Our Not So Best and Not So Brightest
From Eliot Spitzer to Elizabeth Warren to Fareed Zakaria — what is wrong with our elites? Do they assume that because they are on record for the proverbial people, or because they have been branded with an Ivy League degree, or because they are habitués of the centers of power between New York and Washington, or because they write for the old (but now money-losing) blue-chip brands (Time magazine, the New York Times, etc.), or because we see them on public and cable TV, or because they rule us from the highest echelons of government that they are exempt from the sorts of common ethical constraints that the rest of us must adhere to — at least if a society as sophisticated as ours is to work?
I understand that there is a special genre of conservative Christian hypocrites — a Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, or Ted Haggard — who preach fire and brimstone about the very sins they indulge in. The Republican primary was in some ways a circus as the media had a field day pointing out the ethical inconsistencies of the candidates. But here I am talking about secular elites across the cultural spectrum who simply do not live by their own rules, and yet are often granted exemption for their transgressions because of their own liberal piety — and a more calibrated assumption that the world of blue America (i.e., the media, the government, the arts, the foundations, the legal profession, and Hollywood) will not hold them to account.
Take affirmative action. Over-the-top and crude Ward Churchill at least bought the buckskin and beads to play out his con as an American Indian activist with various other associated academic frauds. But Elizabeth Warren’s “Cherokee”-constructed pedigree was far more subtle — and the sort of lie that Harvard could handle. She more wisely kept to the fast lane of tasteful liberal one-percenters, as she parlayed a false claim of Indian ancestry into a Harvard professorship. So whereas Churchill is now a much-lampooned figure, Warren may be headed to the U.S. Senate. To say that Elizabeth Warren is and was untruthful, and yet was a law professor who was supposed to inculcate respect for our jurisprudence, is to incur the charge of being a right-wing bigot. But reflect: how can someone who faked an entire identity — and one aimed at providing an edge in hiring to the disadvantage of others — not be completely ostracized? Again, Warren was successful precisely because she wore no beads or headband and did not affect a tribal name — the sort of hocus-pocus that makes faculty lounge liberals uncomfortable. It was precisely because she looked exactly like a blond, pink Harvard progressive that Warren’s constructed minority fraud was so effective.
Why would a Fareed Zakaria lift the work of someone else? Time constraints? Carelessness? Amnesia over how and why he reached his present perch? Do such columnists farm out their research or outlines to assistants? Or do they think their liberal credentials outweigh reasonable audit of what they write? Steal from someone else and take a month off work? Even my copper wire thieves out here on the farm would have to pay a bit more if they were caught. Their last theft was about $70 worth of conduit, but I imagine Time pays lots more per Zakaria column.
Or why did Maureen Dowd think she could lift some sentences from someone else and then claim she got them from a friend’s email — especially given her hyper-criticism of less-liberal others? And did she not guess rightly that no one would really care? After all, do we remember the Pulitzer Prize winning Team of Rivals or the fact that far earlier Doris Kearns Goodwin was a confessed plagiarist? When I pick up the Selma Enterprise, I do not expect the cub reporter to steal her report of a DUI accident verbatim from the Fresno Bee. Should I?
That’s a wonderful set of names for some future journalist/book author who undertakes a study of these times. Names that will go down in disgrace. I have half a mind to write Elizabeth Warren a letter and tell her that she can say what she wants to credulous Massachusetts reporters, but her place in history is quite dubious.
Hundreds of kennedies and a warren,OH MY! My lovely state dosent stand a chance! You in the free states rejoice and be vigilant!
Hey what can you do!?
http://ericsprott.blogspot.ca/
I like your letter idea. Might I suggest that you copy said letter to the Boston papers as well?
Dear Ms. Warren,
I have followed your campaign with great interest although I live in California. Your statements are clear indicators of your abilities and ideas, and you will dobutless figure in histories of our time.
I’m a history buff, and the last book I read was a bio of Catherine the Great, a woman who aggressively maintained the enslavement of Russian serfs even while she lauded French rationalists and egalitarians, who indulged in fatuous love affairs, and who pursued an adventurist foreign policy in which much blood was spilled. As the czarina of Russia, she was shielded from criticism by contemporary beliefs in hereditary monarchy and by structures that allowed her to suppress her political opponents. To top it off, one of her most loyal servants was Gregory Potemkin, the man gave his name to the most egregious, false, and wasteful forms of propaganda. It’s all exposed to the broad light of day now that she can’t kill people for pointing out her faults.
Do you think that your frivolous remarks about high cheekbones and luncheons, and your division of society into those who build factories and those who pay taxes, will stand up well to future readers? Do you think that serious future students of America’s indigenous peoples will consider people like you to be heroes or jokes? Today’s credulous mainstream reporters will be long dead, too. Don’t you ever think about these things?
Sincerely,
arhooley
Dear Arhooley,
It is with great pleasure that I received and began to read your letter. However, I was somewhat distraught to find that you began to impugn my impoverished Native American heritage with slanderous denials of my the same.
As you may be aware, and in response to the allegations made against me, I have commissioned a set of Mormon Genealogists to research my ancestry back to the first upright ape. I’m happy to say that my impressive gallery of progenitors is complete and will be published soon. Allow me to give you a hint of my relatives–then please compare them to your long line of scullery maids and butlers. Sniff.
It has been determined that not only am I related to the Cherokee grandmother previously touted, but–surprise!–I’m also related to Catherine The Great. That’s correct: she was my Great, Great Great Aunt. She is a descendent of a small Russian minority tribe known as the “Czar” and, as such, provides yet another Affirmative Action feather for my Senate War Bonnet, if you’ll forgive the phrasing.
I really could go on and on but I must complete this job application to Chicago Law School for a career as a Constitutional Law Lecturer. I’m sure you’re aware of their storied stable of past lecturers, so I won’t drop any names. Moreover, given my new street cred, I don’t have to actually produce or publish anything.
In that vein, I will kindly ask you to refrain from further criticism; as a full 50% minority I am therefore exempt further criticism, just as our president. *Sniff !*
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Warren
Well done, Sir! (ma’am?) I have half a mind to attach your letter as well, with a polite inquiry as to its authenticity. HA!
Ya think you find time to do a rain dance? There’s a lot of corn..er maize a-wasting in the midwest. thanks in advance.
But the names VDH mentions are not the instigators of the decline of our culture. I would look at the sociologists and other corporatist liberal elites who banded together starting in 1939 to move over to Keynesian economics. They included such as Robert M. Hutchins, Paul G. Hoffman, and William Benton, names that are not often mentioned today. I wrote about them in the context of the start of Pacifica Radio here: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/04/pacifica-radio-and-the-progressive-movement/. I lay out their “moderate” conservative agenda, and include how it worked out in action, easily penetrated by the Communist Party from the outset.
Clare you do wonderful work but we should always take an issue back to where it began to affect our America.
Try Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as the beginning of our fall into the tank of Socialist Communisn and the Federal Reserve System as the operating partner to finance us into oblivion, from which we will emerge as as a slave nation and one of many. The New World Order is coming closer to us each day..
No, you have to go back to the first Left-Right confrontation in US history — the 1787 Constitutional Convention. There were numerous problems presented with the Articles of Confederation, but there was only one problem the Federalists were concerned with — the Federal government had no power to tax citizens directly. Under the Articles, the Feds had to obtain funds from the States. Needless to say, this outrage actually gave the States real power in influencing policy. Well, we couldn’t have that! So the Leftists won, and here we are today: citizens in Texas helpless to stop the spending of their taxes to benefit California (and CA will be bailed out by the rest of the States in Term II).
Yeah, we have had an awful run as a country since that disastrous leftist win in 1787. If only the ‘right’ side had won we wouldn’t have had to endure such a successful history as the world’s richest superpower that has offered more opportunity to more individuals than any other country in the history of mankind.
IMHO, the republic’s goose was cooked when Lincoln got away with suspending habeus corpus. All thereafter has been unconstitutional / extra-constitutional elaboration.
Interesting. You should also include Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People), PT Barnum, Big Hollywood studio owners and gossip columnists who began to undermine character’s value in our society and replaced it with superficial flash, charisma, and ability to verbally manipulate people. Following them were the college deans and presidents, especially in business schools, who applied that template to students and further weeded character and ethics out of our society.
It’s really a multifront attack not just one main thrust, but it was all aimed at the same end result: the chaotic society of dunces chasing fame with one hand while holding out the other to government for free stuff.
You obviously have not read Carnegie.
Though I agree with you, Clare (and Al and William) whole heartedly that the root of the problem lies in history; unfortunately we are out of time. I love history and have studied it as well. Research is one of my favorite things to do.
However, VDH is correct in concentrating on the current problems and people. We do not have the time to teach the entire United States a history lesson. We must focus on the task at hand and what people can see and touch, now. People like you and other correct thinking historians can write the books and editorials of how we saved (or lost) the country when we have that leisure. if individuals have not been convienced by paying attention the last three years to the various sources of well thought out connect the dots then they don’t have time between now and the election to catch on and pay attention.
Time is short. Our message must be current and forward looking like VDH or there will be nothing to look forward to.
I agree. Knowing the history can help understand how to unravel this mess but it won’t do it on it’s own. Besides, so many Americans have been dumbed down by the government (public) schools that they probably couldn’t understand an historic perspective so that would be a lost cause.
Since logic is largely, that leaves emotion. Unfortunately for us, emotional manipulation is the Liberal Democrat stock and trade. They have decades more experience and the sociopathic narcissism to exploit the more powerful negative emotions of rage, envy, hate, and the impulse to destroy in order to get their way.
We really have our work cut out for us. Ryan was a good choice for that battle, it’s just a pity he isn’t in the President slot instead of RINO Romney. There was an article in today’s local paper saying Romney is already trying to distance himself from Ryan’s policies. But that’s a whole different argument and I’m sure articles about it will appear here soon.
Blast. My sincere apologies Ione. My browser accidentally put your handle in place of mine. I was trying to address my comment to you. If we could delete comments on here I would have and replaced it with the correct name. Again, my apologies.
“The real” Ione speaking here. Perfectly fine, William. Apology accepted.
“We must all hang together or surely we will all hang seperately”
Actually, I think Ryan is a perfect match for Romney. If he’s not just another RINO; how do you explain:
Ryan voted for TARP – vast majority of citizens lobbied against this only to be ingnored by TPTB
Ryan voted for auto bailouts
Ryan voted for medicare expansions
Ryan voted for housing subsidies
Ryan voted for unemployment extensions
Ryan voted for a national ID
Ryan voted for making the so-called Patriot Act permanent
Ryan voted for No Child Left Behind and Head Start
Ryan voted for economic stimulus 2008 & 2009
etc.
Mr. Hanson has couched his essay in the context of progressives/left, which is definitely fair enough, IMO; but, I think much of what he says applies to both sides of the aisle as it were. That is, Ryan gets credit for being a fiscal conservative, but from my reading of it (e.g. above), he’s far from that; yet, very few are pointing this out.
Time for us to be praying against evil.
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Are you sure what you say about Elizabeth Warren is actually TRUE? Here is an extract from Wikipedia: “The Warren campaign stated she had never authorized HLS to claim her as a minority hire. Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who sat on the appointing committee that recommended Warren for hire in 1995, said that her heritage was never mentioned and played no role in the appointments process.[46][53]
The Brown campaign[54][55][56] has questioned her identification.[54][57][58][50][59] In a campaign appearance in early June, Warren repeated that she had not received any preferential treatment due to her claimed minority status. “I never received any benefit from it. Every single person who has been involved in hiring me has issued a statement to that effect.”[60]“
Yes, and all the criminals on Death Row are innocent….just ask them.
She was listed as proof that Harvard Law was making more minority hires in official federal documents. Legal Insurrection helps explain some of the issue, though I don’t think anyone has pulled together all the strings of her vile little game:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/05/it-was-elizabeth-warrens-intent-and-attempt-that-matter/
This whole issue really gripes me, as I’ve Native American blood on both sides of my family tree and actually, you know, LOOK it – but I’ve never claimed any benefits because as a high school student choosing National Merit Scholarships, I looked into the requirements and determined that there was no way I’d legally qualify as a minority. (and this was pre-Internet, by the way.)
I think if a teenager from a poor working-class family attending a backwater school (graduating class – 73 people!) in Podunk, Kentucky can figure this out, Ms. Warren, a highly-respected legal scholar with Ivy League roots and from an upper middle class family, should be able to do the same. If she’s incapable of that level of legal scholarship, perhaps she’s in the wrong line of business – and perhaps she should rethink her political career as well. Lord knows we have enough incompetents running the government, we don’t need another.
Hahvud’s claim was BS. On what she claimed, they couldn’t claim her as an Indian hire for their affirmative action plan. To be an Indian as that word has meaning under the Constitution and in federal law, you must be able to demonstrate 25% Indian or Alaska Native blood (or have been “adopted” by a federally recognized tribe, though there’s been a bit of a crackdown on “adoptions.” As the casinos became more lucrative more and more blonde-haired former Vegas showgirls and such were turning out to be Indians.). The ticket to ride is called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Birth (CDIB), and here there be money if you know how to work it.
