’s prior statements and actions don’t square with his current ones, they fail to recognize that they are the pot calling the kettle black for most Americans, and most bitterly to those who until this latest election season, trusted them.

3. Endorsements of Trump from the likes of Bob Dole and Trent Lott don’t help. Seriously, the next party flunky who jabbers about the “unacceptability” of someone with principles, who has walked the walk, and demonstrated an understanding of the Trumanism “If you want a friend in D.C., buy a dog.” while extolling Trump’s “electability” should be given his or her walking papers. The mere utterance of the word by someone with Republican credentials is taken as confirmation that the label matters more to them than the content, that the win matters more than policy, and that is why “electability” has given us sterling candidates, like Romney, McCain, and Dole, whose great success in Presidential elections gives credence to this concept and the priority that the party put on it.

4. Condescension doesn’t work.

You can say that people don’t know the issues and don’t know what they are doing, and in many cases, you’d be right. But are those people going to listen to anything you say after that? Probably not.

Progressive philosophy and dogged determination have done much to dumb our neighbors down. There is no immediate miracle to reverse this. But what you can do is engage individuals and respectfully challenge their assumptions and conclusions, and when you win them with patience and a dogged determination all your own, they will do the same.

5. We are in a scary place right now…
…and the impossible choice between and inveterate liar with no regard for the lives of people who selflessly dedicate their lives for this country, self-proclaimed socialist who promises to make everything “free”, including things government has no business providing to anyone, while at the same time acknowledging that those “free” things have an enormous cost on one side, and on the other, an egotistical, brash narcissist who, like the man he seeks to succeed, also has no understanding of the limitations imposed on the Executive branch of government, by design, is frightening. Especially when this man’s exaggerated sense of self-worth impairs his ability to thoughtfully reflect on the actions of others and respond in a manner which is best for the country, rather in a fashion that would best assuage his outsized ego.

Anger, righteous anger, and a willingness that no mainstream Republican demonstrated to actually talk about issues unfiltered by the restrictions of euphemism and fear of offending anyone brought us to this point. We can talk all day long about how anger doesn’t win elections, but 2008 and 2010 are proof that this is wrong. Because of this, and the excuses and failure yielded by the trust placed in the party after the last two elections, the talk about anger not working will fall on deaf ears, closed by the empty past rhetoric of “electability” and “compromise” from suits festooned with the party label.

Until the party publicly declares ownership of this disaster, it won’t regain any credibility with anyone. And the longer we go on without this admission of responsibility, the more likely it is that we really will have to hold our noses and choose the least onerous choice on a menu of excrement, and if that happens, we will remember the people most responsible for this for a long, long, long time.

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“UNEXPECTEDLY”

When I was a young man, about a week or so out from high school graduation, my friends and I piled in a Suburban and went up north to Hammond Bay for a few days of sailing and fishing.  On the second day, we all woke up, and everyone was eager to get on the boat and do some sailing.  Except me.  I could smell rain, and I suggested that we wait.  After some grumbling back and forth, we agreed to go over to the port, and hang out there for a while.  I grabbed my fishing pole and went to the end of the pier.  I sat there, casting my line out, and slowly reeling it in, while watching the sky along the coastline to the north.

After about ten minutes, one of my friends sat down next to me and was doing the same.  We sat there, casting, reeling, and looking north, while listening to the sound of the reels and the rising waves.  Twenty minutes later, we could see a wall of rain about a mile off to the north.  The wind picked up, and a small power boat came into the middle of the harbor, dropped anchor, and zipped everything up.  “It’s raining pretty hard up there.” my friend observed.  “Yup.” was my only reply.  The casting and reeling continued for another twenty minutes.  The wind was blowing harder, the temperature had dropped, and the wall of rain was only a half mile or so away.   My friend looked up and said “It’s raining pretty hard up there.”  I looked up, and said “Yup.”, and continued to cast and reel.   Ten minutes passed.   Two more boats came in, and tied up, their passengers rushing off to their cars waiting in the parking lot.  The wall of rain was now less than a quarter mile away.  My friend stopped reeling, and stared at the rain as he said “It’s raining pretty hard up there.”  I stopped, and shivered in the wind as I regarded the rapidly approaching wall of rain.  “Yup.” was my only reply.

