Amateur Megalomania

OpinionJournal – Best of the Web Today

Yesterday’s Best of the Web is full of good stuff! To remind you, BotW is FREE, so sign up and get it every afternoon. It makes for a nice break.

In an example of Great Minds thinking alike, BotW used the headline ‘Schroedinger’s Thug’ to describe the latest Arafat news. I should claim credit!

In a later section entitled Party Like It’s 1864, they provide some more on the Carole Simpson ‘State’s Rights means slavery’ crap she peddled on CSPAN recently. I’m going to clip it here to be sure you see it.

The other day Carole Simpson of ABC News appeared on a postelection panel, which was televised on C-Span. Rush Limbaugh has a partial transcript of Simpson’s comments, and blogger Napoleon Cole has video of one particularly inflammatory comment:

I got a little map here of pre-Civil War free versus slave states. I wish you could see it in color and large. But if you look at it, the red states are all done in the South, and you have the Nebraska territories, the New Mexico territories and the Kansas territories, but the Pacific Northwest and California were not slave states. The Northeast was not. It looks like the map of 2004, and when you say, “Let’s let the states decide,” I remember what the states decided when they had slavery. I think they’re going quickly after social programs, despite what he says. I think we’re going to get a rollback on all kind of things. Affirmative action is a bad word; liberal is a bad word; gay is a bad word, diversity. All these words that are perfectly fine words now are these touchstones, these trigger points, and that frightens me.

Perhaps Simpson hasn’t heard the news that slavery was abolished nationwide by the 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865–139 years ago. New York, which John Kerry carried by a margin of more than 17%, had abolished slavery just 38 years earlier, in 1827. That’s less time than has now passed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made good on the promise of full legal equality for black Americans. That law, by the way was pushed through Congress by a president from Texas.

Meanwhile, over on BillMaher.com, the eponymous Web site of the HBO talk-show host, a reader called “moulty” has posted a message to the discussion board under the title “Shooting Republicans, ethical? Discuss” (quoting verbatim):

At this point in time, would it be morally defensible to apply a “final solution” to republicans?

Let’s face it, when Grover Norquist is doing the media rounds…when his agenda of eliminating all taxes on billionaires and letting the poor pay all taxes and carry the debt burdon, and let them scounge around in the garbage for food…builds character…..when THIS type of criminal extreme right wing “thought” is entering the mainstream…it’s time for extreme action.

GW Bush and the American right wing Taliban are endangering the entire planet. If the rest of the world had a say, Bush and Cheney would be in jail.

Is it now morally excusable to organize midnight raids on republican groups in the red states and “terminate” them with extreme prejudice?

Watching Bush’s acceptance speech on wednesday, with the Cheney’s on stage as well….who would not have liked to see a bomb go off under the stage and wipe out the whole despicable slimy lot of them? And hopefully the shrapnel would have gone to the second deck and blown Mary Matalin’s head off as well.

Be honest. Who would not like to see Karen Hughes run over by an 18 wheel truck? Who wouldn’t like to see her carcass scattered all over highway 99?

Good thing liberals are so tolerant, open-minded and inclusive, or there’s no telling what they might say or do.

Of course whack jobs like this don’t represent the entirety of the Left, but I still find it interesting that people are willing to not only think this, but post it on the net.

In related news, I was chatting with Mike last night and he shared a transcript of his own chat with a long time friend he has had in an on-line RPG. In the conversation, Mike had touched upon the Blog post yesterday regarding Federalism and State’s Rights, and the response from his friend was illustrative of the problems we are going to have advancing such ideas in the casual populace.

The friend immediately defaulted to ‘you want to bring back the Confederacy and you still wish there were slaves’ argument. While that is obviously ridiculous, it points out the impossible nature of having a real conversation about Federalism. For whatever reason, those opposed to State’s Rights have been quite successful in tying the concept to slavery. Sure, we fought a war over it, but that war is constantly misrepresented in our schools. As General Longstreet said in the movie “Gettysburg” – they should have freed the slaves, and THEN fired on Sumter. (And if you miss the irony of me lamenting the educational system while stealing a quote from a movie, then there is little hope for you.)

I’m going to risk the conceit of the Angry Left here and say that the primary problem facing our nation today is the lack of political education on the part of voters. This is also why I favor abolishing the direct election of Senators as well as restoring the choice of Presidency to the state legislators. Get the people OUT of the system and it will improve. I’m not saying that be definition anyone who doesn’t vote as I do is dumb…but I am saying that those that have no ability to explain the roots of their belief probably aren’t going to make informed decisions on how a nation of 275 million, with more power than any other people ever to walk the earth, decides how to govern itself. Capital ‘R’ proper noun Republican Government requires an understanding of the past, a comprehension of the nature of Man, and the ability to recognize when you DON’T have the answers. Capital ‘D’ proper noun Democratic Government requires nothing more than passion and emotion.

Unfortunately, both the small letter republicans and democrats are equally distant from their capital letter antecedents. Neither side is the ideal form, but in my mind, one side is much closer to what I would like to see.

Mike expressed a lot of doom and gloom yesterday in this space, and I agree with him more than I like. I try to maintain some optimism, and the recent election does give me hope that while we can’t return to what we should be, we might be able to delay the collapse long enough to relearn the lessons of our Founders. Part of understanding human nature demands a recognition that we forget things, and the natural cycle is to squander what has been won on our behalf. Another part of that natural cycle is the eventual recognition of what has been lost, along with appropriate steps to regain it. The Founders did not spring from a vacuum. They were demi-gods in a realm of base men, but people like that still do arrive from time to time. While I doubt we will ever see a nexus of so many exceptional people bent to one task, we will see them individually from time to time. I try to cling to that.

It feels good to Blog again….

Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome