Rocket Surgery

I thought for sure it would be Kaine. Kaine seemed like a better choice to me…safe, southern, seriously up Obama’s, um, alley…..

Biden?! Really?!

I don’t really see how it helps him at all. Don’t get me wrong, I actually find Biden funny and interesting, so I don’t object to the choice, but this is a guy who seems to me like a cross of McCain and Cheney — a more aggressive old bastard of a 20+year Senator who shoots his mouth off and irritates orthodox party loyalists.

True, He won’t having any trouble playing bad cop to Obama’s good cop. I guess what Obama wanted was someone with foreign policy and national security experience (as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) — more than he wanted someone who can bring swing votes or has his own “change appeal”. Without a doubt Obama will need experienced advisors and cabinet members, and Biden would have been a pretty good choice for a number of cabinet posts (perhaps State, or Defense).

But I don’t see how it will help in the election…The draw of Obama is change, and the selection of Biden diffuses that message by giving the appearance of trying to tap into the experience of those who have been running the very things he is trying to change. Seems to me like he’s just trying to mollify the people who worry about his lack of experience by adding Biden to the ticket — which I don’t think will really work.

The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller, Chapter 34

I recently re-read Catch-22 (what a great book!) and when this bit came up and I read it, all the hair on my arm stood up, it was so good.  It’s today - it’s reality - it’s political correctness - it’s modern politics - it’s the Iraq war - it’s bad management - it’s pervasive.

Simply brilliant.

I have designed two new bumper stickers in a shameless attempt to make a buck.

These can actually be ordered at http://www.cafepress.com/mattharrah.  Such a deal!!

Skeptical about the claims from all the hyperventilating environmentalist whack-jobs?  Don’t believe that all the heat waves, cold waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, locust swarms, and toenail fungus infections across the planet are due to global warming?  Think that the fact that the polar ice caps melting on Mars might just suggest that solar activity and not humans are the cause of the one (gasp!) degree increase in temperatures over the past 100 years?

Then join me in celebrating Carbon Belch Day on June 12.  A day for lighting cigars, idling your car engine, leaving all the lights on, and turning the A/C down to 60 degrees.  A day for throwing your aluminum cans in the trash, taking a long shower, and leaving the water running while you brush your teeth.  A glorious day for cutting the grass using a gas-powered mower; for doing a half-load of laundry (both the washer and the dryer!); and for feeding the poor starving plants of the world by pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

C’mon!! Thumb your nose at the religion science of global warming and express your support for capitalism and western civilization!

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” – George Washington, in “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest” by Upton Sinclair.

“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C. S. Lewis, “God in the Dock”

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Won’t stop me from trying.

“By the mid-1930’s, thanks to the New Deal, all that self-reliance had changed, prompting Mencken to declare: ‘There is no genuine justice in any scheme of feeding and coddling the loafer whose only ponderable energies are devoted wholly to reproduction. Nine-tenths of the rights he bellows for are really privileges and he does nothing to deserve them.’ Despite the billions spent on an individual, ‘he can be lifted transiently but always slips back again.’ Thus, the New Deal had been ‘the most stupendous digenetic enterprise ever undertaken by man…. We not only acquired a vast population of morons, we have inculcated all morons, old or young, with the doctrine that the decent and industrious people of the country are bound to support them for all time. The effects of that doctrine are bound to be disastrous soon or late.’

When someone asked, “And what, Mr. Mencken, would you do about the unemployed?” He looked up with a bland expression. “We could start by taking away their vote,” he said, deadpan. Mencken was not surprised when the majority disagreed. “There can be nothing even remotely approaching a rational solution of the fundamental national problems until we face them in a realistic spirit,” he later reflected, and that was impossible so long as educated Americans remained responsive “to the Roosevelt buncombe.”

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, The Bad Boy of Baltimore (a biography of H.L.Mencken), p409.

I wonder what Mencken would say today about Universal Health Care, Medicare, Medicaid, College Financial Aid, etc. Actually, I think I can roughly guess what he’d say. And neither Clinton, nor Obama, nor McCain is saying anything like it.

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought given for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards–never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle mt mind–yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it–and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p683.

For all the people who want the nanny state:

Let’s compare hotel heiress Paris Hilton with President George W. Bush:

	Paris Hilton	George W. Bush
Intellect of a pencil
Drives drunk
Got where they are entirely through family connections
Wealthy
Famous
Embarrass themselves on a daily basis
Semi-attractive female
Served in Vietnam during the war