As Otto von Bismarck once said, “Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”
The common denominator here is the media, plain and simple. If they do their job, people are called to account and none of this happens. But they choose not only to not do their job, but to actively engage in waging propagandistic warfare against those they disagree with – Republicans and conservatives. They are worse than Pravda ever was. Pravda’s “reporters” had the excuse of reporting their lies under coercion and the threat of gulag and death. Our media lies enthusiastically and willingly. And the mis-information they provide determines the course our country takes. I call that pretty goddammed presumptive of them, assuming that their province is to tell us what, and what not, to think. I don’t remember voting to give them that authority.
Exactly and precisely. This is why Andrew Breitbart was the greatest threat that our present-day neo-gentry class ever faced. I can only pray that enough of us learned from him in time.
Thank you, Professor Hanson. For a dozen years now you’ve helped me to hold on.
The media are facing a paradigm shift, due to Pjmedia, yourself, and Breitbart, among many others. The old model, or paradigm, can be described as the “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” conundrum. There was a time when strict embargoes were enforced, and when something outside of the narrative happened, there was silence. Now, when a tree like Elizabeth Warren or Joe Soptic falls, instead of silence, we all hear it.
Don’t kid yourself. Go out on the street. Ask the mouth-breathing everyman citizen passing by who Elizabeth Warren is and what she did.
There are a thousand trumpets blaring. The one Breitbart trumpet can’t be heard. And anyway they killed him.
You’re absolutely right, peluat. Some time after Obama was elected, I recall a reporter going out to some major city and asking around 7 or 8 people in the street who the vice-president of the U.S was. I think less than half got it right.
As I went down the list of names that Dr. Hanson produced I was impressed by the fact that there was a particular “common denominator” other than the one that you specify, LGoPs. None of these people ever produced a damn thing. Not one single product or tangible service. They don’t pick up trash or perform brain surgery. They don’t farm or work in a factory or sell shoes. They couldn’t build you a house or repair your plumbing or run a backhoe if their life depended on it. They don’t drive a taxi or fly an airplane. They can’t even be reliably trusted to write a book. The only thing they “produce” is themselves and their ability to game the system for wealth. Any one of them could drop dead and it wouldn’t have any substantive negative impact on the production of anything worthwhile. How’s about “worthless parasites” as a common denominator? Sadly, however, we award these jerks with high office. What’s our defective common denominator?
“They [intellectuals] prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige…They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator… Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas… Hayek put it clearly: “the intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties.” He is interested in visions and utopias, and because “socialist thought owes its appeal largely to its visionary character” (and I would add lack of realism and utopian nature), the intellectual tends to become a socialist.…The free market system does not typically reward those who are, in their own eyes, the most meritorious. Because the intellectuals value themselves very highly, they disdain the marketplace. Markets value them differently than their own eyes and, in addition to it, markets function nicely without their supervision. As a result, the intellectuals are suspicious of free markets and prefer being publicly funded. That is another reason, why they are in favour of socialism…” Václav Klaus
http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=wFYl3mgsTzI6
Perhaps a better statement is that intellectuals who are employees of the government in some way, really produce nothing, but that is not true of intellectuals who work in a private enterprise that is responsible for providing goods or services. Intellectuals are needed in private enterprise, because they are the most likely to come up with innovations. Not that other, non-intellectuals, don’t innovate, rather that it becomes the job of the intellectual. I suppose you could say that intellectuals in government come up with innovative ways to relieve the tax payer of their money, and give it to those who are less likely to take responsibility for their own lives. Liberal government truly believes that it can take care of individuals better than they can care for themselves. It might be ok if they were only talking about those with the absolute greatest need, but unfortunately that is not the case. They are doing it for, or should I say to, all of us, even, or especially those who really should be responsible for themselves.
Agreed. I believe Klaus was referring to government intellectuals and those in “social science” academia.
Our defective Common Denominator is the Uneducated VOTER.
If and when we somehow figure out the method of educating our citizens without it being through a propaganda machine of government implementation then the Nation has a chance of thriving. But as long as we are all walking the line of bigger government we are treading the shoelace of destruction on a daily basis.
Are you ready for the coming revolution, for we are moving towards it with breakneck speed.
It makes no difference who wins the election except for legitimacy of action. If Romney wins then the Conservatives will have a defensive posture and be legitimate. If Obama wins the election the opposite will be true. Either way, the gap that separates the people has been exactly what Obama has been enhancing for the last four years and it will come to the fore with the November elections. Expect trouble, starting by mid 2013.
“The gap that separates the people”…..has been moving to the left for 100 years and with the introduction of the multitude of ruling unelected bureaucrats put in place in new departments and agencies over the past 50 years we are now at a point where it can be said that we are indeed going over the cliff either in a hurry with Obama or less of a hurry with Romney. The congress has effectively abdicated their responsibilities to the constitution, we citizens and we have allowed them, while the MSM, liberal elites, Hollywood, politicians, unions, blithely believe that they are above the fray and will not get caught up in the mess when the house of cards come tumbling down. Of course they are wrong, but such is the realm of hypocrites.
I suspect that you are correct, not sure if it starts blowing up in 2013, but something ugly is most likely coming our way.
The other thing to take into account is how important the person is considered by both the big media and fellow Democrats. In the case of Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren, the former wasn’t considered high enough up the totem pole, so to speak, for the big media to go to the mat for this guy; in contrast, Warren is in 2012, because she’s running for Scott Brown’s seat.
In terms of past scandals, the New York Times was actually in the lead on the Eliot Spitzer and Bob Torecelli scandals, but in both cases, those guys were such egotists they had their own enemies within the local Democratic Party establishments and within the media and the Times and the Dems were almost assured of getting another Democrat in their place if they were removed. The same situation apparently works for Goodwin and Zakaria — Doris doesn’t rub others within the big media the wrong way, or is seen as an egotist, so she gets a ‘get out of plagiarism jail free’ card where Fareed is likely to be knocked back to apprentice pencil sharpener duties because it’s not like there’s not another liberal foreign policy blowhard out there that can’t just be plunked in his place.
“The common denominator here is the media, plain and simple.”
In another forum I have earned the ire of a “journalist” by repeatedly pointing out the absolute corruption of the press. He concedes every point I make, then whines “But I’m a good guy!” Except he does nothing to combat the corruption, and maintains that “journalism” is some sort of noble profession. I guess the Guild protects its own, eh?
I hold journalists to the same standard as I hold the police. No cop is any better than the worst cop allowed to remain on the force. If they hide behind the “blue wall of silence” when it comes to a crooked or brutal cop, then the “honest” cops are no better. So-called journalists are no better. When they turn a blind eye to the abuses of liberal politicians or other so-called journalists, then they’re just as bad themselves.
The military academies have the Honor Code. They don’t always live up to it, but the Code remains: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” It’s a pity more don’t live by such a code.
They worship the creation. Not the creator.
This is the best blog.
I have a special disdain of that smarmy fraudster Fareed Zakaria.
Espousing liberal ideology seems to function as a form of indulgence, allowing unpunished wrong doing.
They have been educated, and even more credentialed, above their intelligence.
…yes, credentialed especially, in our dumbed-down world. The sense of entitlement that goes with the credentials often carries with it a feeling of superiority, invisible to the rest of us. Often, it’s because the nomenklatura, usually self-styled, are still unused to challenge. They deflate fast and often retreat into temper tantrums (a couple of unpleasant examples round here), rather like King Canute’s courtiers.
The rest of us know the old king was correct.
“Educated above their intelligence” – a wonderful turn of phrase that is too rarely credited properly to the great Jerry Clower.
…”having educated himself into imbecility”…Malcomb Muggeridge
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense.
Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own eroto-mania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer.
Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
I’ve thought about this a lot, and wondered. Back 100 years ago, several Supreme Court Justices hadn’t even graduated from law school, and those that had went to Stanford and Trannsylvania, places that real people, non-elite people, attend. Now in our “diverse” Supreme Court, nine Justices attended just two universities: Harvard and Yale. If you didn’t go to law school east of the Berkshires, you don’t get onto the Supreme Court.
The issue of why they think like this is pretty simple, really. It’s entitlement. It’s on a different level from the guy on welfare or food stamps, or the kid getting a subsidy to go to college, job training, whatever. Nevertheless, it’s an entitlement. They’re entitled to rule, be prominent, have very lucrative jobs, and live the lifestyle. I used to live in an affluent neighborhood in Southern California, one of the ones where people live if they’re wealthy and they don’t care if you know (as opposed to Beverly Hills and the West Side, where you’re supposed to be impressed with the fact they can afford to live there). I managed a place that had a coffee bar, and we had regular meetings of the local “Progressive book club.” I always wondered if they met and complained to one another how George Bush wasn’t screwing them hard enough in taxes (people up there are rolling in it, houses are even now mostly multi-million in value, it’s not uncommon for people to have a pool *and* a tennis court in their backyard). The key is that beneath the liberal exterior, pretty much everyone wants to get ahead. If you’re in favor of taxing the rich, and you think that’ll mean you, then you advocate it–and then hire an expensive lawyer/tax attorney to get you out of paying every red cent you can avoid, in taxes. Remember, U-2 is an Irish rock band who’s headquartered in Amsterdam, so that they avoid Irish taxes. Everybody tries to get ahead…
As for Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, I’ve written about this before, but my take is simple. When you get to the point where you command a team of research assistants who do much of the actual writing, you can find yourself in this sort of situation. My understanding is that DKG employs a researcher now who does nothing but compare what’s going into her book with the sources, to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Ambrose, of course, is no longer with us, so that’s he is spared explaining some of his more egregious claims (for instance he alleged to have hundreds of hours of interviews with President Eisenhower, when in fact he apparently only interviewed him a few times). After a while, the writing turns into an assembly line, and the product isn’t quite as impressive.
Btw, Dr. Hanson, I’m 140 pages into “The Soul of Battle” and finding it quite interesting, though I’ll confess to not agreeing exactly with every point you make re: Sherman. Good book though.
When you get to the point where you command a team of research assistants who do much of the actual writing, you can find yourself in this sort of situation.
Surely you don’t mean that’s an acceptable excuse. If you’ve reached the point where other people do your work for you, you can damn well pay the price for falling asleep at the wheel. What special dispensation exempts media-driven academics?
Doris Kearns Goodfraud got what she deserved. Ambrose was more slippery: “Hey, I’m a story teller not an academic”. Yes, but…
Has anyone ever done a study on the political leanings of plagiarists? Most of the names I see are on the left. I’m guessing Alex Haley was a liberal, although I haven’t found confirmation online. The NY Times says he agreed to a settlement over a small passage in “Roots” which he claims was given to him by someone else, while other sources contend he paid another writer over $300,000 rather than face perjury charges threatened by a judge. Does anyone have the real story?
I just remember Haley got caught, and it was notable in that what he wrote was supposedly his family history. When he eventually admitted to copying part of it from someone else’s writing, it sort of took the air out of the whole thing.
As for political leanings of plagarists, I’m afraid I believe theft has no political orientation. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any conservative historians who’ve been caught, but Dr. Hanson is the only historian who comes to mind whose politics aren’t left-leaning, and who’s open about it. I’m sure there are others who are conservative, but when you’re talking about events that are in the past, it’s hard to judge, sometimes.
Martin Luther King, Jr. got caught plagiarizing his doctor’s thesis, refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr._authorship_issues
King is widely presented as a role model for our children. At my kid’s school, they have King’s picture next to Abraham Lincoln’s. At the very least, King’s Ph.D. should be revoked.
Paul Johnson is a conservative historian well worth your time. His History of the American People is the best history of this country I ever read. Johnson appreciates the greatness of America, as sometimes a foreign born, who chose to be an American, can without embarrassment celebrate our extraordinay history.
One problem with the internet is that you have to write /sarc when you’ve planted your tongue in your cheek, or people will miss the inference. I tend to think that a writer should actually write what they publish with their own name on the cover. In the fictional world, it’s gotten to the point that writers have to be honest when they don’t write their books, nowadays (Check out James Patterson, Tom Clancy, et al, and what I call their “sharecroppers”). With non-fiction writers tend to be more coy. If the person is a public official (say a politician or especially an actor or musician) employing a ghostwriter is acceptable, but an actual historian must keep everyone else’s name off the cover if they’re going to have street cred from their work. So they fudge the truth a little.
One would have thought that after killing that girl, Ted Kennedy couldn’t get elected Dog Catcher, but the people of Massachusetts made him Senator for Life; proving that a large portion of the electorate are stupid.
…proving that a large portion of the electorate are stupid. Stupid or just democrat?
There is a difference?
It’s not stupid if being one gets you what you want. Comfortable social status and personal gain. Beyond that there really is nothing else.
Ah yes, Pat me lad. Ted is the absolute best example of what Victor’s piece this week is about. The Homicider of the Senate, alas to roar no more. What was that clamdigger?
These so-called elites are so caught up in the purported nobility of being midwives to a transformed future that they think their personal behavior is not an issue. Only the narrative and their intentions and the professed goals matter. Those of us who dwell in reality and pay the bills for these shenanigans are the silly people who notice that the means used and the consequences are the tangible reality. They are not beside the point in the least.
Professors and administrators in education, K-12 and higher ed, have been actively working to use education to attack the US noetic system via outcomes based education for more than 20 years now. It gets renamed but it never goes away. Obama and his accreditation enforcers of a political transformation have turbocharged it now.
They are experts in getting the media on board because they teach each other that perceptions of reality matter more in impacting behavior than actual reality. So you game all means of communication with the desired messages and appeals to the emotions education has already primed via OBE. And then you get the media not to cover uncomfortable facts. Or you just know they understand that there will be no openings at the prestigious private schools for their own children if they break the code of silence.
And the media would not want their own children immersed in the education systems they have been deliberately redesigning or keeping as hellholes to cultivate grievances that will justify “economic justice for all.”
I had been mulling over why the so-called elite did not care about the ClimateGate emails or what the actual Earth temperature trends are. A little investigation located a recent USGCRP report put out by NOAA, higher ed institutions, and other federal science agencies. Turns out facts do not matter. They have the social sciences and education and access to communicators to go after popular perceptions of the relevant facts.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/
And that kind of official decision to disregard reality will crash any civilization. The cultivation of a so-called common core actually leaves no real core.
One reason our elites get away with such outrages is because they are not challenged on them. Just for one example, where is the Republican outrage over Harry Reid’s slandering of Mitt Romney? Why isn’t the Senate floor full of Republican denunciations of Harry 24/7? Why no calls for his resignation or his censure if he does not immediately come forward with the names of his sources? Why no arguments with and denunciation of MSM reporters over their double standard on reporting such accusations? Republicans, rather than challenging and denouncing our elites, treat them as their social betters, who, if they’re only nice enough to them, and don’t bring up embarrassing things about them, and praise and flatter them enough, might allow them to sit at the cool kids’ table in the school cafeteria at lunchtime. Try expecting more from our conservative leaders, and maybe more will start being expected from our liberal elites.
Most are kowtowed into place by the same media establishment that provides covering fire for the democrats. The problem is that many of our politicians have skeletons, and the media will be oh to happy to parade them out, or even invent them, and make anyone challenging their legislators lives a living hell.
You mean, they’re pussies?
Yup.
You mean Vietnam War hero Tom Harkin?
You are, of course, correct to bring them to book over this, yet I have long wondered if there isn’t a form of battle fatigue supposedly conservative politcos begin to suffer from as the years roll by?
Harry Reid should be forced to testify under oath. If he refuses, or lies under oath, he should be severely punished. It’s pathetic that a ballplayer like Roger Clemens is held to a much higher standard than someone in Reid’s position.
Legislative Immunity. He is protected by Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution:
“…and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
Hey Harry, step outside and say that!
He already said it outside.
In fact, he said it outside the Senate FIRST. Repeating it for a microphone in an empty Senate chamber does not magically give him immunity.
Joe Cor (#11) I am with you, Why has there been no “denunciations of Harry 24/7? Why no calls for his resignation or his censure”? why aren’t Republicans doing around the Clock denunciations of Eric Holder, Why no constant calls for his resignation? And with the breaking News that “Big Sis” is treating the men like “Lapdogs” aren’t there calls for her denunciations 24/7? Why no calls for her resignation? If this was a Republican Administration and the Demoncrats controlled the House they would be doing just that! MSM would be amplifying it 100%
Harry Reid entered the Senate poor and will leave rich. Shouldn’t he be telling the rest of us how to become rich, instead of wasting his time on Romney? Romney doesn’t need the help, but the rest of us do.
Elizabeth Warren making a campaign ad deriding corporations for not paying enough and leaving higher-education students with enormous debt burdens, while she herself draws a $350,000 dollar salary for teaching 1 class two days a week.
“From Eliot Spitzer to Elizabeth Warren to Fareed Zakaria — what is wrong with our elites? Do they assume that because they are on record for the proverbial people, or because they have been branded with an Ivy League……”
To answer in a few words: They are liars and hypocrites and — delusional and brain dead!!!
Time to clean the pond. The build up of scum threatens the ecosystem.
Isnt there an electric shock treatment that can be applied to swimming pools? Can that be applied to lefties this November? And what are the odds that our New Cesar will rename November Obomber,obummer,oppenbomber or something?
I have thought for a while that Fareed may be MB, or just an ISI plant. Is he connected to Huma – does he promote her?
I remember Zakaria advocating a few years ago for the US to abandon Israel in favor of the IRI.
Zakaria is a Foreign National Muslim infiltrator of the West, Affirmative Action hire and should be run out of the country…back to whence he came from.
Zakaria: Don’t fear political Islam
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/06/zakaria-dont-fear-political-islam-yet/
Mr. Hanson, A timely and well said essay. I wanted to say a lot of things here but my cynicism has reached its limit for a while. The only thing I can say is that has it not always been so in human experience? It’s possible that we are in the “let them eat cake period of American history”.
The progressive justification for everything they do is very simple;
Everything proceeds from that premise. Which is easy for progressives to believe in, when they have spent their entire lives in a hothouse culture where the have been fawned over, kowtowed to, and constantly told how wonderful they are for… being exactly like everyone else in the hothouse.
They repeatedly receive rude shocks when their dogmas collide with reality, and reality smashes their dogmas as thoroughly as the English did the French at Agincourt;
The trouble is, whenever it happens, instead of questioning their premises, progressives look around for someone else to blame. If they can’t find someone, they will invent them. (Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” comes to mind.) At no point will they accept blame themselves, or even consider the possibility that they might be wrong.
Eventually, they reach the point where they have absolute power, but things still don’t work. (Jerry Brown and California being a case in point.) And they run out of scapegoats, believable or otherwise. (Believability not being a prerequisite, in their books; it’s only necessary that their Greek chorus, the MSM, parrots it.)
That’s when you can expect the “necessary strong measures” to maintain their power to begin.
It happens about ten seconds before they lapse into Redjac* mode, and start looking around, not for scapegoats, but for sacrifices. Or just victims who they can maim for the sheer hell of it;
(*”Wolf in the Fold”, Star Trek [original series] episode #36, written by Robert Bloch, first aired 22 December 1967.)
It reaffirms their “outlaw chic” philosophy, in that it “proves” that society’s mores and taboos simply do not apply to them. Which is at the heart of their self-constructed belief system, going back to their original premise, stated at top.
Gods are omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and infallible. If something doesn’t work, it has to be the fault of mere mortals for opposing the gods’ will.
Just ask the gods. They’ll tell you.
clear ether
eon
Agreed. When you look closely at the actions and behaviors of top Dems today, it is hard to escape the conclusion that you are dealing with a bunch of lunatics. Every one of the leaders of this cabal is caught up in some bizarre fantasy of self aggrandisement. They see it as their natural right to impose their every whim on us, by coercion and deception if necessary, and as affront against nature if we dare oppose them. Do you remember when Pelosi asked a group that was supporting oil drilling “can we drill your brains”? What kind of question is that? What kind of thought process gives rise to such a question(from a supposedly serious politician)? How utterly oblivious can she be?
And it’s the same thing over and over from every one of these sick individuals! They are utterly careless of the destructive consequences of their actions, in fact, they take pleasure in them, and in some cases, deliberately pursue them. I honestly believe we are dealing with a large collection of clinical sociopaths, to whom we have granted enormous power! If you step back to look at their grand design (if you can call it that), it includes the massive de-industrialization of the United States, the reduction of human life to the most basic survival conditions, steep declines in birthrates, widespread communal violence, global ideological war and a total surveillance society. In short it is 1984 made flesh. These people are deeply anti-human in their souls. The sooner were are rid of their putrid kind, the better. I hope we internalize the many lessons that will come from this experience because their will always be diseased minds out there and we must learn to recognize when they are converging on power that they themselves are centralizing.
” Every one of the leaders of this cabal is caught up in some bizarre fantasy of self aggrandisement. They see it as their natural right to impose their every whim on us, by coercion and deception if necessary, and as affront against nature if we dare oppose them.”
You give the rank-and-file too much credit by limiting this impulse to the lefts’ leaders. It was our own “BostonLib” who declared there simply WILL be gun control, and the neanderthals had better get used to the idea.
The left — from top to bottom — is dedicated to making everyone live according to the lefts’ whims. They’ll talk about freedom, on occasion, but you’ll note they do not permit dissent in their own ranks.
(Don’t believe that? More “pro-choice” Republicans will speak at the Republican convention than “pro-life” Democrats will speak at the Democrat convention. There will not be a single Democrat speaker who mentions “traditional marriage” except as a laugh line.)
“I am God! You will Obey!!”
I really think that you are wrong on this one. They don’t believe that they are God, they believe that they are the Elect, those that are predestined for salvation and intended by God to rule the world and impose correct behavior on the depraved mass of humanity.
This is exactly the world view of the Calvinists who settled Massachusetts in the 1600s and attempted to build a theocracy ruled by the Elect in the New World. Massachusetts had an established state church and you could not vote if you were not a member in good standing until the mid 19th century.
They established Harvard University to teach the leaders of this religious utopia. Harvard continues today to teach the leaders who are destined to rule over the ignorant and depraved masses but they have gotten rid of all the stuff involving God, leaving only the absolute faith that they are a superior group which should rule over their inferiors that that the only immorality is anything that threatens their status or calls it into question.
Are you aware that your second sentence
Is directly contradicted by your sixth?
You have actually hit upon the core fact without realizing it. I don’t know how to break this to you, but our “enlightened elite’” do not believe in any sort of God. (Not even that postulated by Pascal’s Wager.)
They reject any idea that there is anything in the entire Universe more important than themselves, and being thus convinced of their own perfection, they seek to impose their vision of that perfection upon the rest of the world, and to hell with the collateral damage. (Since they define our civilization as evil, that’s a feature, not a bug.)
Being convinced of their own position as the ultimate development of, well, everything, they define the rest of humanity as sheep to be herded as needed, sheared as desired, and to be made into mutton as is pleasing… to them. Saying they regard us as Neanderthals is inaccurate; their opinion of the Great Unwashed is significantly lower than that. (Read the op-ed pages of the New Yorker sometime.)
Back in 1971, in reference to the “Jesus Freak” movement, Hunter S. Thompson observed that “entire empires have been done in by vengeful freaks claiming a special relationship with God”. (The modern Islamists are the definitive proof of the hypothesis.)
Unfortunately, HST overlooked the even greater number of polities destroyed by even more vengeful freaks who believed that they, themselves, were in fact God.
Which is the situation we face today.
clear ether
eon
Perhaps I was inelegant in expressing myself.
Shorter version: Our modern day Ruling Class is a continuation of the theocrats who settled in New England in order to build a utopia in the wilderness. They were absolutely convinced of their rightness and saw any criticism as an attack against all that was good.
The fact that these intolerant theocrats have mutated to the point where they no longer believe in God does not change the way they think about themselves in relation to everybody else or their determination to force us to behave the way they think we ought.
Is it possible to have a theology that does not believe in God? Look at the political left since the French Revolution and you have your answer. A set of beliefs that induces people to sacrifice their own lives and even more willingly the lives of millions of others sure looks like a religion from the outside.
Mark in Texas, more people should read their prerevolutionary history as you did. This stuff isn’t taught in school anymore – and it should be.
Thank you for saying so. What little I know of history is from reading I have done on my own since graduating with a degree in a technical discipline.
The behavior of our modern day elite actually reminds me of the elite of Constantinople in 1204. They were more concerned with gaining advantage over each other and protecting their own turf to the point that they ignored all other considerations and stiffed the western Crusaders who had come to assist them in their struggle with the expanding Muslim powers. After waiting outside Constantinople while the elites squabbled, the Crusaders lost patience and invaded and sacked the city, essentially ending the eastern Roman Empire. A rump form of the empire carried on until it was finally put out of its misery in 1453 but by then it was just another kingdom in Asia Minor.
Wrong. These people do not just worship power for its own sake. They worship the POWER TO DO GOOD!” They know what’s good, they know they’re right, so their goal is to acquire the power they need to implement their plans for “making the world a better place.” They just want to help!
And because they believe their motives are pure and unselfish, they’ve given themselves permission to do all the same crap that greedy bankers and corrupt politicians and military dictators do. The ends justify the means. They will take away our freedom in the name of…freedom.
And we’d better let them help, or they’ll make our lives very, very difficult.