Three minutes later, a raindrop the size of a half-dollar slammed into my forehead, followed by another.  And another.  We got up and ran as hard as we could for the Suburban, but in the minute or so it took us to get there, we were drenched.

Why am I telling you this story?  Because our government is doing the same thing.

Just as it was utterly predictable that we would get wet if we didn’t react to the obvious threat, our government refused to react to the obvious threat of a terrible disease, and suspend air travel from the affected area in west Africa, and the inevitable happened.  It flew in with a passenger from the affected area.  And while that passenger has since passed, he didn’t do so without infecting Americans with a disease that has a 70% mortality rate, according to the new data from the World Health Organization.

The government, facing the obvious question, has decided that rather than stopping the flights now, it is imperative to keep these flights going, because stopping them will make us less safe from the virus.  This causes anyone with three brain cells and the knowledge that England and France (FRANCE!!!) believe otherwise to stifle a collective “That’s quite possibly the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard.” , but actually, this makes a perverse sort of sense when you consider that this excuse originates in the same town where not spending more on an agency or program than we spent last year is somehow a “cut”.

The fact is that a travel ban from West Africa would lead to questions about other immigration…and those questions would lead to questions about Enterovirus 68, which has killed several American children, and the emergence of which corresponds to the resettlement of all the “children” from south of border. (Unexpectedly!) and then people would be questioning an ideological touchstone of this Administration for reasons that could not logically be defined as “racist”.  And they can’t have that.  The illusion of the naked emperor’s resplendent garb is simply too precious, especially to the emperor himself.  Protecting the first failure, which ignores the wisdom of previous generations who saw the wisdom in health screenings as a condition of entry into this country, means committing more errors, which will, in turn, cost more American lives.

To combat this obvious failure, which would even cause Helen Keller to say “What the hell…?”, the meme has been floated that being  concerned about this silly, given that tobacco, alcohol, and obesity kill tens of thousands more in this country annually, so being concerned this government’s stubborn insistence to continue to allow people from affected areas to travel to this country and potentially infect Americans with a dread disease with a 71% mortality rate that heretofore was unseen among our population is somehow foolish “panicking”.  “Panic” is of course, hyperbole.   Panic is afoot in this nation today, but it is found in the offices of Democratic incumbents seeking re-election to the United States Senate, not among the average American who realizes that common sense and logic are being deliberately suppressed in favor of purely political considerations that have already needlessly cost the lives of Americans, and place countless others at risk

It isn’t panic that most Americans feel about this, it is ANGER.  Justifiable, controlled, and focused ANGER.

And when the response is to draw comparisons to other causes of death, such as from alcohol, tobacco, and obesity, they have a right to be even angrier, as the lyric “One of these things is different from the other/One of these things is different from the rest.” plays loudly in the radio of their minds.  The fact is that we are all dying, a  little bit each day, and for most Americans, these causes are also incremental.  They kill, but because they are patient, and slow, they feel like they are contributing factors, and not direct causes.  And more importantly, they are the result of choices WE make, not choices that our government refuses to make.   That is the difference, and it is an even greater irritant when we consider the steps that government takes to “protect” us from these incremental harms.  Minimum ages in order purchase the products.  Taxes to discourage purchase.  PSAs.  Fitness and nutrition programs.  Millions and millions of dollars spent annually to “protect” us from cutting off the years we would otherwise spend in wheelchairs, warehoused in a “home” somewhere, staring off into space, exhausting our resources, and more commonly, the taxpayers’ money, and yet this same government, afraid to threaten a source of new votes purchased with our money refuses to take common sense measures to reduce the number of Americans exposed to and infected with a disease that will cause fever, liquefied internal organs, seizures, and death while bleeding out of every orifice, all in a span of days.  That kind of dual-mindedness would hopelessly confuse Bob Arctor.

