Right Wing Nut House

This is surely one of the dumbest thing any blogger has ever written anywhere:

The shooting in Oakland was horrible, but the guy who did it was just a bad guy. The killing in Pittsburgh was the result of right-wingers spreading disinformation. This guy, already disturbed, was apparently helped over the edge by conspiracy theories pushed by the mainstream right in America.

I’m sorry, but when someone like Oliver Willis - already suffering from a lack of logic and an overabundance of stupidity - tells us flat out with no qualifiers whatsoever that the shooter in Pittsburgh carried out his mass murder of police officers because “conspiracy theories pushed by the mainstream right in America” forced him “over the edge,” I can’t sit by allow that kind of contemptible calumny go by without some kind of comment.

What “conspiracy theories?” Name them Oliver. Which “mainstream” conservative media outlets? Not Michael Savage or Alex Jones. Like, real mainstream blogs, TV shows, newspaper columnists, editorials, or other media. Just one?

He can’t do it because there are none. Projection is reflection in this case and Willis seems to have a difficult time being able to define “conspiracy theory.” For instance, he believes if you oppose the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, you believe there is a “conspiracy” to reinstate it. Willis also believes that if you oppose gun restrictions that have been proposed by several Obama appointees in the past - including his own Attorney General - this makes you a conspiracy monger. And it isn’t only a problem with definitions. Willis also pimped the story that circulated for about 4 hours on liberal blogs that the Tea Parties were part of a vast, right wing, conspiracy. Apparently, Willis can’t even recognize what a conspiracy is and is something of a conspiracy monger himself.

So Oliver might want to become better informed before he wildly accuses mainstream conservative outlets of promoting “conspiracy theories.” The Obama is a Muslim - wasn’t born here - fake birth certificate - is a terrorst - crew are relegated to the fringes of conservatism with most mainstream conservatives condemning the idiocy.

But beyond Willis’ usual hysteria and laughable hyperbole, there is this fantastical notion shared by many on the left that they have insight into people’s souls not granted to us mere mortals. Willis can make an extraordinarily bald faced statement that the reason the Pittsburgh killer acted was because he was infuenced by right wing blather - without so much as “we think” this is so or “many believe” this is what he thought - because many liberals think themselves qualified psychiatrists or better yet, “diviners of their neighbor’s intent.” It is a heavy burden Oliver and other liberals carry, this almost psychic ability to peer into other men’s souls and glean motivations that we ordinary folk are not vouchsafed the ability to use.

This gift comes in especially handy when peeriing into the confused, diseased mind of someone like the Pittsburgh cop killer. A battery of trained psychiatrists couldn’t tell you exactly why or even when this fellow snapped, why reason and logic left him and caused him to murder 3 policemen. But Oliver Willis and his liberal friends who are also blessed with this second sight can do so.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, Willis’s statement of fact runs into a small problem; the man was using the police to commit suicide:

Perkovic, 22, said he got a call at work from him in which he said, “Eddie, I am going to die today. … Tell your family I love them and I love you.”

Perkovic said: “I heard gunshots and he hung up. … He sounded like he was in pain, like he got shot.”

That does not sound like someone driven “over the edge” by gun crazy Republicans. It sounds like any other individual contemplating suicide. And the fact that Willis and other liberals feel absolutely no shame in trying to make political hay against their foes by standing on the dead bodies of three policemen is so far beyond the pale of reasoned discourse that it nauseates me because I feel it necessary to respond for the second time in two days to this utter tripe.

I urged conservatives yesterday to tone down some of the rhetoric about Obama because frankly, no one can tell what effect some of the rantings of Alex Jones or Michael Savage or even some fringe bloggers might have on the mentally ill that walk our streets. But that is a far cry from saying flat out that the Pittsburgh shooter acted because Republicans “encourage people to shoot cops.” That kind of hysterical hyperbole has been the hallmark of Willis’s blogging career which is why he is so popular on the left. Mindless, partisan hackery goes over very well with liberals as it does with conservatives.

Here we are in April with Opening Day upon us (for the uninitiated, this used to be a holy day of obligation for followers of what used to be called our National Pastime) and Barack Obama has been president for 10 weeks. It has been an eventful epoch in American history with the president taking unprecedented steps to head off a depression, save our financial system, and remake America into a liberal paradise.

He has made plenty of errors, befitting his rookie status in the major leagues of public policy and national politics. So far, none of these miscues have cost us the game, as it were. (Forgive the baseball analogies but I am rounding into shape for the coming season.) The national government is in a rebuilding mode as veteran players and old policies are either traded away or unceremoniously let go while we give the youngsters a chance to prove themselves.

Some of these policies may indeed pan out and make the cut. The president’s new Af-Pak strategy has its drawbacks but, I believe, holds real promise for progress. And if Europe wants to embrace our new president and if that leads to better cooperation, I applaud it. We need Europe and NATO more now that the president is going to unilaterally and drastically reduce defense spending. The outline of an agreement with Russia on further reducing nukes appears to be pragmatic and not based on looking into Putin’s “soul” to discern what kind of a partner he might be. Trouble is brewing in Asia but that would have happened if John McCain had become president instead of Obama. The North Korean missile launch has scrambled our alliances with Japan and South Korea while making even the Chinese a little antsy. This presents an opportunity rather than a set back - as long as the Administration sees it that way and not as another excuse to placate Kim Il Jung by continuiing talks as if nothing has happened.