And remember, Bill Ayers wrote that for the rebellion to succeed (That being the ultimat good) that 10,000,000 opponents, that is Americans, must be executed.
Eon,
You are correct, and thanks for the great Star Trek reference.
And here’s another regarding Obeyme kind of leaders: Jim Jones, Jonestown, Guyana, circa November 1978:
A mass suicide: 909 temple members hearkening unto “I am God! You will Obey!” and “Die! Kill you all! Make you suffer!”
Our elites? OUR elites? Speak for yourself, these scumbags certainly do not have anything to do with me in any way, shape, or form.
As a Doctor explained to me years ago…there will always be disease.
We live in an overtly hypocritical government and culture, why single out individuals when the system itself is wrong;
We send billions of dollars in weapons and trade to Saudi Arabia while our soldiers lose life and limb defending their petroleum reserves.
All the while Saudi Arabia funds Wahabbi schools, Hamas, MB, pakistan terrorists, etc, dedicated to overthrow Western society and replace it with Fundamental Islamic Sharia law. We are funding our own demise.
The Federal Reserve wires Trillions to European bankers without collateral or repayment in place, while americans lose their homes and businesses.
Our tax system rewards companies moving labor offshore and maintaining high levels of Debt, while penalizing savings or expanding domestic labor workforce.
The U.S. political system is a floating shipwreck. Lies and accusations serve to generate reactive funding on both sides, regardless how outlandish. Politicians behave in a manner that would never be tolerated in any other industry.
The US economy has been hollowed out since the 1970′s, incrementally and completely in the open. President Nixon installed the petro-dollar system in 1971 which has decimated the US dollar, losing 92% of its value from 1971 to 2010. NAFTA forced US manufacturers to compete with third world industries, which wrecked havoc with the Middle class.
Glass Steagal was passed in 1934 as result of great depression and resulted in the longest period of banking stability in US history.President Clinton repealed Glass Steagal in 1999 which allowed banks to once again lend themselves money to make risky investments, knowing they would never be held responsible. The result was the banking crisis in 2007 after just a few years of unsupervised self lending.
The problem isnt a few dozen individuals, it is the wilful ignorance of the American Voter that allow political leadership to make wreckless decisions without consequence.
In one word on your comments – brilliant!
alex,
I picked up on your, “….the problem isnt a few dozen individuals, it is the wilful ignorance of the American Voter that allow political leadership to make wreckless decisions without consequence.”
Because I believe that the 52% who elected that chameleon Obama did so to …”stick it to th’ man”…that’s literally all that entered their melon-heads. I fear that these 52% will not be swayed by common sense and reality because they have no ability to recognize and react to common sense and they will stubbornly cling to their rude attitudes.
I wish that we’d take the last election as a lesson displaying what happens when the flippant voter has developed the “I’m all right, Jack,” attitudes of the entitlement receiving class, food stamps, welfare Queens and that ilk. I fear that that same 52% couldn’t care less about the Nation so long as the gravy at the Publick Trough is not interrupted.
I keep saying that I remember Franklin Roosevelt…..I say that because I simply cannot remember a single President since then who has caused so much vitriol, and is so roundly divisive.
To Franklin Roosevelt’s credit he steered us along during the Second World War with his half-American friend Winston Churchill…. while our latent wholly Muslim [no puns, please...] Obama here is a direct threat to the safety of our nation.
There simply cannot be a more start contrast to Commanders in Chief during active warfare.
Hasty correction….”who has caused so much vitriol, and is so roundly divisive…”—as our Muslim Barak Obama here who is demonstrably not on America’s side.
The “disease” of Democrats involves thinking words do not mean anything other than what they want them to mean. When the so-called elite are caught in their obvious lies and distortions, it is not their fault but, as with Obama, the blame for the mistake lies elsewhere.
Living a lie naturally leads to telling lies or distortions because the end justifies the means.
Even the title “elite” is misleading but cherished by these thieves because the word itself validates their status among their peers. The rest of us, the majority, are not worthy to be near them but to accept their ideas and words without question.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
They’re all Marxists.
Deep down inside of everyone of us is the fundamental idea of God. Not man, but God. The reason the left and the others of that looney spectrum can not face the Taxed-Enough-Already Party is because of their guilt – morally and SPIRITUALLY. They would have to look at themselves deep and it terrifies them. They’d rather live THE BIG LIE. It is easier, and it is their livelyhood. There are some that will come out soon. Glenn and others are going to make that possible for them. That’s right – go Beck!
Great indictment, Mr. Hanson. The sheer gall and hypocrisy of the modern left would steer me away even if I could be persuaded any of their positions are valid.
And let me add my observation, over the last 30 years, that the most vocal and militant blacks in academia tend to be very light-skinned in pigment and very bourgeoisie in life style, thus relishing the privilege and prosperity they condemn in the larger society. Think Jeremiah Wright, who retired to a large suburban home in Tinley Park, Illinois, well away from the inner city where he maintained his pulpit. A friend of mine many years ago remarked that Ishmael Reed, at the time one of the hippest of African-American writers, was the only writer to show up at a writers conference wearing a suit, and was very middle class in demeanor.
what is wrong with our elites? Simple, they live in a echo chamber where the members of the club regurgitate each other. This true in any group that do not allow dissent such as modern day academia or an intolerant church. There is only limited way to defend/articulate discredited viewpoint. Especially hard for individuals with limited Intelligence who get caught pretending.
What is wrong with our elites?
When they get caught:
They are never prosecuted to the letter of the law.
They buy their way out.
Also, we the people can never believe that they could be so bad. Give them another chance.
I say hog wash. Look what that attitude has created.
Our so called liberal progressive elites consider themselves a vanguard party in the same way the Bolsheviks did. The massses are too stupid, too ignorant, not suffiently class conscious to make decisions/ come to the correct conclusions by themselves. Someone has to think for them. As in the USSR, this leads people to do the least and worry only about themselves and thier own families rather than their communities. The past is prologue.
But here I am talking about secular elites across the cultural spectrum who simply do not live by their own rules, and yet are often granted exemption for their transgressions because of their own liberal piety
Double standard, I am Leftist.
…work the system of exemption that assumes loud liberal credentials allow one to live a life quite differently from the one professed.
Part of elitism is a concept of Self as superior and, therefore, lying to the Neanderthals is ok as they drag us kicking and screaming into their enlightened paradigm.
Which isn’t, of course, enlightened at all. Which isn’t, of course, how they themselves, our self-proclaimed betters, live at all.
Through false claims (Warren, Churchill), they try to fit themselves into acceptable categories that will raise their creds in the elite index and, just coincidentally, get them some designated affirmative action gig.
In some cases like E. Warren, mental illness isn’t far fetched. If Mass. selects this woman, egads, but Mass. has given us some doozies in the past, so I won’t hold my breath.
Does the profession of cosmic morality by design allow one to enjoy without guilt quite earthly sins?
Ask Hollywood. Absolution through lip service.
First, when the left-wing media ceases to scrutinize public figures, the latter are emboldened to fabricate, cheat, plagiarize, and flat out lie.
BHO lies to us with almost every breath, every single day,
It is stunning, and saddening, what he isn’t called on.
Our civilization is under assault. Those who have taken upon themselves to direct it are instead doing their own part to destroy it.
Bottom line.
IMHO progressivism in the English-speaking world is rooted in what, in England, would be called the dissenting religious demonimations. In these, it is important to be Saved. When you are Saved, your actions don’t matter in the way that the actions of those who are not Saved does.
Thus you talk the talk of the Saved, showing to others of the Elect that you are too, and what you do is consecrated.
Thus Al Gore, who is Saved (and busy raising your consciousness to his level) can live in whatever house he wants to and fly as many times to events to raise your consciousness as he wants. All he has to do is continue to witness that he is Saved (and that you are not).
Thus, criticising these peoples’ actions misses the point: they are Saved and that is that.
There is another aspect to that tradition. God shows his favor to the Elect by rewarding them with financial blessings in this world as well as salvation in the next. It is not just OK for them to do well, it is proof of their membership in the Elect. Al Gore’s wealth is proof that he is one of the Elect and is saved. Likewise Franklin Raines, the Kardashians and George Soros have evidence of God’s favor in this world.
The only comfort in all of this is that God in his infinite will sort it all out in the end.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
Cold comfort when you know the means by which the Lord will do his final sorting and you have a 2-year-old.
And please don’t forget Nancy Pelosi, who has made a fortune on all of the insider stock trades she participated it as Speaker of the House. You can read about it here: http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/pelosi-stock-insider-60minutes/2011/11/13/id/417848
These liberal hypocrites probably think that any type of cheating or lying is justified as long as they continue kicking back some money to their home state in the form of grants or pork. The corruption helps them get re-elected and their cheating helps them get rich. Everybody wins, right?
Well, not quite. Problem is, the money in Congress comes from somebody and that somebody is YOU. So if you’re sick and tired of subsidizing these bums, vote them out of office in November.
And before any trolls out there start bleating like sheep that there are lots of corrupt Republicans out there that behave the same way, I say to you, “What’s your point?” If they are corrupt, they are voted out of office as well. But you have to start somewhere if our government is to work better for all of us, so we can start reforming things by throwing out the bums who got us into this financial mess. And that means voting CONSERVATIVE as much as possible and get as many Tea Party candidates elected as possible. The new wave of Tea Party members in Congress ARE making a difference and have stopped the Democratic spending in its tracks. But to pass conservative legislation, we need to control all of Congress, not just the House. If we can do that, then there will be some real change in Washington, and that would be Nancy Pelosi’s worst hightmare.
When morals are absent, proper behavior only comes from the cops. If the cops let you speed, you speed. If oral sex is not sex, indulge. If you can get away with lying, lie. A dreadful lack of integrity infects our leaders and cops are not the answer.
True.
What the hell happened to the William Buckley’s and the like???? They vanished from the political scene and have been replaced by..well….dont know quite how to put it without incurring legal liabilities. Did you ever see William Buckley behaving like a grunt on television???? NEVER.
But I agree with you. Liberal elites in the US, UK and other western countries have become insipid, ambivalent and weak.
They pander to the PC crowd and often refuse to see what is all too evident.
I beg to differ Dr. Hanson. People like Warren, Pelosi, Obama, Zakaria, and Couric are not our elites. They may be liberal elites but they are not our elites.
Our elites are people like Justice Clarence Thomas, Raul Ryan, and Dr. Victor Davis Hansen – people whose spoken words are a result of deep thought and consideration.
That’s why I usually describe people like those in your first paragraph as “self-designated” elites.
That they’ve achieved prominence at all is a sad commentary on our times.
Just because a person shows up in a limo, wears a $5,000 suit and gets pampered by all their hangers-on is no requirement for me to respect or even acknowledge them.
I am a free man. I have the right to worship at the temple of liberalism, or walk away. It’s when I do the latter that the liberals pitch a fit, is it not? Thus, their problem is twofold. One, they do not recognize their behavior for the folly that it is and two, they cannot detect real and utter honesty when it hits them in the face.
Yes. The so-called “elites” are sewer trout. All of them.
I suppose this is why conservative journalists, like Mr. Hanson are more intelligent than their liberal counterparts. Liberals can just put themselves up on a pedastal and claim to be so smart, conservatives have to keep reaching, learning, working hard, and debating to make their case.
As mentioned by Dr. Hansen and other commentators, none of this happens if the press does its job. However, an example of what the press thinks its job is was a recent commercial I saw for Brian Williams during the Olympics. In said commercial, one of the things he said was “These are complicated issues which we have to explain to people”. Right there, that tells me that at least Brian Williams and NBC has lost sight of the job of the press, which is simply to report, not explain. Now I don’t mean the talk show hosts and opinion shows, I mean just the basic nightly news- Brian Williams thinks its NBC’s job to “explain” things, and of course said explanation comes through the lenses of partisan politics.
The liberal press, somewhere between Huntley-Brinkley and Edward Murrow to the present, decided that their job was no longer bound even in appearance, to an ethical sense, or to patriotism, or to “good” citizenship, or even to faithfully representing all sides of an issue, but rather, to help advance their own personal political preferences or the preferences of their organization.
The only solution to this is to read and/or watch many different sources, understand EVERYONE’s personal biases, and if they claim they don’t have one, or if they won’t tell you what it is, then disbelief (if not outright derision) is the only sensible response.
… what is wrong with our elites? Do they assume that because they are on record for the proverbial people, or because they have been branded with an Ivy League degree, or because they are habitués of the centers of power between New York and Washington, or because they write for the old (but now money-losing) blue-chip brands…
In the way the all powerful Ivy League brand is used, one must expand the prestige list to include Stanford, Georgetown, USC, MIT, Northwestern and a few other “elite” universities, all private. Hell, the engineering schools at Stanford, MIT and even USC far outstrip any Ivy League school in the northeast corridor as far as real results, so how can they be excluded from the sphere of prestige brands?
But, in the context of this VDH essay the measure is the effect a person having the brand is what really counts, cuz it has an enormous effect on the school’s alums aggregate ability to influence the course of the nation. Forget that nearly all our presidential nominees are from Harvard or Yale, or that there is a stratum in the permanent gubmint whereby leadership is mostly Ivy Leaguers. State and CIA are Princeton, Justice is Columbia, Harvard or Yale, and so on. This is not just in terms of Cabinet Secretaries, the pattern extends well down into the senior management of every agency, and has for at least a century.
The operating theory is that alums from pedigree diploma mills are smarter people who are better educated. You’d have trouble believing this based on national policy we’ve seen from them. Indeed, the body of policy these branded elite people has become increasingly detached from reality, a fatal flaw that can only be attributed to either a limited ability to perform deductive reasoning, bad intent, or both.
This is a critical problem that is easily documented but never discussed and researched. A non-Ivy Leaguer who would publicly criticize the ill effects of this would suffer ad hominem butchering on the assumption that the criticism was made out of jealousy. When I entered the computer business and moved to Boston. I was shocked to discover two terms were in common use: Ivy League Moron and Ivy League Survivor. After meetings, Ivy League Moron was frequently used in the hallway. And the concept behind the use of the unflattering term was true; it was taken as true and dealt with accordingly, to the ability a NJIT grad can take on such a person (using my IT example). I was stunned that this duality was also applied to MIT alums, many of whom I worked with. The whole idea was, and still is, that most the poor people were fast tracked to the upper echelons even though their performance was mediocre. Multiply that by 10, at least, for Ivy League Morons working in government.
For every Art Laffer, there are hundreds of Clintons (Yale); for every Thomas Sowell or Peter Ferrara, there are hundreds of John Roberts (Harvard), for every Sam Alito, there hundreds of Paul Krugmans (Princeton), and so on. This phenomenon goes on and on and on unquestioned, and is extremely damaging because it takes performance-based competition and personal accountability out of government policy. It also places enormous influence over events into a group of a few hundred professors. Worst of all, prestigism [no sic] is a self-reinforcing phenomenon.
It is apparently impossible to stop this, cuz Ivy League Survivors are loathe to criticize and cheapen their own cachet; I already mentioned why non-Ivy Leaguers don’t even bother to try.
Btw, the Ivy League engineering schools – Stanford, MIT and USC – are much less of a problem because most of its alums go into business, where poor performance tends to be corrected. But when people from there go into gubmint and take part in national policy, even that’s growing. If you doubt this, may I present you Steven Chu.
If you doubt this, may I present you Steven Chu.
The Nobel prize winning physicist who suggested we paint our roofs and roads white to combat global warming ?
The guy whose dept. of energy shoveled millions in loan guarantees to Solyndra and other green boondoggles and was trying to schlep another $400 million or so Solyndra’s way as the company was going down the drain ?
The idiotlogue who, like his boss, wants US gasoline prices to soar to European levels/$10 gal.?
The ineffectual and useless guy whom Barry kept citing as “brilliant” as the gusher in the Gulf spewed on? (I wanted Chu to swim down there and plug the hole, personally.)
That Steven Chu?
That he publicly crowed for $10 gal gas and got away with it stands as proof of the great power of credentialing. Or, prestigisming, as I like to call it.
And why not, in his case? Nobody ever sits around and talks about Nobel dumbasses.
One thing we can do is refuse to hire them. One of the biggest consumers of the “credentialled” is government and conservatives/Republicans control over half the state governments. Frankly, a Republican governor is nuts to hire an Ivy League lawyer, at least unless their families have been friends for a few generations, or an elite school MBA. My personal preference would be to make all MBAs work the harvests on a thousand calorie a day diet for ten years and then those that survive can apply to have their citizenship restored. If you could get Republican officeholders to actually pay attention to governing, they could instruct their HR people to review all their government’s job classifications for unnecessary or inappropriate credentialling. A degree, any degree in any subject, will put you at the lower middle or above in most any job family right out of school whether you know anything about the work or not. This gives you about a ten year head start over the employee who works their way up on actual job knowledge. A start at the middle of the job family has you in a supervisory role in five years or less, another five or so at that level and you’re in management. At ten or twelve years you’re participating in policy-making and from that level all it takes is the right cocktail parties and a few checks and you’re making policy. That kind of career progression probably isn’t problematic for an accountant or a budget analyst, but when you take someone with a bachelor’s in “Environmental Studies” and ten years from smoking dope on the floor of their college dorm room put them in a policy making role, you can have real problems. The only consumer of the “Studies,” political science, communication, and business administration degrees that will offer them a starting job that allows an independent existence is government; in the private sector the most those degrees will get you is a retail or service job unless you know somebody.
I understand the reasoning that the degree offers some assurance that the person will at least be able to sit in one place for awhile and I’m more aware than most of how expensive and time consuming actual hiring standards can be, but the schools are using government credentialling to install mind-numbed lefties in the mid-level clerical, technical, and professional positions of government and placing them in a position to thwart, leak, and sabotage Republican governments right out of college and do far worse in a few years. It isn’t hard to fix, but it is hard to get Republicans to pay attention to stuff like this and the push-back from the bureaucrats can be pretty hard, but all you have to do to them is threaten to fire them and they’ll sit down and shut up; nobody’s going to risk their job for the FNGs.
One thing we can do is refuse to hire them.
That would require a big consciousness raising based on the pitch that pedigrees foment bad policy and unaccountability, which must be stopped. But, until the RINOs sing that tune, no progress can be made. Don’t expect it from Mitt; he doubled down on Harvard, so he’s out.
Well, at least Romney didn’t go Ivy for his VP. Miami of Ohio is a front-rank school but I wouldn’t place it among the snobby elite of the Ivies, Stanford, and the University of Spoiled Children (USC).
My own view is that we’re a long way from doing more than hold back the tide at the federal level, though a thorough re-drawing of the federal org chart would do a world of good. There is a lot of opportunity in the Republican governed states, especially now that it has been shown that taking on public employee unions doesn’t bring about the end of the World as we know it. The left really are paper tigers; like celebrities are famous for being famous, the left is powerful for being thought powerful.
Hey Art, I almost totally agree with you but what happened, did you go to UCLA or something? You really seem to have it in for USC and I think your grouping it with Harvard and Stanford is not an accurate representation. My daughter went to USC and it seemed to me that at least half the kids there were pretty down to earth and conservative in their view aka a realistic view of the world. When I visited I noticed that half the parents were like me, ones that had done pretty well runninng a business or something and working their butts off all their life so their kid could get a good education. These were of course the parents of the kids that did not act like they were born with silver spoons. The other half of course were well to do professional Liberal types and their kids followed with their examples. There were also a lot of Asian kids, and I would put them and their parents with the conservative group. Its location in South Central LA also does not lend itself to isolation from the real world. Harvard or Stanford it is not. I know of what I speak because I also had a step kid at Stanford. He was he son of my ex Liberal wife from San Francisco. Talk about a town out of touch with reality. Palo Alto and Stanford is a million miles in every way away from South Central and USC. I think Dr. Hanson would agree with me there. Like Dr. Hanson I too have spent a day or two at the cafes of University Avenue in Palo Alto. I think you will find more “spoiled children” you talk about in Palo Alto. Bright yes, but still spoiled, and living in a very thick Liberal bubble. In all schools of course there are exceptions like in the engineering schools for example – Stanford and USC included. Does UCLA have an engineering school? If so I have not heard of it. ;-)
If you get in, you get out so long as you can fog a mirror, show up occassionally, and have someone who’ll pay. If you’re a minority, even the first two aren’t rigid requirements. Really, the only thing the Ivy or other elite school credential demonstrates is that you were among the chosen. Unfortunately, The Chosen are particularly viscious in protecting their brand and taking steps to keep it valuable. Just look at the over-credentialing of federal jobs; you practically need a PhD to get a GS-7 clerk job. Well, filling in the right block on the Affirmative Action form will qualify you too.
I reckon 50 years ago you could forgive a thinking person for dabbling in collectivism/statism. Now however such schemes of societal organization have been forever proven abject failures. Yet supposedly thinking democrats insist a system presiding over the incomprehensible debt of 16 trillion we have and an unfunded mandate to come beyond all measure … is a good system. A superior system. A humane caring system. No plainer example of human madness can be shown. The Four Horsemen are about to ravage the earth.
Now however such schemes of societal organization have been forever proven abject failures.
To elaborate on your point:
- How did socialism turn out in China, Russia, Eastern Europe, the now failing EU, and what are the results from the recent moves by Norway, Sweden and Canada from away from statism?
- Mitt and Paul should axe this question at the end of every speech: What makes more sense, a few thousand central bureaucrats making key economic decisions remotely, with no personal financial stake in them, or millions of business leaders making local decisions with their personal money on the line?
How has Canada moved away from statism? Are they taking some baby steps?
They still have a bloated bureaucracy, a state controlled medical system, (Canadian high-rollers and not-so-high-rollers routinely come to the USA for medical care) and some rigid financial controls for private citizens on retirement savings plans, not to mention stifling taxation everywhere you look, such as the HST.
If there are reforms, I’d be curious as to what you are referring to. The TFSA?
This is not a challenge; I’d be happy to be informed of any developments I am unaware of.
But none of this should be any surprise given that we live in a post-modern world that sees truth as relative and the ‘text’ as a starting point for deconstructing and reconstructing the narrative. Morality? Just a cultural construct. Ethics? A quaint concept from our primitive religious past. Doing the right thing? Wasn’t that just a Spike Lee movie?
42. DD
Boy that must be painful.
These faux elite charlatans of “gaming the system” and who’ve not produced anything substantial…who’ve produced nothing but ephemeral vacuous bullsh*t, should be judged by the standards required of Air Traffic Controllers monitoring the very aircraft these “gamers” are sitting inside en route to their next $100k speaking engagement: Accuracy and Mental Stability. It’s not how many living beings these Controllers have not physically harmed, it’s the way they go about their vital daily-shift business. Those named here in this article simply aren’t “vital” in the sense of being needed. They’ve all,indeed, so very “cloudy”. There’s no “there” within them.
We’ve permitted this evolving and ever multiplying shallowness ourselves. The trouble is in the circular media-oriented political system in which we’ve permitted the media tail to wag the rest of us.
We’re, dear Readers, faced with a circular, mindless, social system that seems to have no end in sight. Think of the coming election…….what are those flippant, mindless 52% who enabled the likes of that Chameleon Obama to take that chair in the White House, of all places, without any apparent vetting…..going to do? Can they be turned into intelligent voters….look closely who they are…..it’s not likely. We run that potentially disastrous and stunningly risky result of actually re-electing that Chameleon-Charlatan. How could we permit this travesty to happen? Why has not Obama been impeached? Obama makes smilin’ Billy Clinton look like a starched choirboy singing off-key….just a little bit…..some of the time.
I throw up my hands. Apparently there’s a pox on all of us.
Heavens, I read that first paragraph of VDH’s excellent article and thought Cicero himself was back — alive, well, in the mood and very miffed. Perhaps he is.
The comments and the article add up to a massive indictment of the way things are — many enemies of freedom, multiple targets. The Founders would not be happy.
Somewhere in all this, as always, is post-modernism: if all morality is based on arbitrary rules defined by arbitrary elites, well, who am I to argue? All I have to do is look after my own interests, then lie if caught. Harvard’s loathsome ‘situational ethics’ will get you there. Hell, play it right and you can end up in the WH. This really isn’t complicated — easy even, for the tainted-but-tinted like Fareed Zakaria and Obama, if you believe the ends justify the means and you have a good address book.
But — to run the risk of Job’s comforter — beware pride. Many Republicans are dipped in this sh*t too, particularly the kind who actively support Romney superPacs — ‘suck it all up, you can’t make omlets without breaking eggs, if we don’t they will, blah blah blah’.
The smear machines and special pleading eventually collapse under their own weight, as always. Plenty of examples, multiplying fast, that business-as-usual, today, here in the US, is yesterday’s game. Future historians will decide, but a critical turning point may well be Sarah Palin: mighty machines on both sides of the fence tried to destroy her, using every tool except the assassin’s bullet — and they all failed, a massive blunder that made her stronger.
Nobody knows where this leads, but we will soon find out
Please people, it is time to take the old dusty black book down from the shelves and read it again. ‘The mystery of iniquity’ is a theme running throughout its pages. Evil has stalked the earth since the dawn of civilization and it ebbs and flows according to man’s will. Obviously a great darkness descends upon our planet. God has allowed us the freedom to destroy ourselves and we have taken it. The tide cannot be turned. None of us were going to get out of this alive anyway. But we can preserve out eternal souls and perhaps turn some from their eternal damnation. Prophecy is at the very heart of Judaism and thus Christianity. Christ quoted prophetic scripture throughout his ministry. Then he capped it off with Himself as the Capstone. The earth is near to plunging into the greatest conflagration of all time and man shall reap what he has sewn.
