Change is A Foot

Slowly learning a little about html--so have improved the look and hopefully readability of the site--also changed the quote at the top. Enjoy.

Your Weekly Rush

Well Rush took the week off, which is understandable. So his website is apparently running a best of Rush 2002. It's insightful as to what Rush thinks his best work is. At the top is this quote.

"Human being three hundred years from now will be able to look at Rushlimbaugh.com and see income tax data as it was today, updated for the times as it occured."

Three hundred years, eh? It's going to take you that long to eliminate liberals?

The first article is an interview between Rush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfield, from May 2002--not much to comment on there, except that Rush apparently did find time to ask Rumsfield about his status as a sex symbol.

The second article deals with President Bush's intentions to build Star Wars, and its one of the rare good points Rush makes. If SDI is possible (and how do you prove it isn't), why not build it? But it's marred by his regular sniping at Democrats for wanting to be judged on their intentions. And of course it ignores the fact that the companies building it certainly have something to gain by pushing for it, and I suspect they do have political connections.

The third is an absolutely hilarious animated cartoon. Mark Fiore over at Salon.com or Home Star Runner have nothing on this. It shows a clunky old women in a wheel chair. Suddenly Al Gore and Tom Daschele and some other democrat pop out in front of her and say boo--then she falls down the stairs. Oh my. And it has a message too. Democrats hate old people and like to push them down stairs.

Down the bottom of the page there is proof that Al-Queda is recieving support from Iraq. Although Rush doesn't need it (he's bloodthirsty enough without it), he does provide it. Oh wait--this is just another retread of the story that Iraqi intelligence met with the hi-jackers in Chzechoslovokia--that's been denied dozens of times. Plus apparently Saddam has a 747 fuselage which he uses to train Al-Queda terrorists. Of course, when you don't need the evidence i suppose any flicker of light works--for me however, this isn't really sufficient to prove anything.

Finally, Rush hates Europeons. He really hates them. He hates the way they have culture and the way they look down on us. He hates that they think they should have a say in world events. He hates that they don't mindlessly go along with everything our wise and just President suggests. He makes sure to remind us that Germany, who has decided that they don't want to invade Iraq, are the Children of Hitler. He states, "Hitler was a member of the National Socialist Party. He has an intellectual kinship with Schroeder's socialists and the communists. That stuff is not right-wing. Somebody has to say this stuff, and I'm in a position to do it." Now, i'll admit this venom came after Schoeder compared Bush to Hitler, which was clearly uncalled for. And I'm not sure there is a foreign country that Rush likes.

But this is clearly over the top nonsense. The Nazi Party name was designed to appeal to as many people as possible without really saying to much about long term goals. No serious student of Nazi Germany would describe them as anything but an aberation of the right. After all large corporations suffered not one whit under Hitler. And he persucuted the Communists almost as much as the Jewish people.

I was going to go on and analyze each article in turn--but instead I'm going to the movies--have a nice day. Maybe I'll get back to it later.

Change is a Foot

Hope you enjoy the new look and are having a happy holiday season. Also brand new cheery quote up at the top.

The Virtue of a Straight Line

Reading the National Review online today--lots of good articles, but two in particular stood out. One by Victor Davis Hanson, prosaicly named, "We Mustn't Forget Why We are Fighting this War.," and a second by Rod Dreher, entitled "A Mighty Fortress is our God."

Hanson writes;

"Lest we forget why we have been fighting the al Qaeda terrorists and are now ready to invade Iraq, we should remember some basic facts about the present war.

What is its immediate cause?

About a year and a half ago, Middle Eastern terrorists — at a time of peace and without provocation — simply murdered 3,000 Americans."

Dreher writes;

"Here we are 12 years later, another Christmas upon us, another war with Iraq looming. This time, the peril is graver. Saddam Hussein has had 12 years to build more weapons of mass destruction — and he knows now that we are coming to kill him. The world is not allied against the dictator as it once was. Our cities — my city — now know what terrorists fighting in the name of Islam, Christendom's ancient foe, are capable of doing to us, without warning.

There was nothing abstract about September 11."

Before making my main point, let me comment on Dreher's argument. Saddam has not had 12 years to build more weapons of mass destruction. He's had constant inspections and bombings. He's suffered (or to be more clear, his people have suffered) under U.N. sanctions. I know it's fashionable for Commentators to assume that American's can't remember what happened six months ago, but I like to think they can. I also am encouraged by the description of Islam as Christendom's ancient foe. And here I thought the enemy of Christianity was Satan. In fact, I'm so theologically backwords, I can't help thinking that an enduring religious war between Christianity and Islam would bring the devil much joy.

But to my main point--would someone please draw a line between the over three thousand dead in the tragedies of September 11 and Saddam Hussein's Iraq? Is it merely that the hijackers came from the middle east (as Hanson points out), and Iraq is in the very same region? Do you think that's merely a coincidence?

