Your Weekly Rush

Nothing really stood out to me this week on Rush, except his continued contempt for modern music. I can understand not liking or appreciating trends in modern music. There are many I don’t like. But talking about how bad modern music makes one sound like a grouchy old man, and it doesn’t look good no matter who does it.

His brother, David Limbaugh, has written an article for Townhall.com which continues a Limbaugh tradition of describing the Poor. Limbaugh states, “Plus, any money they [the rich] save from the tax cuts will be money they earned themselves, not transfers from the poor or the government, neither of which produce wealth.”

You see, to the Limbaugh clan the Poor and the Unemployed are essentially the same. The Working Poor is a contradiction; if the poor were working they wouldn’t be poor. The wealthy create wealth all by themselves, presumably in a manner wholly unrelated to those factories one sees from time to time. Imagine the manager of your local Wal-mart running his store without the hundreds of employees, many of whom work at or near the poverty level. Many of whom may be working two or three jobs to maintain a family. And yet to the Limbaughs of the world (David or Rush), the working poor are irreverent.

Perhaps disposable.

The Wisdom of Solomon

It was kind of a slow week, and then all of a sudden we got several good articles. So several updates today. Probably.

First came across Norman Solomon through his book “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh.” In it he takes Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) for not writing cartoons that expose the horrors of large corporation capitalism. He also argues that by providing a safety valve for workplace anger, Scott Adams prevents the workers from getting mad enough to organize and change the system.

One of the ways you can tell an ideologue is that he is satisfied with the suffering of others if he believes it will lead to the changes he’s advocating. Norman Solomon wants to see capitalism over thrown, and as such is unhappy when management gives the workers some of the things they demand. He’d rather the workers suffer so that they will get angry enough to completely destroy the system.

Such thinking is not unique to the left. Certainly there are right commentators who take pleasure in the problems of California, which they attribute to Liberal Politicians.

Solomon’s latest article is a portrait of the future 50 years hence, in which there is only one media company (with the catchy name AT WONDERS), and the air is so bad that you have to wear a gas mask outside. Cheery. Of course in the future we’ll all have giant domes so the gas mask scenario isn’t really the future.

Solomon’s critiques of media are pretty much always old school, and ignore the internet. There are a lot of metaphors for the internet. Here’s one. It’s an infinite frontier. It’s being colonized. There are large ranches and small farms and tiny vegetable garden’s (like the site you are currently viewing.) Most people still get their news from Mainstream sources perhaps, but the numbers shrink ever year.

Now the Internet isn’t the best counter to the mainstream media. As I document pretty regularly, there are hundreds of different points of view online, all with “facts” backing them up. I personally like that. I like that I can visit websites of all different political factions and ideals.

But remember rule #1, which I haven’t mentioned yet, but is true. Ideologues hate democracy. You see the internet allows points of views from most American’s, and probably eventually all Americans. But if points of views are available everywhere, doesn’t that devalue the value of any one point of view? If an Ideology points the One True Path to ideology, than why have other points of view? Tough question. Because it’s clear on many issues that there is one right answer, and differing points of views don’t seem to add much value.

Still I believe in noisy boisterous and occasionally angry democracy.

Still to come, an analysis of Michelle Malkin’s “A Generation of Skanks” and Your Weekly Rush. Come on back.

It's Thursday!

Sorry not much of a post tonight. Ann Coulter's and Ben Shapiro's columns posted today, but both are doing post election spin. It's nice that Ann Coulter is pushing to have the Democratic party renamed the Abortion party. And it's nice that young Ben has realized that he need never worry about liberals returning to power again. After all, "Americans are looking for more than radicalism with a friendly face." Nope, young Ben has realized that American's will see through liberals from now until the end of time.

Oh, and Ms. Coulter, some Democrats do know how a squirt gun works. I myself experimented with one this very evening. You see you pull the trigger and water shoots out one end, and also drips out the other end, thus wettening the hand. They aren't so tough to figure out.

Seriously, Ms. Coulter, are you for anything other than defeating the Democrats?

Consistency

Well, one thing you have to say about Walter Williams; he’s consistent. Walter Williams believes in the strictest of interpretations of the constitution. He would abolish the departments of Education, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, etc.

In his latest article he attacks the generation that lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War. As he says, “There's no question that the "great" generation spared the world from external tyranny, but it has outdone any other generation in destroying both the letter and the spirit of our Constitution, and as such produced a form of tyranny for which there's little defense.”

Williams, like most ideologues, fears democracy. He admits readily that the growth of the government is reflective of the will of the people, but would presumably argue that the founders did not intend for the government to be reflective of the people. And he’s correct. Walter Williams, for example, was considered by the founders to be three/fifths of a person for purposes of representation. While I have enormous respect for the Founders, I don’t believe that they had the solutions to all problems America has faced or will face.

You might check out this article by Brett Dakin about “The Quiet American.” The movie was to be released before September 11, but was seen as too radical after that. The movie stars Brenden Fraser and Michael Caine--and apparently is opening in selected theaters. I don’t know much about it, other than it deals with the moral problems posed by the Vietnam War.

Also if you are reading this--please e-mail me any thoughts or questions you might have.

Don't Let it Get you Down

Well can’t find much to write on today. Bin Ladin is apparently alive and well, according to msnbc.com. Most columnists are still doing post game analysis. One interesting column by Sean Wilentz appeared at Salon.com. Unfortunately it's on the pay side so I can't link to it. Wilentz argues that the recent republican gains in the South are probably linked to their support of the confederate flag. He may be right; and if so it's a troubling reminder that the Civil War is not all that long ago.

Rich Lowry wrote an article on a new Sonar System designed by the navy that may prove harmful to whales. He spends most of his article talking about what a submarine is and what it’s designed to do, suggesting Iranian subs (both of them) off the coast of Atlantic City or San Francisco “launching a cruise missile or disgorging an operative to carry a suitcase nuke into a city.”

Then he makes the standard environmental argument about how whales have no problem using sonar attacks to stun their prey. This proves that Whales are hypocrites for being critical of our use of sonar. So the next time you see a whale speaking on Face the Nation or Hardball, you'll know to discount anything he says. Of course, humans, who speak on behalf of whales have no such sonar powers, and so are not being hypocritical in their suggestions.

He then ends with a neat bit of historical revisionism. “Liberals opposing the Cold War used to preach "Better red than dead."“ Of course the phrase was “better dead than red” was much more popular. The right made use of that and other cold war slogans to attack their political enemies. "Better Red than Dead" was a reaction by some in the far left to this more common phase.

More Post Election Commentary

Well the writers at Commondreams.org are not very happy. I use Commondreams.org and Townhall.com for most of my research these days. Both collect at least 7-8 articles a day, usually on a fair range of subjects. There is some differences between the two however. I find that Townhall.com has a greater diversity of opinion. While there are certainly hard-line conservatives, such as Oliver North, and David Limbaugh, there are also contrarian voices such as Pat Buchanan (who has consistently opposed invading Iraq), and Steve Chapman (who wrote an excellent article today on the futility of Ashcroft fighting a war against drugs and a war against terrorism at the same time).

At Commondreams.org, however, the viewpoints are much more homogenous. There are very very few words of praise for President Bush, for example. Commondreams.org also prints a number of articles from outside the United States, although they are all about the United States. In Sunday’s edition, they printed an article by William Hutton from the Guardian UK about how terribly messed up the United States is now that we’ve elected a Conservative Congress. As he says, “America is not a happy place.”

I don’t know, I suspect a good percentage of American’s are happy--at least 30 percent or so, and possibly more. Last Thursday America had a chance to speak it’s mind, and it did. I’m not sure I like what came out any more than Mr. Hutton. I think, however, it’s nonsensical to assume (baring massive voter fraud) that the American People didn’t know what they were doing last Tuesday.