There is no pre-tribulation rapture. Scripture is plain and definitive on this subject. We who call ourselves by His name are here to witness to the world. Prepare yourselves. Cease all this worthless political blathering and endless debate. Take up The Cross and bear it with pride. Thy Kingdom come Lord.
Conservatives cry out continually for the cause of ‘objective truth’. But do you really? Do you really?
A fellow golfer, former high school math teacher said, “That’s it, Romney will not get my vote after picking Ryan. Ryan wants to overturn Rowe v Wade and I’m strongly anti-abortion and pro choice.”
I said, “Who told you that?”
He replied, “My mother, she heard it on the news.”
I said,”It isn’t true but I can’t argue with you about your abortion position.”
This is the same guy who said, “I thinks Obama is doing a good job and my favorite president was Jimmy Carter and I also liked that actor guy.”
Who let these people in the classroom?
Add Ben & Jerry’s left-wing poseur leadership, for kicking off the lefty lying season with the fact-less assertions that Occupy Wall Street, never ever attempting to filter out the violent, anarchist Black Block wing or the rapists in the movement, is “non-violent.” I have repeatedly called for a boycott of them until this happens. And what will Occupy’s inspiration, Elizabeth Warren, be held accountable for regarding this movement’s violence during her high-profile keynote? Nothing probably, but disgusting. Brilliant piece Mr. Hanson!
It is quite fun, actually, to always substitute “elitists” for “elites.” And, more accurate.
When I listen to, watch, or read the words of the liberal elites who are truly convinced they are above the common laws of morality, truth, and honor because of their ideological status among their peers, I form the image of each in my mind as a reincarnation of Diogenes of Sinope. He lived in a large jar type vessel with his dog, he urinated and defecated in public, went unwashed and insulted passers-by with impunity. Yet, among many of his peers of philosophers and intellectuals, he was considered an equal and his infamous search “for an honest man” became his identity in history. I see the same behavior coming from the current crop of liberal, leftist elites. The difference is that the liberal elites of today live in expensive homes, earn salaries that place them in the 1%, have no experiences with the actual poor they claim to represent, will lie to further their agenda, and their “carbon footprints” are larger by 1,000% than the unwashed and uneducated masses they look down upon.
They feel no compassion for opinions or beliefs other than their own and will tolerate no dissention without derision and ridicule of those who express or support a different philosophy or ideology. If one speaks in opposition with the truth, they, in their arrogance and self-absorbed sense of superiority will willingly distort the truth, tell an outright lie, or as in the case of the president (with a small “p”), author (?) a fictional autobiography using composites that are not based in reality but wishful thinking, learned at the knee of a self-proclaimed communist, in a home where his maternal grandparents were both communist sympathizers and socialist ideologues, and nurtured by everything we find abhorrent and in direct opposition to the values of the ones who sacrificed to build this country.
What can we expect when it is a proven fact that all of the media with the exception of a few are avowed Democrats and once the emperor or media in this case with no clothes is revealed, their actual political leanings are decidedly more liberal than any other profession in America. How can we expect the crimes of lies and purposeful deceit by the liberal elites be exposed by the media when they would be guilty of turning on one of their own? The truth is expendable when defending the home turf and no rule book to turn to when deciding how to parse the words of a report that will portray a less guilty opponent in damaging terms over extolling the righteous behavior of acceptable lying of one of their own?
Case in point. After the revelation of the assembly of lies and fabrications in Obama’s book, “Dreams from my Father” were published, there was no outcry from the media almost without exception. Yet, if Mitt Romney had written the same book, the outcry and outrage from the media would be relentless and unmerciful. If one thinks the circus surrounding the release of Sarah Palin’s emails was equivalent to piranha’s feeding on a small animal, the media would become a school of great white sharks, devouring every morsel they could manage to find in their attempt to thoroughly and finally destroy the man. If anything, the liberal elite will cut their own wrists and purposely spill the blood of their lies into the water surrounding Mitt Romney hoping it will attract every media shark in the ocean to feed upon his body.
This is going to be the most negative and bloody campaign in modern history. Count on it.
Damn near everything has been dumbed-down since the 50s-60s but especially education. That is why we have millions of Americans who cannot analyze and reason logically and who are ignorant of history, such that the con artists of the left can promise them Utopia and there’s no down side for them even when they demonstrably fail, every time. “Something for nothing” is their mantra and the suckers swallow it whole and keep coming back for more.
Good point. The media are the proximate problem because they’ve been heavily penetrated by leftists, but education has also failed us dismally. Why, some high school graduates don’t know how to pronounce “corpsman,” think Austrian speak “Austrian,” and are unclear on the number of states. Imagine.
Occam’s Beard said:
Why, some high school graduates don’t know how to pronounce “corpsman,” think Austrian speak “Austrian,” and are unclear on the number of states. Imagine.
I would point out that some Ivy League Doctoral-level graduates have the same limitations in their education. Imagine they could possibly be considered Presidential material by an honorable, responsible political party. Oh, wait… never mind, I was confusing the Democrats with a political party.
tom
These are the same people who are now engaged in wholesale war against “for profit universities”, that is to say, the only ones someone with a job may attend. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that they all put papers through “Turn it in” or similar automated systems which instantly detect the kind of blatant plagiarism they seem to be engaged in…
I’ve never encountered a progressive who was familiar with the concept of contrition – except in those few cases where they sincerely regretted not stomping their boot on some scapegoat’s neck with enough vigor.
there are degrees of stupidity.. if you are a small time crook stealing ideas from your colleagues to look smart, you will get caught because people who came up with those words are wiser than you to begin with.. you’ll be shame and loose your job.. you are stupid!.. now there is a higher degree of intellectual dishonesty if you know nothing about Iraq nothing about war but you neocon your people into war frenzy, hundreds of thousands of lost lives.. if people still fall for your words because they sound nice but utterly false, then people are stupid
When those in charge of an enterprise do not hold their employees accountable -the bottom line – for misdeeds and non-compliance with contract of employment leads finally to bankruptcy of the enterprise.
In America it is We The People who are in charge of the enterprise. Represented – represented only – by those we elect to service in our name. We The People have for a very long time elected to that representation persons we KNOW are unworthy of us as American. Because they have pretty faces, a nice line in patter, give good speech and are drum beaten and trumpeted by socalled best and brightest to induce Americans – common Americans – to elect/employ them for Congress, Judgeships and Executives. A Sickness of the soul of America in following the guidance of persons like those in the article who are themselves little more than parasites, frauds and embezzling psychopaths.
That they call themselves elite, best and brightest does not make them such. Any more than their calling themselves democrats, feel your pain compassionates and liberals makes them that.
They also consider themselves Blues, as in blood. We The People must remember that blue blood is deficient in oxygen. The bearer of blue blood too often too weak for the robust efforts required of enterpreneurs who make things happen. And that Red blood of the common, the ordinary, is replete with oxygen, energy and CAN DO.
Is it that the Blues are resentful of the Reds because they CAN DO more than talk if not hindered by controllers that they wish to “transform” the economic and social structures of the commoners of America? That social structure that says they are not special just because born of rich and privileged families. Or are they fearful of competition from the redblooded that they congregate in gangs. To menace the redblooded to discourage them from trying, creating, competing, working and winning? To flex their muscles?
Or is it that they know as Ronald Reagan is reported to have said, “God must have loved the common people he made so many of them”.
I recently finished a study of ancient Greece, particularly Athens, the alpha dog of that era. (A subject upon which Dr. Hanson is an authority.) In a time of troubles, their elite held a show trial of an uppity guy who questioned their dumb decisions, and sentenced him to an excruciating death. The mentally challenged sentenced Socrates to death. His two axioms demanded that people think, and hold to moral convictions. This made him extremely unpopular with the immoral elite. His final words, “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways–I to die, and you to live. Which to the better fate is known only to God.” Within years, Athens was destroyed, and never recovered.
America’s present situation is not unique. It is important not to listen to dumb, lousy people, particularly if they are in high places.
There certainly has been a decline in the quality of our elites. It’s not just that say, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is bad, but who in their right mind thought she’d be an effective spokesperson for the Democratic Party? At best she’s a backbencher, not the face of the left side of the aisle. And Tom Friedman used to be readable, he’d have a decent analysis of a situation (his conclusions were wrong though) but now he’s reduced to fantasizing about a dictatorship in America.
Mob rule, VDH, has only internal rules, not external ones.
Radical leftism is not liberal and being a made man in the Chicago Mob may make you powerful, but it doesn’t make you elite and it most assuredly doesn’t require that you manage uphold any of the Ten Commandments, breaking them is a feature not a bug on your resume.
The leftists have successfully given us their Fabian Socialism in good, hard doses. They thumb their noses at being held accountable, because those mandated with “policing” all sides fairly, are on the take.
So, we get our present Government by Ambush, trained years ago when they would storm into the personal lives of bankers and force them into capitulation…give junk mortgage money…or we will harass you into submission, buddy. Obama was a puppeteer pulling the strings behind the scenes, as he always does.
When Barney Frank and Chris Dodd took that ball and ran it through the goal posts at Fannie and Freddie, the die was cast for the big collapse. Frank, Dodd and the leftist Congress escaped the scrutiny, because the crooked “defenders of the realm” were all screaming Bushitler in unison.
The nonsense that this catastrophic economy was “inherited” from Bush, is like saying that Ted Kennedy inherited drunk driving from Lexus. Blaming the vehicle for the inevitable crash is more than a little inane.
The Propaganda and Lies Ministry will simply not hold themselves or any of their puppeteers accountable for…well, almost anything. That is a one way street and only travels over the top of non-leftists…and the further to the right of hard leftism you are…the more scrutiny you are going to get.
Our present Government by Ambush is in full desperado. They will take money from everyone on our side of the fence and call us “rich”. They will shut down businesses that don’t bow to the “protection racket” of union/Workers Party threats. They will throw open our borders, run guns to drug cartels, not have race neutral application of our laws, seize our natural resources and lock down our banks, insurance companies and healthcare facilities.
The low information voter watches the Mob do “charity” work…”for the children”, and is easily kept fooled, stupid and content.
When you run a Government by Ambush, VDH…you live by the rules you make up as you go along.
Victor, I like your views but one thing that you have dead wrong came out in the first sentence. These people aren’t “our elites”. There is a real problem with the use of that term. Educational attainment at “elite” universities or coming from the “right” families does not confer superiority, a status that “elite” seems to imply. And that is their problem. They think they’re “elite”, i.e. better than the typical American. They’re not.
We need get past the idea that they are anything other than common criminals.
The only difference between the thugs in Rikers and the thugs in the white house is that the thugs in Rikers only ruin the lives of a handful of people. The thugs in the white house ruin the lives of millions.
vdh has only itemized the daintiest of the crimes of the progressive thugs.
Does anybody doubt that that have done far worse, and will do far worse. If you do doubt it, spend some time reviewing the history of every dictatorial regime in human history. The only difference between them and the one in power now is that the one in power now is making up it’s own history as it goes.
You called them elites….your first mistake….but a pretty funny one. These people are anything but elite…
“because they have been branded with an Ivy League degree”
I was once told that Barney Frank was CLEARLY brilliant, because he had an Ivy League degree. Never mind that said degree was 40+ years in the past, and that his behavior since showed him to be ignorant and corrupt.
I can only hope that there are enough aware people to vote these subversives out of office this November.
“In short, our top pundits, our political elites, our very president all believe that they can blast the unfairness of high capitalism while doing everything in their power to enjoy its dividends — and demand an ethical standard from others that they habitually do not meet themselves….”
I just heard a podcast with Dennis Miller and Mark Steyn (via the Daily Caller) where both talk about how liberals in general (and Thomas Friedman in particular) are facinated by authoritarian China and their ability to “get things done.” Steyn points out that America’s most influential newspaper has become a house organ for those who pine for the day when an “enlightened elite” (my words) can run the entire show without all of that messy voting and democracy. In short the Times believes that we should simply hand over every aspect of governance to the sort of people described here by Professor Hanson and go out and live in our wattle huts.
Despite their claims to moral and intellectual superiority the Left’s arguments essentally all boil down to hysterical bumper-sticker boiler-plate. If you think that Obamacare is a bad idea socially and economically then you are automatically for the death of millions. If you think that our tax system needs an overhaul you are for “Tax Breaks for the Rich.” If you question the effects of abortion then you are automatically some sort of fundamentalist yahoo. If you believe that people should act with a modicum of personal responsibillity then you are “Selfish and Mean-Spirited”
The Left has become so used to a hectoring and bullying tone (warmly abetted by the MSM) that they now believe that invective equals argument. Of course they can engage in this because their isn’t the slightest chance that theywill have to pay a price for it. For me the last straw was trying to make Mitt Romney look like a cold-blooded murderer. Where’s the consequence for doing something that vile? there isn’t any.