And when the government decides to do “something”, it is to appoint a political hack to “take the point” (and the blame) for an executive who’d rather be golfing, until it’s time to blame someone for the inevitable failures.

We have a right to be angry.  And they are the ones who should be panicking.

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Saturday Morning Happy Thoughts

“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.”—Jim Hightower

“To see the right and not to do it is cowardice.”–Confucius

So if impeachment simply isn’t an option, because those in Congress are afraid of losing their jobs because they might actually DO their jobs, then why bother with the ongoing investigations of the weaponizing of the IRS, of Benghazi, and of Fast and Furious? Seriously. If you’re willing to let an Executive usurp your power with his pen and his phone without lawful and rightful consequence provided for in the Constitution, then why pretend that anything else done by government on his behalf (and likely at his behest) is of any consequence?

And if we have so many of our “countrymen” willing to clap and cheer an Executive all but DARING Congress to publicly wallow in it’s impotence in the face of this brazen flouting of our most basic law, do we really have a common ground with those who willingly trade their sovereignty and lawful authority for a despot bearing “gifts” paid for by others?

Seriously, if Congress is willing to neuter itself in order to avoid a confrontation over whether we are going to be a nation of laws or a nation of [small, petty, vindictive] “men”, then the coup is complete, and every day that passes in which no one in authority is willing to publicly pronounce this brings us closer to the purge which must inevitably follow. And if we can expect no courage now from the ones we have elected to be our voices, we have no right to expect any from our neighbors on that black day.

One can only hope that the deepest, darkest, hottest reaches of Hell are reserved for those who could have taken a stand, and instead decided that they only needed to be courageous as soon as we elected enough others like them, for the future of freedom itself rested upon their slight shoulders, and either by a lack of character, or just weak ones, they shrugged.

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Because Being On One List Isn’t Enough…

I’m ashamed to admit that I was amused for a bit.  When the Hobby Lobby decision was first handed down, the deluge of butthurt and really bad analysis from the Left was entertaining.  It offered a glimpse into a mindset that has been wrongly conditioned to think that religion was something confined to various buildings dotting the landscape of the country for a few hours a week…a diversion for people not smart enough to take advantage of an opportunity to sleep in, rather than a deeply held conviction that guides the actions of those who believe, and that as such, will be expressed in the actions taken by the holders of those beliefs, including what they do, and what government may try to force them to do, with their own property.

But the howls continued.  The vitriol continued.  And expressions of hatred were aired without restraint or condemnation, once again giving lie to the Left’s own sermonizing about civility and tolerance.

As a student of history, I wasn’t disturbed by the Hobby Lobby ruling, because it brought about the correct result.  I was disturbed by the fact that it wasn’t a unanimous ruling, which in and of itself shows just how far we have strayed from first principles.  And as the wailing and gnashing of teeth continued to grow into a low roar, fueled by ignorance and indigence that someone should be allowed to dissent and not participate in the high holy sacrament of killing unborn children, I saw yet more confirmation of a clash of beliefs being perpetrated by a creed that is still inexplicably permitted to masquerade as value neutral, when it is nothing of the sort.  Secularism as practiced today has death at its heart, and as such it can be nothing but a cancer that is embraced and nurtured by too many in society until the tumor in our collective head has grown so large that it threatens the very nature of who we are as a people.  Our society still utters the expressions of freedom, but does so in contradiction to the convictions that inform our actions.  These soulless supplications are offered both as ruse, and rebuke, intended to convince the less vigilant among us that there is no cause for alarm, and to portray the watchmen as hysterical and ridiculous.  And in this climate, usurpations and entitlements are magically and mystically transmogrified into “rights”,while real rights, which government is obligated to protect and defend, are consigned to wither and fade in the shadow of the “rights” “given” (and protected by nothing other than) by the artifice and caprice of government, which is more interested in redistributing private property and the bounty earned by it, than in defending it.

A healthy society is one that understands that morality is a cultural necessity.  No society has long lasted when every man has done right in his own eyes, without a common frame of reference to which everyone can refer.  Government works best when it accepts and codifies those guard rails which delineate the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not.  It is an unhealthy society which rejects what has been shown to have value, and provide a framework that allows society to grow and thrive, in favor of a government that assumes the mantle of moral authority based on what it determines is true, is right, and is acceptable, because there is no anchor for any of these determinations other than the desires of 50% +1.  Some may say that this sickness is a product of the 20th Century.  I’ve come to understand that the body politic has been infected with this particular hubris from much longer, but I do think that it accelerated, at an exponential rate, in the 20th Century.

The standing complaint of human degeneracy remains against us.  Causes have been operating—and of late years with fearful rapidity and strength—to produce a state of moral obliquity and practical atheism among us, appalling in magnitude and of alarming consequence.  It has become of late quite customary to sneer at the Puritanism of our fathers, and to speak with contempt of the severity of their manners and the bigotry of their faith.  This impious treatment, by the present corrupters of society, of a generation of men whose lofty principles and illustrious virtues they seem utterly unable to comprehend, is well adapted to not only arouse the deepest indignation, but to excite the most lively concern.  There are two quarters from which these evil influences chiefly proceed.  A class of men without conscience, and reckless of all moral restraint, have gained ascendancy in the public favor, and assume from their prominent position to mould and direct the public sentiment of the nation.  Their general influence upon the public morals has been like the wind of the desert, –poisonous, withering, and destructive.  Another and very large class of men moving in the lower walks of life form a significant element of our American population, whose hard and vicious instincts , gratified without compunction and paraded everywhere in the most offensive manner, would seem to render them well-nigh incapable of reformation.  Apparently insensible to all the nobler sentiments of public morality and virtue, and ever ready to perform their congenial part in the general demoralization the demand that all the higher classes shall pander to their depraved appetites, as the price of their patronage and support.  In this reciprocal play of the baser passions the common principles of morality are daily sacrificed, and the strong and the weak join hands in carrying down the nation to the very verge of ruin.  No man can observe the conditions of society in our country, and the obvious impulses of human conduct, without feeling that the perils against which the fathers warned us, and which have so faithfully and constantly pointed out ministers of religion, have, not withstanding, increased at a fearful rate, without seeing the most alarming departures from the standard of individual rectitude and social integrity have occurred among us within the century that is past.
—Byron Sunderland, Washington D.C., April 14, 1863.

And now we have come to a point where a vocal segment of society have decided that a recognition that someone else’s right to not participate in the use of a substance or device that they personally find repugnant to their faith should be subordinate to government’s “ability” to make them pay for another’s choice to use such substance or device.  We have come to that point where a recognition of the right of conscience is considered to be a “denial of access” and abridgement of the recipient’s “right to choose” with their benefactors money.  And those who protest loudest because they see in this recognition a threat to a river of blood money so long and casually extorted from the taxpayer feel absolutely no guilt in their perversion of terms and concepts in their efforts to gin up outrage against the affirmation of the obvious, which is still obviously stated, and has remained such in a more than a century’s worth of a campaign of deception and subversion by their own design, because honesty in their intentions never would have obtained the support they otherwise enjoyed.

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Lessons I Learned From the Obama Administration

1.  Getting up early and being informed is for suckers.
The nice thing about being President is that your daily calendar is published for God and the whole world to see.  The bad part is that everyone can see that the current occupant of the West Wing doesn’t do that much.  Maybe everything George W. Bush’s fault six years into the new administration because he actually started his day before 10 am, and actually attended security briefings.

2.  At no time was anyone in the Obama Administration actually aware of what the Obama Administration was actually doing.
It doesn’t matter what the issue is.  Gun running to narco-terrorists south of the border?  Nope, they knew Nussink! One-size-fits-none “health care” in the VA being rationed to the point of death? Thank you television news for bringing it to our attention.  IRS targeting of groups with opposing political affiliation? The Devil you say! (These aren’t the emails leading to the White House that you’re looking for) An ambassador and his defenders attacked and a President MIA while those brave Americans died calling for help?  Damn that film maker for posting a movie that the jhadis probably didn’t have any means to watch anyway!  We took over a car maker in bankruptcy, but at no time were we aware of any mammoth manufacturing defect for which we fined the car company a record fine for attempting to cover up, while we were the ones owning the company.

3.  Every situation and scenario can be adequately addressed with a furrowed brow and a stern condemnation.
No matter the crisis, no matter the problem, no matter the failure of the person who asked us for the job twice, the answer is the same.  Words of outrage, a furrowed brow, an empty gesture.  I’d pay real money to hear someone, anyone in the White House Presstitute Corpse ask Spokesclown Jay Carney why the empty suit who keeps saying “I will not rest until…” has to take so many vacations and starts his day so close to Noon every day.  What would be better is if that is followed by another member of the Presstitute Corpse following up by channeling Inego Montoya by saying “He keeps saying “I will not rest until…”, but I don’t think that phrase means what he thinks it means.  I don’t see bags under his eyes, and they don’t appear to be bloodshot, either.”

4.  If a problem isn’t solved by throwing money at it, then the only answer is to throw more money at it.
The pResident who campaigned on fixing the problems with the VA made sure that more money got put into the VA, and in the face of some questions from the Presstitute Corpse on the continuing failure of the VA, his spokesidiots are quick to point out that he’s made more spending on the VA a priority throughout his tenure.  That’s it.  The only tools in their toolbox are to say that they are “Mad as hell” and throw more money at the problem.

5.  Accountability is a word to be spoken when campaigning and in front of microphones when your failure can no longer be concealed.
But at no time does it ever mean that someone should actually lose their job because things went wrong and people died on their watch.   Because if such a thing were to happen, someone might get the idea that the buck should actually stop with the occupant of the Oval Office, and then he’d have to pay for his family’s extravagant lifestyle.   But as a famous member of this administration once famously asked “What difference does it make?”

6.  There is no lie too big, too stupid, or too insulting to say in an attempt to deflect deserved criticism and anger.
At no time has this administration ever acknowledged the first rule of being in charge, which is that EVERYTHING is your fault.  In the magical world of the Obama Administration, government is the answer to every question, and when government fails, it is:

(a) George W. Bush’s fault;

(b) Your fault, because you have some misguided notion that government’s authority is actually limited because it cannot hope to do many of the things it attempts in a responsible and efficient manner;

(c) ATM’s;

(d) George W. Bush’s fault; and

(e) Someone, anyone else’s fault…be it a film maker, or 1/2 of 1/3 of government…anyone but the person who asked to sit in the big chair and be the chief executive.

7.  Laws are for other people.
I’ve written extensively about the lawlessness of this administration, and how we are only a nation of laws when they can be applied to opponents, not members of the administration, and their own ultra vires activities…a legacy that is corrosive to society, because it correctly creates the impression of selective enforcement and punishment, and because it fosters a contempt for the law and legal processes as a means of peaceful dispute resolution.  These are hallmarks of a banana republic, not a constitutional republic.

8.  You don’t have to deliver results.
All that matters is that you convince people that you just care more than the other guy.  Which is why this administration doesn’t deliver results (well, that and the fact that they have no idea how to do so), but they do a hashtag selfie better than any other government in the world.

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A Different Perspective

For a while now, some conservative pundits and individuals have portrayed our current political predicament as being akin to the “zombie apocalypse”.  It is an easy comparison to make, and it isn’t even a new one, as demonstrated by our friend, Packy East, in this clip:

But ask I drove to work this morning, listing to a discussion about the ridiculous and costly nature of public sector unions, and how government, led by the EPA, was standing in the way of what should be a very simple infrastructure improvement that would allow American businesses to remain competitive moving forward into the 21st Century, and this story about the Bureau of Land Management harassing a rancher in southern Nevada, I realized that the zombie analogy wasn’t entirely accurate.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think the zombies are still out there, shuffling along, and multiplying quickly, but I realized this morning that there is a better analogy of the relationship between our government and its citizens:

I trust no further explanation is necessary.