Domestically, the recession seems to be bottoming out (not surprisingly, no thanks to the Stimulus Bill) and Washington and the financial community appear to be coming to grips with the banking crisis. Whether the Geithner plan will work is a big unknown but just addressing the problem is a good first step. Other policy initiatives from stem cells to Guantanamo are matters of extreme disagreement with the opposition. Not that it matters. The voting public rejected the Republicans and conservatives and elected an almost supermajority of Democrats. They are in the drivers seat and for the first time since 1964, one party is going to get a chance to implement its agenda without needing to bother with what the political opposition has to say about it. In 1980 and 1994, the GOP had to deal with either a large, powerful, entrenched opposition or a president of the other party. Ronald Reagan worked some miracles to get most of his tax and spending policies made into law while the 1994 Republican takeover in the House saw many agenda items adopted, others not. Today’s political landscape is a Democratic one. All the Republicans can do is howl.

But it is Obama’s current foreign trip that is revealing of what kind of person we have elected as president. No one on the right should be surprised if Obama behaves like a liberal. He made no secret of his plan to exchange the “unilateralism” of the Bush Administration that always put American interests first with the unilateralism of the left that grants concessions without reciprocity (Iran) while subsuming American interests in the name of “cooperation” and “unity.”

Obama is making all the right noises and taken the right attitude - if one supports a liberal foreign policy. He has been apologetic, humble, cognizant of what the Europeans consider our “past mistakes,” solicitous of the sensibilities of our allies who, after all, think they should be running the world and not us (despite making a royal botch of things for 500 years), and respectful of leaders who have shone little but disdain for the US.

He has had a few gaffes but this is to be expected for his first at bat on his first road trip. What I find curious is the lack of coverage of many of these faux pas and liberal websites dismissing them as “distractions” or with the euphemistic “Bush did it too, only worse” meme. What’s interesting is that when Bush was president, they didn’t believe these gaffes to be a distraction but rather huge international incidents. One would have thought the world ended when Bush got too familiar with German Chancellor Merkel or he was overheard saying “sh*t” at a state dinner.

Somehow, now that Obama is president, these kinds of miscues that at one time were incidents that threatened the foundations of international order and indicative of the relative competence and smarts of President Bush have suddenly become “distractions.”

Glad we got that cleared up.

Beyond that, it was nice to see an American president lecture Europe about the “casual” anti-Americanism that occassionally morphs into a kind of nutty, conspiratorial idiocy and contributes to attitudes like believing America is a bigger threat to their country than Iran. That kind of stupidity can only be explained by an unreasoning, illogical, hatred of America. And for Obama - as popular as he is with the Euro-young - to lay it out in such stark terms was refreshing indeed.

Did he have to preface that lecture in Strasborg by referring to the US as “arrogant?” I note the overreaction to this statement on the right and while I understand the emotional response, Obama was doing more than simply playing to his audience as the Dixie Chicks and other high profile Americans have done while overseas. The president saw himself in the role of repairman in Europe. The alliance has been strained over our invasion and occupation of Iraq and the news - both true and false - about our government’s support for torture. Before you can fix anything, you must first identify what is wrong. This is what Obama was attempting to do when he said that past American policy had “shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” All of those perjoratives have nothing to do with “America” and everything to do with “Bush.” Nations aren’t arrogant. National leaders are. Nor are nations “dismissive and derisive.”

(Tis a pity our president didn’t give any examples of our “dismissiveness” and “derisiveness.” I can’t recall a single incident the previous 8 years where the US government was “derisive” of anything said by anyone save perhaps the North Koreans and the Iranians. Was he apologizing to them? I hope not.)

I guess the words were meant to convey an attitude recognizing the fact that America isn’t perfect rather than apologizing for specific instances of American derisiveness. Obama as supplicant went over very well with those who want to see America brought down a peg or two. These people hold the same attitude toward America as those who reduced our former Ambassador to Great Britain Phillip Lader to tears on the BBC program Question Time a few days after 9/11 by applauding audience members who said the attack was our fault and mocking Lader when he tried to defend American policy. The myth of European solidarity with the US after 9/11 is a powerful one despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Oh sure, they were shocked and horrified by the nature of the attack and the loss of life. And they certainly felt a sympathy for the American people. But it is laughable to believe that on some level, they weren’t extremely pleased to see American power take a hit.

It worries me that Obama might believe in this legend and will seek to further subsume American interests in hopes that this mythical “solidarity” can be found again - a return to a time that never existed and a relationship that has been romanticized by the left. The fact is, Obama may be popular but America is not - not now and will not likely be in the future - unless Obama completely goes native and hands the keys to American foreign policy to the EU. This won’t happen which means European attitudes toward America will remain basically unchanged - as they have remained the same since the end of the cold war. The EU has been looking for a “counterweight” to American power for a long time and the thought that President Obama can do anything except improve our image and meliorate other atmospherics in our relationship is wishful thinking.

