Circuit Rider

What is this man?

2010-02-25T19:08:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, President Obama chaired the loudly touted Healthcare Summit, meeting with Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle to show us how serious he is about resolving the issue. Various pundits from across the political spectrum will interpret the proceedings and spin the results to suit their own positions, but one sentence will stand out for me. I think it defines this President.

To make the trials of the health care dilemma more personal, or as Reuters' said, "to tug at America's heartstrings," the President told of his own experience taking his youngest daughter, Sasha, to the hospital with a suspected case of meningitis. He ended his story saying, "I remember thinking while sitting in the emergency room, what would have happened if I didn't have reliable health care." (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61O6H420100225)

What kind of man is this?!

When our youngest son was one week old, he was diagnosed with meningitis. I remember our fussy, slightly feverish infant son being taken from my wife's arms into another room for the spinal tap, a room where we were not allowed to follow. I remember hearing his infant scream and feeling my wife cringe as they inserted a needle into the sac that surrounds the spine and brain to withdraw a portion of the cerebrospinal fluid and confirm the diagnosis. I remember the doctor's words to us beginning with "if your son lives," and continuing to describe the possibilities of blindness, deafness, profound mental retardation or a prolonged and ultimately fatal vegetative state.

I remember thinking we might lose our precious newborn son. I remember thinking how I could ever bring my tender wife through this tragedy. I remember thinking about how I would manage to tell our other children that their baby brother was dead or dying, or how I would tell my mother. I can't remember even once considering how I would pay for the treatment that might save the life of my son.

What kind of man is this that sits in our White House? Is he as cold as his chilling story suggests? Or is he merely a political opportunist tugging at any string his fingers can find that promises to produce the desired results and gratify his ambition?

Bump, Stall and Dip

2010-02-06T00:32:00.000-08:00

In the season opener of a favorite television series the other night, an attractive young female character jostled against another of the regular characters on a crowded airplane. She gave the poor guy an apologetic smile and flirted with him briefly, with her left hand on his chest and her right hand in his jacket pocket. Distraction (See Red Herring) is the best friend of magicians of course, but also of pickpockets. Stall with the left hand and dip into the mark's pocket with the right.

The same thing had happened, a little less obviously, on another season premiere show just a few hours earlier. Unfortunately, it was the most real of reality shows, President Obama's State of the Union Address. There stood the President proposing, among other things, an initiative to build more nuclear power plants to generate clean, reliable energy for America's homes and businesses, flirting outrageously with moderate voters and beating the time of the drill-here-drill-now crowd. The President is an attractive figure, and he throws a good party. But the next day, in the budget he presented to Congress, buried several hundred pages deep was a clause that eliminates all funding for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Depository, the only place in the U.S. to legally store nuclear waste. In other words, regardless of the proposals of the previous night, there ain't gonna be any nuclear power development. No waste facility means no new plants. The left hand giveth and the right hand taketh away. The stall came from the Presidential podium, and the dip in the back pages of the budget.

Question: Would any self-respecting pickpocket lift your wallet and leave the money clip behind? Answer: The President certainly didn't. For the last year and a half, first-time home buying has been encouraged and subsidized by an $8000 federal income tax credit. A payoff like this goes way past flirting, but I'm not sure we want to take the metaphor that far. It's enough to recognize that while the nation's attention regarding housing has been focused on the tax credit, the Administration has proposed to eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction for a large class of not-very-rich taxpayers. The tax credit is the stall, and the budget proposes a dip into a previously inviolable pocket.

The cool thing about this technique is that it is so reliable. It works almost every time it's tried, but the stall has to be varied to keep it fresh. The President's evocative emotional appeals for our compassion toward our Haitian brothers and sisters hit just the right chord. Americans have proven in every instance to be among the world's most generous people. The Administration even went so far as to set up links to organizations which handle charitable donations on the official White House web site, to demonstrate that they were right there working with us. But did you know that the President's proposed budget eliminates the income tax deduction for charitable contributions? Once again, our attention is drawn to one hand, while the other goes deep into our pockets.

For generations the American government has subsidized charitable giving by allowing taxpayers to claim a deduction for a certain percentage of their gifts. It was essentially a joint investment by the government and the people in the work of a recognized charity, with the taxpayer deciding who should receive the gift. But under the Obama plan, the rules change. You will still be free to give, of course, but only out of your own pocket without any tax benefit. There won't be any deduction from the tax bill, and the huge gifts previously made by large corporations, the gifts that keep most non-profits alive, will simple go away. You will, however, continue to make "donations," and big ones, because the government itself will take on the responsibility of supporting charities directly, with public money but without public controls. The consequence, of course, will be that the government will suddenly have complete control over which charities are funded and which are not. Under those circumstances, which health care reform plan do you think the American Heart Association will publicly support, the President's or some rival proposal? Will the Boy Scouts, who collect and donate a million tons of food for the poor every year, and who have provided billions of hours of public service over their 100 year history, enjoy the same level of funding as, say, Planned Parenthood? Yeah, that's likely. Government will fund the organizations that agree with the Administration, period, and your influence on the society in which you live will be that much more limited. This trick is more like the magician who looks you squarely in the eye while he removes your underwear! Watch the one hand, and he'll get you with the other.

When we saw our favorite female character bump up against the man on the airplane, I said to my wife, "She picked his pocket." She asked, "Did you see it?" Well no, I didn't see it, but we've seen her do this type of thing before, and we know the character well enough to expect it. On the other hand, who would suspect the President of the United..Um, wait. Isn't the "not suspecting" part just what he's counting on?

A RED Letter Day

2010-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

(Ted Kennedy must be suffering the pains of hell. I'm not judging how he conducted his life. His sins are his, and my sins are mine. No, I'm thinking it must be hell for him to look back at the situation he so recently left and see that there was no lasting foundation to all that he had built with forty years of labor, that his entire legacy is a sandcastle with the tide coming in. Hell itself is built upon regret.)

The people of Massachusetts did something astonishing last week. They elected Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, to the United States Senate. This is the first time in nearly four decades a Republican has won election in the bluest of New England's solid block of blue states. The result, as you have no doubt heard, is that the 60 vote super-majority the Democrats have enjoyed in the Senate for the past year is broken, and they can no longer simply present a bill, close the debate and bring it to a vote. They still have the votes to pass whatever they want, but they can't make people shut up and vote without talking the issues through. It's going to be tougher for them now.

The Democrat spin on Brown's election has been, predictably, that this was a local race against a weak Democrat candidate and has no bearing whatever on national issues. Hooey.

Spin (see Propaganda Techniques) is more than mere fallacy. It is an attempt to distract the listener from the truth by consciously applying any number of fallacious arguments or explanations. The difference is that a fallacious argument may be presented in ignorance, but the the spinner knows he's spinning and chooses to deceive.The Massachusetts Senatorial election was undoubtedly a referendum on the Obama administration and the Democrat agenda, and both sides clearly demonstrated that they knew it was throughout this special election campaign.

Brown's choice of issues left little doubt what he was thinking. Clearly he was running a national campaign. In spite of the fact that Massachusetts already has state-run health care, his stump speeches hammered the national health care bill where his vote will now be the spoiler. He addressed the American economy, American unemployment, American everything, and the Massachusetts voters ate it up. The candidate did interviews with the national media and courted campaign contributors and grassroots political bloggers from across the country, and he didn't hesitate a moment to welcome the support of the big conservative guns who came to the state to campaign for him. The politics of getting elected are always local, certainly, but Scott Brown and his constituents know that the issues in this case are the concern of the entire country.

Martha Coakley and her staff also knew that the issues, and more importantly the stakes, were national. She too campaigned on health care which, in Massachusetts, would have been preaching to the converted had she not been looking toward the national plan being hustled through the Senate. She also addressed the national economy and national unemployment. More tellingly, she welcomed the campaign visits of national Democrat Party leaders, right up to the President, all of whom stressed the important role Martha (or sometimes "Marcia") Coakley would play in promoting the Democrats' national agenda. To pretend that her defeat was not a rejection of that agenda, and the leaders who support it, is just not credible.

And now that I've written this, I find I could have been more succinct by quoting a woman who donated to Brown's campaign on the internet. She said, "I can't vote in Massachusetts, but the people of Massachusetts voted for me."

Separation of Business and State, part 2.

2009-04-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote last week that the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress' intervention in the banking industry could be considered a precursor to nationalization. Today The Wall Street Journal reports, "The Obama administration could end up with more direct control over some of the nation's largest banks as policy makers consider converting the government's preferred stock in these companies into common equity" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124019955514434181.html), which could make the government the controlling stock holder in these banks. Effectively, this would be a hostile takeover of the banking industry.
I can't take much credit on this one. You didn't have to be very smart to see this coming.