Those who are paying attention will get it.

Those accustomed to stupid government tricks will get it.

The zombies will engage in ad hominems to prevent others from getting it.

The grievance pimps will take to their fainting couches with wicked, crippling cases of the vapors.

And it will still be true.

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Interregnum

With a government based on the rule of law becoming increasingly lawless with every passing day, I find the subject of rebellion on my mind more and more.  I don’t mean rebellion in the sense of the contumacious response that many of our forebears reserved for those who disregarded the notions of individual rights and liberty in favor of a distant sovereign.  I mean a deliberate and conscious effort to hinder the designs of those who “rule” without understanding, and who turn the notion of consent of the governed around so that the governed must seek the consent of the government.  Indeed, when we are burdened with a President who has voiced criticism of the Constitution that characterizes it as a “charter of Negative Liberties”, and laments the fact that it has in the past prevented government from working a top down, fundamental change, including redistribution of wealth, as a means to work “social justice” upon the country, and without a trace of understanding that this has been a feature and not a bug, reasonable men and women will observe that these are not normal times.

It is hard to maintain a fealty and respect for the offices of government when its scrutiny and muscle render so little of it those it was intended to serve.  And as the single biggest usurpation of power ever devised by man, the cruelly and ironically titled “Affordable Care Act” continues to harm Americans in greater numbers than it “helps”, despite the Administration’s near constant extra-Constitutional efforts to delay implementation of some of its more onerous provisions, I suspect that I am not the only one considering rebellion, in a myriad degrees.

I fear the disruption and chaos that would come with an open insurrection.  But with a government that disregards any semblance of limitation upon its power, or any regard for ours, I find it difficult to believe that things will improve of their own accord.  As corruption becomes the norm, and as government wears less tolerant of competitors and critics, I suspect that acts of rebellion, large and small, will become commonplace.  Lawlessness begets lawlessness.  Selective enforcement is no different from arbitrary and capricious fiat, save for the window dressing of legitimacy conferred by the fact that what is being selectively enforce having actually once been enacted by a legislature.  Without a common moral compass to act as a moderating influence, I have little faith that once contempt for the rule of law is shared equally by those charged with enforcing it, and those meant to live under it, that bloody retribution will not be a fatiguing fixture of daily life.  And still, it comes, along with the day when each person will have to decide how far is too far, what trespasses are too offensive, and what intrusions are intolerable.  As that decision is arrived at, the legitimacy of government will evaporate like morning fog on a summer lake, because once those charged with maintaining the peace have abrogated the birthright of our citizens, the social compact will be swept away, leaving those with no understanding of the philosophy and history of our legal tradition to make the laws.

25 In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Judges 21:25

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Dispatches From Bizzaro World

What a great week.

We get a Supreme Court ruling on DOMA that WILL be used to attack the exercise of the First Amendment in a “historic” and “unprecedented” way, thanks to a remarkably intemperate ruling written by Justice Kennedy, who decided in his ruling in the DOMA case (United States v. Windsor) that the only purpose in opposing same-sex marriage MUST be malicious, which will be used against churches and religious organizations by a cabal of Christian Derangement Syndrome sufferers and the pink swastika wearing rainbow warriors of “tolerance”. Not content with this decision, the court also issued a ruling on the Prop 8 case (Hollingsworth v. Perry), in which the court came to the rather curious conclusion that you can have standing to be sued, but not have standing to defend against a suit. Such legal alchemy is no longer shocking to me, but the bigger implication of this suit is far more stunning. The net effect of this ruling is that the people of a state can use the initiative process to make laws that their elected officials WON’T, and if their governor and their attorney general refuse to defend against legal challenges, then the proponents of the initiative don’t have standing to defend against those same legal challenges. The silence from the usual defenders of “democracy” is disappointing, but predictable.

After the ruling was released, I was sure I heard the sound of hands rubbing together in Olympia, as the Governor and the Democrats in Olympia are making plans for the next session when the Senate can’t stop them, and they can tax to their grubby little hearts’ content, and then fail to defend a trumped-up lawsuit against an initiative telling them “No.” It will be even less trouble than having the courts do them a solid on overturning our $30.00 license tabs…again, and again, and again.