So Obama’s European test rates about a “B-” in my opinion. There is plenty of room for improvement but he accomplished much in the time he was there that I believe will end up being a net good for America. As a rule, I think it unimportant whether an American president is liked or disliked by the Europeans. But considerng the worldwide financial mess, the crumbling situation in Afghanistan, our continuing fight with Islamic extremists, and other issues of vital mutual concern with the EU, it certainly can’t hurt that Obama is well liked and apparently got off on the right foot with our allies and their citizens.

Looking for reasons why mass murderers commit their heinous acts has devolved into something of a parlor game with both sides playing it to some extent. But since being a liberal automatically qualifies you as a psychotherapist and an expert diviner of an individual’s intent, the left is much better at blaming the right for these slaughters than conservatives are in positing more philosophical and - dare I say - reality based motivations for these tragedies.

A whole cottage industry has grown up on the left in finding motivations for these tragically sick individuals that always seem to track back to at least one of the following:

1. Talk radio
2. Conservative “hate speech”
3. “The Gun Culture”
4. Conservatives are mentally ill
5. Opposing liberals is the same as wanting them dead

The right’s favorite whipping boys are much different:

1. Sick society
2. Violence on TV and movies
3. Poor parenting
4. No conceal carry laws
5. God has disappeared from public life

I won’t entirely dismiss Dave Neiwart’s thesis that, in this case, scare tactics by the NRA and some conservative commentators that Obama was going to confiscate weapons may have affected this obviously sick individual in a way that played to his paranoia. But there is no evidence and none likely to emerge that this was the catalyst that set him off on that day at that time. The broad brush strokes of motivation used by most of the left on this incident are ridiculously simple minded and fails to take into account that in dealing with a diseased mind, there is no telling what will be the trigger that causes him to abandon all reason and attack police officers.

A key piece of evidence that this is an individual who wanted to use the police to commit suicide and his fear that Obama would take his guns was a lot less of a motivating factor than many on the left are crowing about today:

Perkovic, 22, said he got a call at work from him in which he said, “Eddie, I am going to die today. … Tell your family I love them and I love you.”

Perkovic said: “I heard gunshots and he hung up. … He sounded like he was in pain, like he got shot.”

One would think that if there was a political element to his true motivations, he would have made some grand statement of intent a la Sirhan Sirhan or McVeigh once he believed he was going to die. Instead, he told his best friend exactly what most suicide victims write in their notes which, while not conclusive, certainly points to alternate motivations for his crime.

Yesterday, I dismissed out of hand a New York Times columnist who attempted to tar conservatives with promoting revolution and violence by using illogic, twisting the facts, and “veiled hate speech.” He also believed conservatives were trying to recruit members for militias. It was pure hyperbole that deserved to be ridiculed - especially his notion that Chuck Norris, Michelle Bachman, and Glen Beck are conservative “leaders.”

But just because idiots like Charles Blow peddle their partisan poison doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a lot of loose talk by conservatives about Obama that has leaned toward the hysterical rather than the logical. There is a perfectly reasonable, factual, case to be made against what the president has been doing since he took office without resorting to calling him a “communist” or even a “socialist” despite his bank and auto company grabs. With those corporations, we are talking about a matter of degree when it comes to socialism. Before Obama even took office those industries were heavily dependent on government for their success. Obama, being a far left liberal, has simply taken the next step and begun to dictate to them who they can hire as CEO’s, how much they can pay their executives, and whether or not they have to file bankruptcy. It is a form of corporate socialism that this country has been moving toward since the end of World War II.

Krauthammer got it right:

Second, there is every political incentive to make these interventions in the banks and autos temporary and circumscribed. For President Obama, autos and banks are sideshows. Enormous sideshows, to be sure, but had the financial meltdown and the looming auto bankruptcies not been handed to him, he would hardly have gone seeking to be the nation’s car and credit czar.

Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

I have been saying this since Obama became a serious candidate for president. He seeks a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between citizen and government that will fall far short of socialism and reflects the same liberal goals that have been the hallmark of the movement since the New Left became ascendant in the 1970’s. America has a leveling tradition that dates back to colonial times - long before the world became aware of the concept of “socialism.” The social democracy that Obama is seeking will accomplish this “leveling” at the expense of a truly free market while limiting the individual citizen’s choices in everything from education to health care.

But conservatives have either ignorantly or deliberately misconstrued Obama’s true intent and have engaged in their own version of BDS. My worry is twofold; that such wild talk enables sickos on the radical right - emboldens them - and makes them believe that killing the president would be doing the world a favor and make them popular. (The FBI and the Warren Commission believed that the atmosphere of Kennedy hate in Dallas played a large role in JFK’s assassination.) The second point is that talk of gun grabbing, dictatorship, canceling elections (or using ACORN to mount a nationwide, massive vote stealing campaign), and even violence has, as a consequence, an unknown effect on the mentally ill that walk our streets. In this sense, it is nothing specific. Instead, it is the permeation of the air waves, the internet, and other media that surrounds the nutcases and speaks to them in ways that it doesn’t speak to normal people.

Fools like Charles Blow don’t get it. Even long time observers of the far right nuts like Neiwart draw too simple a conclusion regarding the effect of this kind of wild talk.

But it doesn’t seem to matter to conservatives who use gross exaggeration and hyperbole to describe what Obama has been doing. Sticking to the facts of Obama’s disregard for tradition and our first principles will get us a lot farther in debate than referring to Obama as a communist. And eschewing the violent language and monumental distortions coming from some on talk radio but especially the internet might serve to lower the temperature and give liberals something else to talk about besides falsely identifying conservatives as the motivating factor in every massacre that will occur over the next four years.

His name is Charles Blow - no really, it is. I don’t know exactly what he does for a living because this op-ed that appears in the New York Times today doesn’t give us a clue. Perhaps he is the official liberal hand wringer. Or maybe he is the designated hysteria monger for the left.

Whatever he does, it is apparent he needs a change of underpants after trying to scare the crap out of the left with visions of bloody revolution, right wing terrorism, and conservative mobs running amuck:

Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.

At first, it was entertaining - just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.

But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.

What sparkling analysis! What scintillating observations! What wit! What insightful reasoning!

What a crock.

Mr. Blowhard is a liar. If he read more conservative commentary than what he has linked above, I will eat my William F. Buckley Memorial Skimmer. If he had, he would not have had a column to write. No one at NRO has called for a “revolution.” No one at The Weekly Standard has written anything remotely resembling a tract that pronouces conservatives “isolated, betrayed, and besieged. I haven’t even heard Rush Limbaugh urging conservatives to pick up a pitchfork and head to Washington. Nor has Mr. Blow read American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Powerline, Hot Air, Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt, Townhall, Outside the Beltway, or most of the other top 50 conservative blogs that, if not always objective in tone and substance, certainly fall far short of advocating or promoting “revolution” or “garbled facts” or “twisted logic” and most especially “veiled” hate speech.

That last, of course, is construed by liberals as any speech they happen to disagree with. In the case of Mr. Blow’s op-ed, I might point out that there is nothing “veiled” at all about his hate; his entire screed is one long, lying, misrepresentation of the current state of conservative thought that descends to the depths of hysterical paranoia, gross and deliberate exaggeration, and a jaw dropping ignorance of who conservatives believe their “leaders” to be (or a coldly calculated attempt to deliberately mis-identify those leaders to make his idiotic thesis ring true).

Calling Michelle Bachman a conservative “leader” tells you right away this fellow has as much business writing an op-ed about conservatives as my pet cat Snowball. And at least Snowy would have enough character and honesty to actually peruse top conservative websites and writings instead of cherry picking blog posts from Think Progress or Crooks and Liars. It may come as a shock to Blow but not everything that appears on those shrines to liberal truth is “fair and balanced” either. Nor can I think of a single liberal site that has even a smidgen of balance when it comes to reporting on conservatives. The rank partisanship of the lefty blogosphere is as pronounced and dominant as it is on the right. That’s showbiz on the internet.

But wait! Before you think Mr. Blowhard is just your typical liberal purveyor of false, misleading, and outright dishonest analysis of conservative opinion, get a load of this:

For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, imagining herself as some sort of Delacroixian Liberty from the Land of the Lakes, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” ready to bust caps over cap-and-trade, I presume.

And between his tears, Glenn Beck, the self-professed “rodeo clown,” keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable” he said. Indeed.

Where’s Rush Limbaugh? Isn’t he the liberal-identified “conservative leader?” Why no scary quotes from him? Evidently, Rush failed to cooperate with Mr. Blowhard and supply the requisite rant calling for “revolution.” Limbaugh, for the most part, has been a rational conservative voice calling for better organizing, sharper messaging, and holding GOP lawmaker’s feet to the fire to stand up for conservative principles. Not calling for violence on his show meant that Rush didn’t make Mr. Blow’s cut of conservative “leaders.”

Instead, we are told that Chuck Norris is da man, a leading light of conservative thought. Norris is popular with some conservatives but I can’t recall anything he ever said being taken seriously by anyone. It would be like saying Jeananne Garofolo is a liberal leader. People know who she is and she is quoted by liberals on occassion but does anyone believe that she is an important spokesperson for the left?

And how important is Glen Beck? There are tens of millions of conservatives in America and Beck has a show on Fox watched by a little more than a million people. If that makes him a “conservative leader” then it makes Al Franken a liberal leader - both clowns who I would be surprised if either were taken seriously by anyone with an IQ higher than 50.

How paranoid is Mr. Blow? The idea that any responsible conservative anywhere is trying to “mold” conservatives into militias is so far beyond the pale of rational discourse as to make the author a true leftist nutcase, a lost cause to reason and logic, and a quaking, shaking, quivering example of lefty delusional thinking.

Both sides have their nutcases - something Mr. Blow either forgot or failed to acknowledge. If he wants some examples, I invite him to visit my blog and pick any post at random. There he will find liberal idiocy in all its glory - paranoia, nauseating condenscension, and a hate so intense as to make the commenter unintelligable.

I might have expected a piece like this on Huffington Post or perhaps Firedoglake - that other liberal bastion of rank partisan hatred, skewed facts, and contextual dishonesty. The fact that it appears in the New York Times shouldn’t surprise us, I guess, except that the Times is still billing itself as a newspaper. Maybe they should simply give in to their impulses and proclaim their switch to being just another liberal blog that traffics in lies, deciet, and towering hypocrisy.

This blog post originally appeared in The American Thinker

UPDATE

Alright already. If you like Glenn Beck you have an IQ above 50. But agreeing with Mr. Blowhard that the talk show host is a “conservative leader”  puts those of you waxing eloquent for Mr. Beck in sort of a strange position, no? It validates his thesis.

Why do conservatives insist on self-immolating behavior such as granting imbeciles like Beck any legitimacy? This is neither the time or the place (I want to enjoy my Saturday afternoon off thank you) to go into Beck’s shortcomings but you might want to ask yourself why simply because you agree with his rants that this makes him a leading light of conservatism? My neighbor is a better ranter than Beck but I don’t ascribe any special qualities to his ability to appeal to emotion. To my mind, there is little difference between Beck and Blow - neither ventures to argue using a logical framework for discussion nor do either of those two gentlemen grant their political opponents any legitimacy whatsoever. There is no rational basis for debate or discussion without both of those givens present.

Sorry for referring to Beckites as having the IQ of a coffee table.

In the futuristic movie Soylent Green, life is so bad due to overpopulation that people are encouraged to go to suicide centers where they can end their lives comfortably. The catch is that the dead bodies are then recylced into food - “Soylent” Green, Red, and other rainbow colors all to feed the hungry billions.

Suicide has an interesting history in the west where some societies actually thought it an honorable exit. Since most who took advantage of lax societal standards on taking one’s own life were in trouble with the government in one way or another and destined for execution, the alternative to how the government was going to kill you seemed a much less painful way to go.

But the troubling aspect of Soylent Green was that it was so horrifying a thought to believe that government would ever go so far as encouraging people to end their lives in order to save precious resources for the living. It could never happen in a million years, right? Just a dumb movie, eh?

Art imitates life:

The founder of the Swiss assistedsuicide clinic Dignitas was criticised yesterday after revealing plans to help a healthy woman to die alongside her terminally ill husband.

Ludwig Minelli described suicide as a “marvellous opportunity” that should not be restricted to the terminally ill or people with severe disabilities. Critics said that the plans highlighted the risks of proposals to legalise assisted suicides in Britain for people in the final stages of a terminal illness.

The Dignitas clinic in Zurich claims to have assisted in the deaths of more than 100 Britons. The Zurich University Clinic found that more than a fifth of people who had died at Dignitas did not have a terminal condition.

Mr Minelli said that anyone who has “mental capacity” should be allowed to have an assisted suicide, claiming that it would save money for the NHS.

Did you get that? Suicide would “save money” for the national health care boondoggle in Great Britain. And that’s a reason to allow suicide for healthy people? 

By definition, someone who seriously contemplates suicide who is healthy otherwise is mentally ill. The short circuiting of the brain’s survival mechanism occurs in deep depressions brought on by disease. Clinically depressed people cannot choose suicide because they are not responsible.  A depression that so debilitates someone that they care not whether they live or die and thus allows them to see death as a way out of their psychic pain can be treated with the proper drugs and within a few months, the individual will look back on that dark period and wonder how they could have contemplated ending their own lives. With death having such a hard finality to it, it is up to government to protect, not encourage those whose mental condition prevents them from making a rational choice. 

Since our culture has forbidden suicide, the argument that “the Romans did it” doesn’t hold much water. What one society finds acceptable, another may outlaw. The Romans also allowed gladiator games for a time where participants fought to the death. Should be emulate them in that activity also? 

And yet, here’s this guy pushing people who aren’t terminally ill to take the needle and end it all. I would like to point out that assisted suicide opponents have been making this argument for years and been ridiculed for doing so - that helping terminally ill patients end their lives was only the first step down a slippery slope that would one day include healthy people being encouraged to end their lives and even government some day deciding who stays and who goes.

That last seems a bit of a stretch today. But back in the 1970’s when Soylent Green was playing in theaters, how weird was it to see healthy people going to a designated place to end their lives?  In short, anything can happen once you take a walk on a road where possibilities are only as remote as the limits we place upon ourselves.

What about that slippery slope now?

President Obama sorta fibbed a little when he promised that no one who made less than $250,000 a year would have their taxes raised. But that’s OK because the people he decided to raise taxes on are the minority that almost everyone - liberals, conservatives, Nazis, Communists, Greens, and your local Community Improvement Association - loves to gang up on.

I am talking about smokers, of course.

The largest increase in tobacco taxes took effect despite Obama’s promise not to raise taxes of any kind on families earning under $250,000 or individuals under $200,000.

This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.

To be sure, Obama’s tax promises in last year’s campaign were most often made in the context of income taxes. Not always

“I can make a firm pledge,” he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

He repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.”