The elites that VDH describes truly believe that they are above such obsolete concepts as decency and civility (even as they bray on about how decent and civilized they themselves are.) It’s a grimly depressing fact but they simply don’t care about anything except their own moral vanity.
The question is: what is wrong with ordinary Americans? Why do we view these people as ‘elites’ in the first place? Why do we watch them? Why do we listen to them? Why do we VOTE FOR THEM?
If Elizabeth Warren is elected in November the people of Massachusetts have only themselves to blame. Don’t blame the media for its failure to vet. There were many alarm bells raised about Barack Obama but Americans chose to ignore them.
These people may be our ‘elites’ but that is our doing. In any case, there are more of us than there are of them. If we decide to take responsibility for this country and vote them out (or refuse to watch, or stop buying their books) we might get somewhere.
What is wrong with them? It’s in your very question, Mr. Hanson; They think they are elite.
I’m interested in the cases of plagiarism because I write about cars and automotive history and often have to rely on secondary sources. I told an editor of mine once, “this is just a grown up version of a book report in school”. A majority of the facts that I write are gotten from other writers. I won’t use even a sentence from another writer without changing things around into my own words. If I can’t rewrite it, well, that’s what quotation marks and footnotes/links are for.
The good professor is correct. It’s not just that the not so best and brightest are lazy and resort to cut and paste. It’s that they do so in the knowledge that nobody will hold them to account for their behavior.
I like Charles McCarry on this one: all they are is credentialed red-necks [or their spawn]. In another context the says that our leaders: ‘come from cinders and return to ashes.’
At the cruelest, they are people who have the gift of pleasing older men.
We do not have elites, just the favored, passing like grass in the field.
Our founding fathers gave us the 2nd Amendment to fix this kind of problem. I wonder when conservatives will do more than talk about this.
VDH must be a very, very evil to write the way he does! Why does PJM give so many digital column-inches to an evil man like VDH? Evil people shouldn’t have any 1st Amendment free speech rights, which are only for non-evil people like you and me. But then again, while I know in my heart that I’m not evil, I have to say that I’m not so sure about the rest of you around here.
What I want to know is who died and named them elites? I hear the term bandied about all the time, but how are they elite? Who says they are? What makes the “elite”? Now I know what elite is: Our Pit Bull is elite. The so-called elites aren’t elite enough to even follow behind with a poopie bag.
… who died and named them elites?
Other elites, piping admissions to the club through their respective TV channels and newspapers. This queer process of unsubstantiated admission is what puts the ruling into our ruling elites.
Our rulers are sociopaths.
“Sociopath”: Newspeak for son of perdition, criminal, evil-doer, monster. We live and breathe and have our being in Brave New 1984.
(Next time somebody uses the term ‘homophobic’ in your presence tell them you resent this misuse of the language. Personally I’m homo-nauseous. I don’t hate them I’m just sick of hearing from them ALL the time.)
it reminds me of millie vannillie
All socialists, ALL, are capitalists in their private lives.
Dr. Hanson writes that he wouldn’t expect his local Selma newspaper to lift verbatim from the rival Fresno Bee. Now that’s naive. I worked in the newspaper business here in the East Bay for almost twenty years. Even good reporters do it all the time. Verbatim? Perhaps not. They do cleverly rewrite, however, and you can follow the tracks if you bother.
In the end, it doesn’t matter anymore because newspapers are dead, and the graduates from very expensive colleges who populate our major Web sites, and who deliver us the news in e-fashion, are not and were never reporters.
These metrosexual fashionistas scour AP and the local newspapers and rewrite it all, sourceless, so that the e-stories demand a dozen mouse clicks in order to shove pop-ups your way. By the way, those youth-oriented Web sites would never hire a real reporter, especially one over the age of forty. The presence of one would challenge their credulity. They’d choke on their Starbucks with every criticism, such as, “Excuse me, they are called Canada Geese, not Canadian Geese.”
That business model, combined with the lying liberal elites who run what remains of the news business, and a population in our big cities that can neither read nor read English, is killing the culture. The truth, no matter how stark will no longer triumph. Start stocking up on lentils and rice; awful times are in store when the crud hits the fan and it runs counter to a culture trained to believe in what it wants to hear and not what it can see. And as usual, in the end it will not punish the liars who led them down the path to desrcution, but rather the good people who offered the bad medicine that would have saved them and all of us.
Just a little trivia I thought you may like to know. Rahm Emanuel DID NOT coin the phrase “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Actually, Fareed Zakaria wrote those words in a magazine article dated December 8, 2008. I personally read the article and had it on my PC. Unfortunately my PC completely crashed and no data could be recovered. I believe it was published in Newsweek. I tried to go back and pull it from Archives, but it was already gone.
Thank you, Mr. Hanson, this is a wonderful article.
I’d like to remind the readers that the public intellectual responsible for much that is wrong today in academia also made up parts of his biography in order to fit more snugly into the narrative he was trying to push of himself as a Palestinian refugee languishing in exilic malaise in the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_Weiner#Weiner.27s_claims_about_Said.27s_early_life
Hey Noga!
Good to see you. Thanks for the info!
Liberal elites do not believe the rules apply to them but never hesitate to scold and tell the rest of us how to live. Charles Rangel, the the liberal Dem who chaired the committee that writes all the onerous and burdensome tax regulations the rest of us are compelled to obey, decides they don’t apply to him and he ignores them. When he’s caught, he tap dances around with some lame excuses, gets a slap on the wrist from his fellow elites, wins his primary and is headed to reelection for something like his 40th term. He uses the publicly subsidized housing the rest of us pay for to help the poor for one of his district offices. Well-known tax cheat Tim Geithner warns us that the government will come down hard on those who fail to file and pay their taxes. His punishment? Confirmation as Treasury Secretary, the very government agency in charge of collecting taxes. Anthony Weiner resigns for sending sexual pictures of himself to women other than his wife and now he’s planning his political comeback. And Bill Clinton, accused rapist, abuser of interns, certified liar, disbarred attorney and impeached president will be the one to place Barack Obama’s name in nomination at the Democrat convention. The bottom line is that these liberal elites have no morals. As a result, nothing they do can be criticized. They cannot be accused of being hypocrites simply because they have no beliefs. Except for the ones they impose on the rest of us, because, after all, they know best. Just ask them.
Great column, as usual, from Mr. Hanson.
One thing bothers me and that is the continual bastardization of Joseph McCarthy’s name. McCarthy was perhaps a bit of a wild character but he was ultimately essentially vindicated, was he not? The man deserves a monument.
What’s wrong with our elites, Dr. Hanson? Guys like you do not run for office. Well, actually, no. You are an elite, too.
Yes, you have your farm. And you have a real theft problem. The roads are no longer safe. What do you do about it? You write and lament, but you take no positive action to make it better.
When war comes, the Citizen leaves his farm or shop, and takes up arms. This war is being waged at the ballot box, this year. Join some campaign as a speechwriter, or quit lamenting. No more gnashing your teeth, tearing your hair, or rending your garments.
KING HENRY V:
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Dr. Hanson. Thank you for your columns. I enjoy them immensely and try to point my friends to PJ Media and your contributions in particular. Alas, the old adage,
“you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.” is all too true.
Am I a racist if I point out that Martin Luther King plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis?
The pattern has been evident to me for forty years: The self-affirmed moral superiority of liberals has always permitted them to play by a different set of rules than the disdained “bitter clingers.”
After all, when their worldview instructs them that “the ends justify the means”, then “Mitt Romney-killed-my-wife” & “Mitt Romney-paid-no-taxes-because-I-say-so” are SOP.
The common denominators for all of these are that they have enough money or enough contacts to rescue them from sinking to the level of their own incompetence.
Yes.
Oh, that was a rhetorical question?
Liberalism is merely a status system, a way for some white people to assert moral superiority over other white people. Poor people and minorities function only as props in facilitating this posturing.
They are all disciples of Ellsworth Toohey.
Liberals are following the lead of Obama, who has been lying outrageously since the last presidential election. Everybody who know the facts knows he’s lying. His thinking seems to be that liberals who know he’s lying won’t care–it’s in the service of their cause, and modern liberals believe the ends justify the means. Conservatives who know he’s lying wouldn’t vote for him anyway. Those who don’t follow events closely enough to know he’s lying will probably believe him. So he has a net gain from lying. From the liberal perspective, that’s all that matters.
Actually, The One has apparently done so since he learned to talk. To the point that even He isn’t sure what the truth is, or even if it exists.
Not that He cares. His fantasy universe, the one inside His head, is all that matters to Him.
That, and making the rest of us live in it. No matter who, or how many, die as a result.
There’s a basic but important difference between dishonesty and insanity. And The One seems to be on the more dangerous side of the divide.
clear ether
eon
Don’t forget Senator Richard Blumenthal, elected in Connecticut in 2010 after lying about service in Vietnam. The issue is we the voters and readers and viewers need to demand higher standards, or perhaps we deserve what we get.
If we don’t expect children to behave, we get gangs and drive by shootings. If we pay people not to work – they don’t. If there is no shame in having babies out of wedlock, they are born. etc., etc.
If we let these dishonorable people “lead us”, they will. In the end, shame on us.
“Why would a Fareed Zakaria lift the work of someone else? ”
Professor, you know the answer to this: it is a habit started in elementary school.
Plagiarism is unknown in school anymore in the sense that it is expected and rewarded. Instead of an F and a suspension for plagiarism, the kid who “writes” a paper solely by cutting and pasting gets a smiley face and and A with a nice note about “creative use of technology.” And I actually saw just that with a paper my oldest kid wrote for his high school senior US Government class. I was appalled and he thought I was just a silly old fuddy-duddy.
It’s all par for the course, typical projection that continually emanates from the liberal left. When Obama heard of Ryan being the VP nominee he immediately said he was a “Radical”, an “extremist!”. Those two words couldn’t have summed up Obama himself any better.
Thank you Dr Hanson. I have had the same thoughts about the so called progressive leadership in our country. As usual, you pen the right words to convey the thoughts. I benefit from your writing ability. ABO2012
You say:
“Those who have taken upon themselves to direct it are instead doing their own part to destroy it”
Yes, well no doubt that is the intent.
Yes, when you start a column with that second paragraph of yours, excepting all the data points which show that your thesis is probably missing the target, you certainly come off as very impressive to those who want to hear how the ‘other side’ is so messed up.
Maybe if you included that group and looked at what actually drivers those who lust for power on right, left and everywhere in between to act unethically to get it you may have been genuinely insightful. But i realize that isn’t your job, your just another of those rightest elites who gets off to feeding his rabid fans whatever they want to hear.
What a pity, Mr. VDH used to write good books on history. Now he is relegated to saying that those he disagrees with politically are stupid. Ward Churchill? This is hardly the sophisticated or nuanced perspective so amply demonstrated in Mr. VDH’s history writings.
Which books of Dr. Hansons have you read?
Just about all of our self-identified elites are corrupt, not just the liberal ones:
Romney got himself a “Mormon missionary” exclusion to avoid service in Viet Nam, then scooted to college for student deferments.
Gingrich, the adulterer.
Rep Don “Bridge to Nowhere” Young (AK)
Rep Spencer Bachus (AL) – insider trading
Bill O’Reilly – sexual predator
It seems power is an equal-opportunity corrupter.
The secular elite claims high ground for everybody else except themselves. Therefore they allow themselves any and every transgression. Their new religion allow them to do anything while denying other the same rights since they have a different set of principles.
The problem is lack of ethics, accountability and the white collar get away with murder.
For the congress: term limit, no exemption, no immunity. After one or max 2 terms, benefits end just like for any other soul. No loophole on trading etc….
This elite is rushing the country to some form of modified US version of communism while the elite punditizes about the greatness of their new system.
My young daughter asked me what is Paris Hilton famous for? I told her Paris is famous for being famous. et. al. Media fame provides fame
Zakaria is a penny ante made man, a shill for the opposition, aka a stealth jihadist–by definition, not all that “bright,” after all.
RE: “I thought Trent Lott should have stepped down for praising 100-year-old Strom Thurmond at his birthday fest in ways that could have suggested support for Thurmond’s earlier creed of racial segregation.”
I wasn’t aware of this. I am quite upset, and may have to knock you down to third or fourth place on my Smartest Person in the World list.
Another reason why the hypocritical, incompetent liberal elite is so full of baloney is that they’re secularists and relativists. When there’s no Truth, there’s only power. The practice of virtue is ordered to Truth. In order to act virtuously, first it’s necessary to believe that there’s a difference between true and false, good and bad, right and wrong. It’s also necessary to believe that we can know the difference, and that knowledge of the difference obligates us to do what is right. The liberal elite considers itself far to sophisticated to be bound by such old-fashioned concepts. They’re so intellectually superior to the common people that they can perceive all the subtle shades of grey. This sophistication functions as a handy dodge and escape hatch, so that Elizabeth Warren’s conscience is serene when she criticizes a lesser mortal for untruthfulness, while being a liar herself. The liberal elite are the “scribes and Pharisees” of today, puffed up with ridiculous pride.