Defend the Separation of Business and State

2009-04-16T09:53:00.000-07:00

It really doesn't take much life experience to notice that Georges Santayana was right, that history does have a tendency to repeat itself, especially if we fail to learn the lessons the first time. For anyone who is paying attention, the lesson today is that our current economic troubles have a clear and recent precedent.

The social upheaval of the 1920s, the stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed are often explained as reactions to the horrors and expenses of World War I, but there was more to it than that. The disillusionment resulting from a bitter and protracted war was an add-on to the temptations of easy credit fanned into flame by exciting technological advances. Airmail, Ford's assembly line, radio, recorded sound, "talking pictures," and installment credit plans were all new in the 1920s, and all changed the way ordinary Americans conducted their lives. It would be silly to argue that such changes led to the downfall of civilization, but linked to the cynicism the War engendered, the result was the rejection of traditional restraints both moral and financial, a record-breaking level of personal debt, a pervasive, "easy come, easy go" philosophy, and a sense of class envy that sowed poisonous seeds in U.S. society. The only place the boom could go was directly into bust.

This is when many discovered that the "easy go" part wasn't so easy when it meant the loss of savings, businesses and homes. Many in their shock and disillusion at the crash looked for a complete change in our form of government. Some were Communists and some were Socialists and some were Fascists, but all were determined that they would overthrow the evils of Capitalism and usher in a Utopian ideal under their radical and often anarchistic plans. The dirty little secret is that as much as they hated and railed against each other, they all wanted to pursue their revolutionary goals by the same draconian methods--by nationalizing key industries, raising taxes on and seizing the property of "the rich" (that means anyone who has more money than whomever they were talking to at the moment), and finding a scapegoat that the majority of voters could resent and eventually hate. It was an agenda with a lot of appeal for some Americans, just as it was for many Germans, Italians and Spaniards. In fact, in the 1930s we came nearer to the overthrow of our democratic republic than at any time in our history to date.

Perhaps the best example from that perilous period was Huey Long, Governor of and Senator from Louisiana. Long knew two important truths about politics--that power can be had by promising people the things they don't have, and that you really don't have to give the people what you promised, as long as you show that you're taking something away from the rich who already have too much anyway. And so he promised the people of Louisiana roads and education and health care, and that's what they got--minus the huge graft payments that went into the pockets of Long and his cronies, a legacy the state continues to try to purge to this day--financed by "taxing the rich," which made it all acceptable.

The poor weren't actually getting anything of significance, but they could be happy knowing that the rich were being punished for their success. Long's "Share Our Wealth" plan (notice the "our" which actually begins the appropriation of private property) included a cap on the salaries and fortunes of businessmen, a progressive tax up to 100% of the earnings of the most prosperous, severe government regulation of major industries and a guaranteed minimum annual salary for the working man. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Huey Long's popular support was so intense and radical that Franklin Roosevelt, certainly no conservative himself, considered Long "one of the two most dangerous men in America," and the New York Times worried that he had established the country's first Fascist State.

Our own era is every bit as dangerous as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the call for a change in government just as radical. The proposals to cap salaries and tax earnings up to 100% we have already heard. The takeover of the automobile manufacturing industry by the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress, and their heavy-handed intervention in the banking, investment and now the insurance industries, have been historic precursors to nationalization. The proposed establishment of a national health care system by the Administration will be, by definition, a seizure of that industry as well. What Long dreamed and Roosevelt feared, and the 1930s Fascists of Germany, Italy and Spain enforced, President Obama is pursuing headlong, and achieving.

Observing in 1938 the same radical political measures we are seeing today, Professor Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School warned, "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany;' it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" Consider that the next time Vice President Biden tells us how patriotic it is to pay more taxes.

TEA--Taxed Enough Already!