Now in office, Obama, who stopped smoking but has admitted he slips now and then, signed a law raising the tobacco tax nearly 62 cents on a pack of cigarettes, to $1.01. Other tobacco products saw similarly steep increases.

The extra money will be used to finance a major expansion of health insurance for children. That represents a step toward achieving another promise, to make sure all kids are covered.

That federal tax increase is added on to the three state tax increases over the last 14 months that have been enacted here in Illinois. The price of a carton for my brand has gone up nearly $13 during that time and has doubled in the last 5 years. Some of that price increase is the result of cigarette manufacturers being under attack in the courts as they pass along those costs of doing business to the consumer. But taxes make up around 75% of the cost of a carton of cigarettes - more in some states. It is by far and away the most popular tax at all levels of government because it affects a relatively small percentage of the population. Around 20% of the US population smokes, down from half in 1960 which was right before the first Surgeon General’s report linking smoking and lung cancer.

Trashing smokers is so easy, so empowering on so many levels that mental health professionals should be concerned about the day that there are literally no more smokers - at least none who will puff in public.The resulting loss in self esteem for busy bodies who feel compelled to demonstrate their moral superiority by criticizing total strangers for their personal life choices might cause an epidemic of clinical depression cases.

There is no human activity save smoking (except perhaps having sex in public) that empowers people to tell a total stranger how he should live his life. Not many would walk up to the morbidly obese and tell them to quit eating so much. Few would stand at the door of a McDonald’s and rail against people walking in for eating unhealthy food. And I have never had the experience of someone standing in the snack aisle at the grocery store and telling me to save myself and stop eating Fritos.

Smoking truly brings out the nanny in most non-smokers. Worst of all are former smokers who are not only imbued with a nauseating self-righteousness that manifests itself in the way these former addicts chastise the smoker for their “weakness” (thus intimating the quitter has superior strength of character) but are near hysterical in their zealotry if you come within 10 feet of their person and start to puff away - even if you’re outside.

Thanks to the very questionable science that has been used to justify limiting exposure to any secondhand smoke, the fear and paranoia that has been drummed up by the government and health advocates has resulted in the most extraordinary personal restrictions placed upon smokers, turning them into modern day lepers.

No doubt that for many people, second hand smoke is bothersome and even unhealthful which is reason enough to ban smoking in the workplace, and most indoor businesses. But it is demonstrably untrue that exposure to secondhand smoke outdoors is dangerous nor can most of the studies showing that any exposure to secondhand smoke can lead to cancer or heart disease be trusted.

Most people would be surprised to learn that almost as many government funded studies on the effects of second hand smoke show no correlation with diease as posit a connection:

The WHO’s World No-Tobacco day web site lists, “Comprehensive Reports on Passive Smoking by Authoritative Scientific Bodies.” The listed reports include the 1986 reports from the Surgeon General and National Research Council, the 1993 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and two late-1990s reports from the California EPA.

For those unfamiliar with the reports, the list appears formidable. Otherwise, it’s just disingenuous.

The 1986 reports by the NRC and Surgeon General concluded secondhand smoke was a risk factor for lung cancer. But of the 13 studies reviewed, 7 reported no link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Given the statistical nature of these studies, this split in results is precisely what one would expect if no true link existed.

Neither report produced much progress for anti-smoking activists. So they convinced the EPA to pick up the gauntlet.

Thirty-three studies on secondhand smoke had been completed by 1993. More than 80 percent of the studies reported no association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, including the largest of the studies. The EPA reviewed 31 studies - inexplicably omitting two studies reporting no association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer - and estimated secondhand smoke caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually.

Under the stewardship of the anti-tobacco Clinton administration, secondhand smoke hysteria caught fire.

Repeat: These were studies funded by various federal and state agencies and not the tobacco industry. And most found no link between cancer and second hand smoke. But, since the Clinton Administration decided to politicize the results, we ended up with this mad rush to trample the rights of smokers.

So what of those studies that did indeed, posit a link to cancer from secondhand smoke? Here’s a take on the “methodology” used:

Lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases develop at advancing ages. Estimating the risk of those diseases posed by secondhand smoke requires knowing the sum of momentary secondhand smoke doses that nonsmokers have internalized over their lifetimes. Such lifetime summations of instant doses are obviously impossible, because concentrations of secondhand smoke in the air, individual rates of inhalation, and metabolic transformations vary from moment to moment, year after year, location to location.

In an effort to circumvent this capital obstacle, all secondhand smoke studies have estimated risk using a misleading marker of “lifetime exposure.” Yet, instant exposures also vary uncontrollably over time, so lifetime summations of exposure could not be, and were not, measured.

Typically, the studies asked 60–70 year-old self-declared nonsmokers to recall how many cigarettes, cigars or pipes might have been smoked in their presence during their lifetimes, how thick the smoke might have been in the rooms, whether the windows were open, and similar vagaries. Obtained mostly during brief phone interviews, answers were then recorded as precise measures of lifetime individual exposures.

You could have gotten the same “scientific” results if you had used a Ouija board.