Then we have the “Tale of Two Apologies”. The first is Paula Deen, a southern cook, with a show on the Food Network and various franchises and a pending cookbook, who admitted in a deposition to having used a racist slur 30 years ago, driving the grievance pimp and race hustling industry into overdrive. Within a week, she lost her show, every business relationship she had, and her publisher dumped her on the cusp of publishing her latest cookbook, despite having given an unnecessary apology for the sin of saying a word frequently used and glorified by members of the supposedly aggrieved class. Incidents like this, and the now infamous Imus incident are proof that Eric Holder was right about us being unable to have an honest conversation about race in this country. When words are only off-limits to one class of persons, and the ones who aren’t restricted are allowed to destroy the careers of those restricted class if they admit to uttering “Voldemort” in the distant past, no honest conversation about race is possible. But at least Jesse Jackson got a few extra moments in the limelight when he offered to help Deen with her “rehabilitation”, so at least his lucrative franchise preserving this perverse status quo will be maintained.

On the other hand, we have Noted Thoughtless Pig, Alec Baldwin, once again launching himself on a gay-slur (I refuse to say “homophobic”, as it would indicate fear, and given what he said, I don’t think he fears gays, I think he holds them in contempt) laden Twitter tirade against a Guardian reporter who made some unflattering allegations about Baldwin’s wife’s behavior at James Gandolfini’s funeral. This isn’t the first time that Baldwin’s Tweeting thumbs have caused him trouble, as he’s tweeted racist slurs before. However, unlike Deen, who said “Voldemort” 30 years ago, when I last checked, Baldwin still had a cushy gig with Capital One, and hasn’t been fired by any of his other employers. While Anderson Cooper and Andrew Sullivan noted the apparent lack of outrage for Baldwin’s rhetorical diarrhea, he seems largely to have gotten a pass, despite the apology which makes claims that are incongruous with his tweets.

I’m not in favor of people having their lives and careers ruined over things they say. That doesn’t mean I’m adverse to speaking out when I think what they say is wrong, dangerous, stupid, etc. I do think that DEMANDING that people being cut off from their means of making a living because they said something that offended someone smacks just a little too much of thought policing for me to be comfortable with. It’s one thing to have no truck with people who offend you (or those who employ them), but it’s quite another to have the expectation that others must share your outrage, and participate in a particularly brutal (and arbitrary) form of collective punishment, which is to be arbitrarily and selectively applied by those who set themselves up as the judge and jury of such socially criminal acts. My contempt is reserved for the deciders who pretend to be guided by such principles as “civility” and a cockeyed notion of “fairness” that only they can mystically discern, according to a subjective standard that we mere mortals are terminally incapable of recognizing, let alone grokking. This contempt is also reserved for the mindless numbers who surrender their own discernment with nary a taxed brain cell to these morally bankrupt clods who have usurped an authority that they prove themselves too hypocritical to objectively wield when they allow such a disparity of outcome in two such similar public faux pas. I could be crass, and suggest that the lesson here is the same one more artfully demonstrated by George Orwell so many years ago in the classic “Animal Farm”, when he observed that “Some animals are more equal than others.”, a concept that seems to have escaped (I hate myself for even using this terminology) “the gay community”, which has struggled so long to enact a dubious and dishonest notion of “equality”, and was given a major victory in this campaign this week by the courts. Instead, I will say that an apology IS owed to someone, and in the great progressive tradition of claiming authority not conferred upon me, I will speak for America when I say:

“I am sorry, Paula Deen. I’m sorry that you believed in the notion of a “post-racial America”, uttered by a President that you voted for, when what he, and many in his party meant was a “Reverse-racial America”, where only white people can be racist, and any excuse to render such a verdict and execute sentence will be pursued by our “betters” in the media, and where your celebrity won’t be enough to protect you, since you failed to write checks to the “right” interest groups. Welcome to Bizzaro World.”

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