Good post. Nor do they believe “that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken.”
VDH (as usual) hits it – mostly – on the head. But, he has pulled some punches.
We are looking at a Democrat/Leftist/Progressive machine that simply doesn’t care to acknowledge or report transgressions of their liked-minded. An equivalent to Fast and Furious alone during a 1st-term Republican administration would have given the chattering classes enough ammo to derail a 2nd term. And yet, this doesn’t amount to as much as an attempted pin-prick in the Obama re-election bubble.
Yes, they are the not-so-best, and not-so-brightest, but they are connected, and share the approved viewpoints. Good luck holding (or Holder-ing) them to any standard of accountability.
The real problem is that so many in our society have been brainwashed into thinking these people are elites and to take them is heresy I know people from various backgrounds and levels of formal education who react with shock, horror scorn or vitriol the momment someone makes a comment critical of one of these “elite” ideas or behavior.
A case in point: an above poster mentions David Chu, a guy who is obviously a complete loop job. One morning I was having breakfast at local cafe that had outdoor tables. I am sitting with my girl friend and reading the paper. An article in the paper was about energy policy and David Chu was quoted in the article. I said to my girlfriend “What a crack pot this guy Dr. Chu is” Suddenly from a near by tablethis guy runs over to us and, with a smarmy grin says “Did I hear you call David Chu ‘a crackpot’”
So I looked him in the eye and said “Yes , I did, you got problem with that Mr.?” He was a bit startled by my blunt response and paused for a momment and put his smarmy smile back on and said “So tell me whwere did you get your Ph.D from and in what and when did you win a noble prize and what did you win it for?”
What every conservative needs to understand about these people, is that they have declared war on the American way of life. There is no “understanding” it, there is only defeating it.
The Left doesn’t call people a racist or a bigot because they actually believe what they’re saying, they use words as a weapon against their perceived enemy. They don’t argue an issue on it’s merits, they demonize their opposition.
They are fully indoctrinated – demoralized as Yuri Bezmenov would say.
The media is complicit, most, likely unknowingly. They simple live within the echo chamber and are unfortunately unable to see beyond the end of their own nose. They live in fear of not getting invited to all the “right” Cocktail parties, or (heaven forbid!) struck off the guest list of the White House Christmas Party.
The duty they owe to the American people – to tell the truth – has been cast aside as they have appointed themselves arbiters of what the public “needs to know.” I hate to reflect on it, it breaks my heart that this is what it’s come to. But the next act is to take a deep breath and gather a firm resolve to destroy these enemies within, for destroy them we must, politically speaking of course.
I’m encouraged by Romney choosing Ryan, it shows a faith in the people of America that I hope we will prove ourselves worthy of, and an enormous step in the right direction if we win.
you should’ve asked, what’s good about them?
the answer, nothing, and call it a day.
the fact is, though, they’re perverts and mass murderers.
and that is a fact, when you come right down to it.
From Cleon Skousen’s “The Naked Communist” circa 1963:
The third major premise of Communism is this: “There is no such thing as innate right or wrong.” As one of their leaders pointedly declared, “To lie, is that wrong? Not for a good cause. To steal, is that wrong? Not for a good cause. To kill, is that wrong? Not for a good cause.” We can that pragmatism — that the end justifies the means. The dialectical materialists look upon ethics and morals as superficial and fraudulent.
From Skousen’s “The Naked Capitalist”:
Anyone reading Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy And Hope will have little difficulty detecting the tremendous self-esteem of the author. He considers himself not only an “insider” but a member of the intellectual elite among the insiders. He feels that the forces of total global control are now sufficiently entrenched so that they can reveal their true identity without fear of being successfully overturned. He expresses the utmost contempt for members of the American middle class who think they can preserve what he calls their “petty-bourgeois” property rights and constitutional privileges.
He also expresses contempt for those who thought the Communist conspiracy was the real center of collectivized conspiracy. He ridicules their conclusions, and then turns right around and admits that their conclusions were correct — American anti-Communists had merely erred in knowing whom to blame.**
I sometimes wonder how close to the mark Dr Skousen really was as I look at who the folks screaming the loudest about the inequalities in our society are.
“The only mystery here is whether there is some sort of logical connection. Does the profession of cosmic morality by design allow one to enjoy without guilt quite earthly sins?”
No mystery, here. The morality the left preaches is a collective one, that is, a morality of social form. A society that exhibits attributes x, y, and z is good. The individuals who design, promote, build and maintain the good society – the elites – embody society’s good form and are therefore not required to live as the rest of society’s individuals, whose base desires compounded across the entire populace would doubtlessly deform society, rendering it bad. Simply put, preach the morality of social form (e.g. “The rich aren’t paying their fair share”) and you can make millions at slum-lording, cheat on your taxes, sexually harass your illegal domestic help, and still be held up as a paragon of elite virtue.
Isn’t this sick? Not if you’re a lefty.
Poor form to quote oneself but I have a point to make-
” 3. Menachem Ben Yakov
Zakaria belongs to the Helen Thomas school of journalism. He hosts a program, GPS , aired on CNN.
On March 21 , he opened with a segment regarding Israel. and its relations with the United States.
Prior to dialogue with a number of guests Mr. Zakaria offered his “ take “ on the current political climate.
Israel is “ not truly serious “ about “ its claims that Iran is an “ existential threat “.
Why , he asks, does Israel allow “ petty domestic considerations “ get in the way of warmer relations with Arab neighbors that also view Iran as a threat?
Mr. Zakaria asks why Israels “ motley collection of political parties “ is allowed to get in the way of peace efforts?
Zakaria then, with opprobrium never tossed at an Ahmadinejad or Chavez , called Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a “ hack “.
Zakaria has neither the intellect or fair mindedness his enablers claim he has.
” Hack “is a word which comes to mind regarding his abilities.
He proves, once again, that talent and real intellect are not required for either financial success or popularity.
He gives the dim witted hope that they too, one day, may host a network television show of their own. ”
August 2, 2010 – ” Laffer vs. Zakaria: Who’s Right? by Roger Kimball on PJMedia
Fast forward 1 year and Zakaria gets his reward from you-know-who. He has become an important advisor to Obama on MIddle East policy. Watch the video-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/13/fareed-zakaria-admits-hes_n_861685.html
Now of course Zakaria gets only ” suspended ” for a month for what should have gotten him fired forever with his reputation in tatters. How many phone calls from The White House did that take?
The point of course is that being a hypocrite has become the way to get ahead in Americas power structure. The honest politicians, generals, etc. get dumped. Barney Frank with a Congressional Paige? Zakaria a plagiarist? Clinton an adulterer? The list goes on.
Lets hope for change, live decent lives and vote for Romney. Thats the best we can do.
Yes, Zakaria is disgusting.
We dont need muslims stinking up our institutions, especially media.
JFK was a chick magnet whose father encouraged him to ignore the sexual prohibitons of the Catholic Church.
LBJ had to pay for his dalliances.
All that money. All that power. All that bad character.
Another first rate article by Professor Hanson.
It does seem that there is no lack of decay and rot at the top. It’s hard for the public to protect itself at the ballot box because our Fourth Estate has abandoned its role as a “check” on power and instead is spearheading the push to the radical left.
How could Clinton have strayed on after Monica? How can Liz Warren possibly imagine she can become Senator? Who actually listens to these people?
Let’s see if we can’t get it together this November and take out some of the trash.
For almost 2000 years this basic principle has held true. ‘Legibus solutus est’. It means that the ruling class is not required to obey the law because they make the law. And as a very wise queen once said “the words mean exactly what I say they mean – nothing more and nothing less”.
The USA now has classes. There is the Ruling Class which is subdivided into many sub-classes. And there is the Middle Class. You are middle class and you presume too much when you say Ruling Class should live by Middle Class rules.
Is there a class lower than middle class?
No. There is nothing lower than Middle Class.
This article outlined one of the biggest differences between leftists and conservatives. We follow our own rules, and discipline our own, while leftists have no rules at all, other than towing the party line, and winning. And sometimes it is even worse, because we will even end up following rules the leftists impose on us, like Obamas phony civility campaign, and his even more phony transparency campaign, that those same leftists never follow themselves. The very example the leftist point to, the corrupt preachers, is a good illustration, since all of those guys lost most of their followers when they were found out. This is not all bad for us, since it means our side tends to be much freer of corruption. The disadvantage is our people also have to follow the rules, and that is a lot of extra work and risk, and might prevent us from doing things for expediance sake that would give us a short term advantage.
Note to Elizabeth Warren: Ms Warren, feeling a bit down! suggestion why not go into your early Native American kitchen and bake up a pan of Alice B Toklas Fudge Brownies, I’ll bet you feel better!
If you need some guidance on the recipe- you can check with either Aunt Jemima, An African American tribal member, or Betty Crocker a Washburn Minnesota tribal member, Elsie Borden, a member of the Holstein Tribe, or The Pillsbury Doughboy, member of the Pillsbury Tribe also in Minnesota. The Pep Boys, the Michelin Man, Tony the Tiger, Jack Box, Ron McDonald, Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, Bugs, Porky Daffy and Donald Mickey and Minnie said they would be happy to come by to sample your very ethnic fudge brownies.
Make sure you put the oven control back to “6″ when your done.
Cheers
This would make an excellent sequel to the book Do As I Say by Peter Schweizer:
http://www.amazon.com/Do-As-Say-Not-Hypocrisy/dp/0767919025/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344962030&sr=1-2&keywords=do+as+i+say
With so many examples of outrageous liberal hypocrisy, I don’t understand why Fox News doesn’t have a 60 Minutes-style program dedicated to the outing of these people. I bet it would kill in the ratings, and it might even raise the profile of this issue enough to hurt some of them politically or get them to clean up their acts. And poetically, they have the perfect person to host: Chris Wallace, son of long-time 60 Minutes host Mike Wallace. How about it, Mr. Murdoch?
Some hypocrisy for ya:
Bain Capital made a $75 million investment in Stericycle, a “medical-waste disposal firm” that disposes of, among other things, aborted fetuses. Romney was very involved in the process and his signature appears on documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In other words, Mitt Romney made money off abortions.
so I guess anything you have ever paid for, bought, or sold, had absolutely nothing to do with abortions? hypocrite yourself.
“John Edwards’s attacks on the wealthy mean that he should not … hire on a groupie with other people’s money.”
I can’t let Dr. Hanson’s gratuitous insult to groupies go unchallenged. Groupies don’t get paid for what they do; they do it out of their pure love of music(ians). Women who take money for it are called something else.
Nailed it.
Soylent Green is people!
I don’t care if Warren claimed she was from Mars, I’m sending money from California to help insure the Brownshirt Republicans don’t hijack all branches of government. Yes the American electorate is too stupid to look out for their own best interests as opposed to the interests of the 1% who trade on their livelihoods as if they were dirty little pieces on a monopoly board game. On top of this Romney is a first degree chickenhawk with zero skin the the game. Romney/Ryan belligerant foreign policy will be a nightmare. While on the subject why doesn’t BHO get us out of the middle east? Don’t the Brownshirts claim we have decades, even centuries worth of our own untapped, coal, oil and natural gas we need to extract? Why is a bankrupt empire destroying itself by fighting unnecessary wars on borrowed money? How is robbing the middle class to give more money to the Chinese and the ever greedy 1% going to help? Oh sorry, not what VDH blogsters want to hear.
“…Brownshirt Republicans… electorate is too stupid…chickenhawk.. belligerant foreign policy… fighting unnecessary wars… robbing the middle class…”
Buzzwords galore. Thanks for the laugh.
OK, my response isn’t going to be as eloquent as others, but bad behavior is tolerated (and in some ways encouraged) as a form of “branding” into the clique. A classic example would be a prospect to your typical “motorcycle club” (i.e. biker gang). Commission of a violent criminal act known to the other members not only signifies your unquestioning obedience to the group, but offers the group a form of blackmail and control over you. The group will maintain the code of silence for their bro’s, but if they kick you out (and don’t kill you) you can ensure that you will be ratted out for your activities. With lefties, the blackmail includes encouragement of deviant sexual behavior and drug use in addition to garden-variety acts of hypocrisy and inconsistency. A left-leaning politician who frequents gay venues and consorts with underage boys will be protected as long as he is part of the left-leaning herd, but should he leave it, his private life quickly becomes public. Encouraging others to partake in the sins of the groups in a standard tactic for group/cult control. Nothing new here…
I want to start my own sports blog, and I need web hosting to do it. What is the best web hosting out there now? Are there any web hosts where you can preorder web hosting for someone else as a gift, or where you can buy a web hosting gift card? I might want web hosting for Christmas if it’s possible to do..