Again, let me stress that I believe smokers and non-smokers should generally be kept apart. I have no trouble at all honoring the request of people that I not smoke in their homes when I am a guest, not light up at a party, or even refrain from smoking in the presence of other people’s children. But the idea that the City of Chicago can ban me from smoking outdoors at a beach (in a designated area away from the crowds) or, as some municipalities want to do, ban smoking on your own property, or in your car, or in your own apartment, is so outrageously illiberal and undemocratic that it is time for smokers to wake up and begin to oppose these fascists and expose the real reason for their fanatical campaign against individuals who have made a choice they disagree with.

It’s not about health. It’s about control.

The various temperance movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries had little to do with the dangerous health and societal effects of drinking and everything to do with controlling the lives of recent immigrants. Not only did the city fathers who backed most of the temperance efforts in their towns want the immigrant workers showing up on the job clean and sober, but the taverns and neighborhood bars where recent arrivals did their drinking were social centers as well. Here, the immigrants were exposed to dangerous ideas like unions, democracy, voting rights, tenant rights, and other notions that did not fit in with the upstanding protestant “work ethic” community leaders were seeking to imbue in recent arrivals. In this way, banning the sale of alcohol was a way to control their workforce - in ways that seem most unamerican today.

For the anti-smoking lobby, it is much simpler; the very human desire to dictate to another how to run their lives. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. For instance, smokers actually use fewer health resources over their lifetime than non smokers because they die earlier - much earlier. Smoking is not a “gateway drug” that leads the way to pot or heroin. The list of falsehoods, bad science, myths, and urban legends about smoking is about what you’d expect from a society that is seeking to alter the behavior of a small minority that, for various reasons, they wish to control. Similar campaigns dot our history from the hysteria surrounding the Salem witches (which was at least partly about a religious dispute in the town where there was a schism between believers) through the wild exaggerations about the dangers of pot claimed by government in the early 20th century (a result of it being seen as a “black” drug). The urge for control of another by dictating what amounts to personal choices has been a common theme in our history.

Why should the non-smoker care? Unless you believe the anti-smoking nannies will cease and desist their efforts at control once they have triumphed over smokers, then you should be concerned what target their eyes fall upon next. It may be something that you wouldn’t want to see stratospherically taxed or regulated beyond any reason. At that point, you very well may preach to me about the dangers of a government in the hands of people who are an anathema to personal liberty. And my question to you will be a pointed “Where were you when my rights were being gouged by these philistines?”

There is no doubt cigarettes are a dangerous product and should be kept out of the hands of children. But adults should be able to make their own decisions in this regard - and accept the consequences of that decision. It is no one’s business why I smoke, why I don’t quit, or even how much I spend on them or how many cigarettes I smoke every day. Those are personal questions that people who would never ask a non-smoker about a behavior they find troubling ask me all the time. I suspect that most smokers are getting sick of it too.

Just as we are sick and tired of being the first place politicians look to grab some extra loot from the taxpayer to fund their pet schemes. Given our status as less than citizens, any protest we make falls on deaf ears. There will be no tea parties put on by smokers (or non-smokers in solidarity with our plight) nor will there be any big name conservatives who will fight on our behalf. So be it. Driving smoking underground will only enrich criminals while making the world a more dangerous place because instead of Al Capone selling beer and liquor you may find yourself responsible for an Osama wannabe who funds his terrorist operations through the sale of illegal cigarettes.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Patrick Ruffini wrote a post on his Next Right site yesterday where he sees a golden opportunity for the GOP to gain some political ground by running on an agenda that includes healthy cuts in the size of government. He believes the GOP is “galivinized” to make cutting government by a third - back to 2007 levels - the centerpiece of a revival even if, as he realistically points out, not much will change given the huge advantage currently enjoyed by liberals in Congress.

It’s an ambitious proposal and is predicated on the idea that people will reject the naked statism being advanced by President Obama and come home to the party of smaller government as a reaction to the bail-out culture as well as the heavy handed attempts by the Administration to gain outright control of companies like GM and AIG.

But will they? Obama still enjoys broad support among the American public and beyond that, you have to wonder how much people really care that government has instituted policies that are destroying the free market and limiting freedom. The small percentage who are paying any attention at all to what is happening in Washington will hear this by Obama and be satisfied:

Let me be clear: the United States government has no interest or intention of running GM. What we are interested in is giving GM an opportunity to finally make those much-needed changes that will let them emerge from this crisis a stronger and more competitive company.

If the lie is told often enough, people will believe it - especially when the media doesn’t think it’s their job to call Obama out for his prevarications. Have you seen any article (outside of the Wall Street Journal and a few reactionary newspapers) or any news broadcast beyond a few CNBC and Fox segments that even discusses the possibility that what Obama is doing is nothing short of a government takeover of GM? If you can fire one CEO, hire another, force bankruptcy, and guarantee warranties, not to mention deciding which “changes” GM should make in their business plan, that sounds an awful lot like “running GM” to me.