Do Hanson and Dreher really believe in an America where on the vaguest of proofs (or even in the absense of proof) of malfience, we wage war on another nation? Apparently they do.

But I don't.

For a more rational appraisel of the Iraq invasion, check out Dilip Hiro's article, "The Post-Saddam Problem."

Exercise may Prove Dangerous to your Health

Suzanne Fields, writing today in Townhall.com, states;

"So beware of the New Age snake oil in the Gymnasiums of Eden. Satan can find Eve on a Stairmaster or in a rowing machine and Adam will drink the forbidden fruit juice wherever it's offered. Fitness may be just another fig leaf to hide from our inner selves."

Luckily I use one of those exercise bikes, so I'm relatively safe from Satan.

The Wonders of the Modern Corporation

"The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
Ayn Rand

There are many who praise the modern corporation as incredibly efficient. And it is. It acquires resources, works those resources, and produces and distributes final products. Certainly there is bloat in many modern organizations (although very little at present, all things considered), but the corporation has revolutionized the way we get things done.

There is another kind of efficiency the modern corporation offers--moral efficiency. Morality often gets in the way of the most efficient way of doing things. A personal example from the running of my house. I have two dogs, which I walk several times a day. The most efficient thing I can do as a person is to let their crap lay where it falls. After all, so long as it's outside and I know where it is, I'm likely to avoid it. But that is not the moral thing to do--so I add in extra inefficiencys, like carrying a scoop, and eliminating the crap afterwords. Inefficient. But Moral.

Now here's where the modern corporation comes in. At some point I have to face myself, and realize that i'm the sort of selfish jerk who lets other people stop on his dog's dog-doo. But with the modern corporation nobody has to face that. Each individual in a chain makes a moral decision, but it's always a small decision. Do I fill out this paperwork that i've been assigned? Do I transport these containers to our other facility? I'm sure if burying these containers was dangerous, someone would tell me. And so on. And so forth.

Everybody has someone else to blame for any immoral actions that happen. The worker blames his supervisor. The Supervisor blames company policy. The Company leaders place responsibility either on the stockholders (for demanding profits) or the workers. Nobody blames themselves. And the morality of any action, spread among so many different people, vanishes in the ether.

Rush says all the time, "Do you think Corporate heads really want dirty air or dirty water? Why would they want that? Why wouldn't they fight to ensure clean air and clean water for their children?" Well there are two answers to that question. First, nobody deciding to pollute lives in the town where the pollution is going to happen. They live in clean safe areas a long way away. The exception is probably Texas--but only because Texas is so aggresively anti-environment. Second, the morality of the decision to not change filters for example dissappears when its spread out over so many people.

Trent Lott--A Post Mortem

It was two weeks ago I first came across Trent Lott's Comments at Strom Thurmond's Birthday Party. Angry at the initial lack of media coverage, I reprinted Lotts comments and called for his resignation. It's the sort of red-blodded all American thing I do often--taking a position on an issue immediately, without really thinking about it in depth. After having thought about it, I do think I was right however. Trent Lott would have held a position of representing the Republican party and the American people. He had to be removed.

However, let it not be said that the Democrats hounded him from office. That would be foolish. The real people who removed Trent Lott from power were his fellow Republicans. The President helped by refusing to show Lott even trace amounts of support. But in truth, the Repbulicans are glad to see him go. In their eyes, it was not his comments at the Birthday Party that were damning; it was his appearance on BET that did him in. There the Senator looked weak. He capitulated to his audience on Affirmative Action, claiming he supported it. To many Republicans, this weakness in articulating their opposition to affirmative action must have seemed either a cynical ploy to preserve his speakership or a continuation of his ongoing weakness in basic republican principles.

Lott commented, "There are some people in Washington who have been trying to nail me for a long time. When you're from Mississippi and you're a conservative and you're a Christian, there are a lot of people that don't like that. I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame." I'm not sure exactly what Mr. Lott means by a trap. Did somebody monkey up his cue cards? Or should he not have been invited to the birthday party at all?

Two final comments on the issue. From the right, Robert Novak writes, "As principal author of Lott's demise, Bush must now face its consequences: limiting his freedom in policy touching on race. He has to decide whether to approve Solicitor General Theodore Olson's proposal for U.S. intervention against the University of Michigan in the racial quota case before the Supreme Court. He has to decide whether to renominate U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering, a friend and Mississippi Republican ally of Lott's, for the appellate bench. To go with Olson and Pickering would raise accusations of "racism." "

From the Left, Seth Sandronsky, of Sacremento's Because People Matter, writes "Lott’s remark’s on the spurned glories of the South threatened to partly alter the administration’s orchestration of a benevolent U.S. imperialism in oil-rich Iraq. He had to go, and did depart as Senate leader of the Republican Party."