But the average voter doesn’t hear any of that. All they hear is the president standing up on national TV and solemnly proclaiming one thing while his Administration is blatantly doing exactly the opposite. The key to any good propaganda is to make the lie believable. And for the moment, the people trust the president to tell them the truth. Right now, people just aren’t that upset with what is going on save the minority of us who are paying a little closer attention to what’s going on in Washington. And don’t forget, there’s another minority of people paying attention who are supporting the President and urging him to do more. Liberal activists have only just begun to hold the president’s feet to the fire and before all is said and done, America could potentially be a place that you and I wouldn’t recognize from just two years ago.

Patrick makes this point in his post:

The end result of this agenda, the size of government at 2007 levels, may seem minimalist in any broad sweep of history, but it is galvanizing in a way it wasn’t before because of the sheer scope of what’s changed in six months. The yawning gap between where we are now and where we were two years ago gives conservatives an ambitious goal to reach for and a reason for being again, even if the end result is little change over time. And if we get a mandate to actually cut government significantly — and I think the public mood will shift there in a few years if not sooner — it might not be that much harder to cut it to below pre-Obama or pre-Bush levels because current levels are so out of whack that people would not be able to tell the difference between that and what the status quo was in the mid-2000s — only that it is change.

Unfortunately, history is not on Patrick’s side. The most conservative president in history couldn’t shrink the size of government. The most conservative Congress in history barely made a dent in the size of government during the 1990’s and then turned around and became the biggest spendthrift Congress in history. “Shrinking” the size of government to 2007 levels can’t be done simply because it is not 2007 anymore. A great tide washed over the country last November and when it ebbs, no one knows where we will be. But there is an historical certainty there will be no road back the way we came. As powerful as the Obama wave seems to be today, even he cannot erase all the contours of what Reagan built many years ago. Similarly, if, as many suspect, Obama’s victory was a transformational moment in history, the next wave of change cannot entirely undo what has been done by his Administration.

The game has changed. Nationalized health insurance is on the way, more top down solutions to education are being contemplated, wholesale changes to business and industry as a result of the green craze will be forced on the economy, the defense budget will be drastically cut, and that’s probably only the beginning. Patrick believes the voter will rebel against these changes. That remains to be seen. But what is certain is that they won’t turn to Republicans for the answers no matter how “galvanized” the GOP becomes.

For Patrick’s proposal to succeed, the word “Republican” will have to be rehabilitated with the voter. The damage done to the party during the Bush years - as Patrick rightly points out - will not be fixed by simply reiterating what the party’s message has been since LBJ’s presidency. It won’t be repaired by offering the same small government mantra no matter how much “big government” is screwing things up. Ruffini points to history to buttress his argument:

The Welfare State mentality of the ’60s that created the conditions for 1980 and 1994 systemically excused bad behavior at an individual level, creating millions of individual tragedies. Obamanomics systematically excuses bad behavior at the wholesale macroeconomic level, creating a vicious circle of irresponsibility with major consequences for every American.

If nothing else, the first 70 days of Obama — with an assist from the last 4 months of Bush — has left government economic policy so off-kilter that it may take a decade or more to fix. Remember that exhausted to-do list? Not a problem any more.

For the first time in decades, Republicans could run on a platform of cutting government by a third and not seem wild-eyed or mean-spirited. When we talk about the dangers of governments running private businesses, we will have contemporary object lessons to teach with, not bogeymen that are decades old or oceans away. When we talk about getting the government out of our lives, more people will nod their head knowing exactly what we mean, having just footed the bill for bailout after bailout, instead of yawning or dismissing it as a non-issue as they did in the prosperous, laissez-faire post-Reagan America.

All of that would be true if the GOP wasn’t totally and deeply discredited as a political party. The difference between 1980 and 1994 and the situation today is that in both those eras, Republicans were competitive across the country. Now, whole swaths of the United States are almost no-go zones for the GOP. Bereft of national leadership, having no counter-agenda that is accepted by the party regulars, and unable to escape the economic legacy of George Bush, Republicans have a lot of work to do in order to be taken seriously - even when they pledge to “shrink” the size of government.

And it isn’t just the map that is the problem. Vital segments of the voting public have decisively rejected the party including the 18-35 age group and Hispanics - two groups who are growing in number and becoming more politically savvy at a time when the Republican social agenda is receding in importance to voters and on issue after issue a decisive advantage accrues to the Democrats. Couple this with the thought that Congressional districts will be redrawn in 2010 with a probable increase in Democratic seats as a result and you have not only problems with party ID but systemic hurdles to overcome as well.

Patrick is not talking about an opportunity for the short term but it is hard to fathom at this point where the GOP can begin to close the gap. Ruffini is attempting to reduce the online activism gap but that too is a long term project. Can these problems be overcome by running on a platform “We are not socialists?” In the end, I think Patrick expects too much of the voter, projects our own anger on to them when I am convinced it will take more than what Obama has done so far to rile them up.

What Patrick has latched onto is an illusion of opportunity. The people aren’t ready. The party’s not ready. The elected representatives certainly aren’t ready for what he is proposing. And before we’re through, history will have a say as well. For that, no one can predict what the outcome of Obama’s assault on capitalism will be nor how well the GOP can respond given the limits imposed on them by their own stupidity and arrogance in the past.