2009-04-13T23:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
On Tax Day, Wednesday, April 15, local groups will be holding TEA Parties all over the country. Because of my schedule, I won't be able to get away to go to one, but I will be wearing a tea bag pinned to my lapel all day. I'll be looking forward to explaining it to anyone who asks.
How about you?
PS

A Whole Herd of Goats

2009-04-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

Under the Mosaic Law, on the Day of Atonement a goat was brought into the Tabernacle, and over him the priest enumerated all the sins of the people, symbolically transferring those sins from the people to the goat. The animal was then taken out into the wilderness far from the camp and released, never to return. It was a symbolic purging of the people from their sins, and the source of our term "scapegoat," someone to blame to distract us from those who might share the guilt. Not only individuals but whole races and ethnic groups have been persecuted as scapegoats over the centuries. It's a classic Propaganda Technique, and it's being worked hard by the Obama administration.
The AIG executives who received bonuses paid out of the bailout funds provided by the Obama administration out of our pockets, are the most obvious examples. No question, it is galling to think the tax dollars of $30,000/yr laborers are paying the six-figure compensation checks of Wall Street types walking away from the train wreck of our retirement programs, and Congress, the Department of Commerce and the media are making sure everyone stays angry about it. What the media, the Administration and the Congressional harpies, Democrats and Republicans alike, have left out is that the vast majority of those who received the bonuses had no involvement in the "credit default swaps" that brought the company down. They also haven't told you that many of those who received those bonuses had worked the entire previous year for for one dollar to try to address the impending problems, accepting that and the promise of "deferred payments"--spelled b-o-n-u-s--as their total compensation. They also haven't told you that the bonuses were specifically authorized in the 1100 page bailout package that the Congress voted on and the President signed, without either of them ever having read it, or that the clause that authorized the payments was inserted as an amendment by Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee which was supposed to oversee AIG's activities! No wonder they want to keep the heat on the AIG execs. If they couldn't transfer their sins to the scapegoats, those dirty little secrets might be darn hard to explain.
Also trussed up and waiting to be led out into the wilderness are the chairmen of Ford and GM. These guys are in a little different situation than the AIG employees. They've galloped forward and volunteered to serve as scapegoats. It's true that the auto companies have been shamefully mismanaged not only by Alan Mulally (Ford) and Rick Wagoner (GM), but by their predecessors as well, and it didn't help their image to fly in for Congressional hearings in their private jets without any plan for recovery beyond demanding a bailout. The part that nobody is talking about is fact that Congressional interference in the auto industry, in the form of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, have forced the automakers to build whole fleets of cars that nobody wants to buy. Popular "green" rhetoric and public proclamations to the contrary, the best-selling vehicles in the United States are and remain trucks, SUVS and family cars. The over-priced and under-performing hybrids, the Ford Escape and Chevy Volt, just haven't won public acceptance, and for obvious reasons. They don't do the job Americans expect of their vehicles. Nevertheless, Congress has mandated the manufacture of these ornamental offerings to the eco-lobby, and the companies keep producing them because they haven't got the guts to oppose the politically correct sentiment that says the government knows better than the free market what the people should have. So Ford and Wagoner will be led off into the woods, never to return. After last week's hostile takeover, the new CEO, President Barack Obama, has fired them, so the people will think their sins are purged. But that won't make the automakers profitable.
To change the metaphor, it's the old Roman trick of placating the people with bread and circuses. On the one hand the Administration is promising to make sure the masses have food on the table and health care down the road, and on the other they provide the spectacle of corporate fat cats being devoured by the lions of official scorn and public outrage, all so that we won't notice the orgy being enjoyed by Caesar and his friends.
PS

Cut Deficit by Half?

2009-02-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

My take on the President's proposed budget, for those who care, is posted below, but did you hear this one?
Radio commentator Michael Medved and one of his guests (I'm sorry I missed the name) were discussing President Obama's "goal" to cut the deficit by 50% in next year's budget (Propaganda Alert: Glittering Generality), but then Medved also pointed out that a 50% cut still leaves us with a $650 billion deficit! That's larger than any deficit presented in eight years of the George W. Bush administration, even with the impact of 9/11 and a two-front war figured in.
And it gets better. To meet that "goal," the Obama administration is projecting three-and-a-half, four and even four-and-a-half percent growth rates in the U.S. economy over the next three years (Another Propaganda Alert: Card Stacking). Those are incredible (literally) boom time growth rates, and the chances of the U.S. experiencing the kind of growth that will result in a significant reduction of the Obama Deficit, even in ten years, are minuscule.
In marketing, when someone tells you a tale like that, it's called "blue sky," and only a sucker buys.
PS

Post-Modern Mardi Gras

2009-02-26T11:47:00.000-08:00

Along with many other professors, Dr. Mary Ann Gillies of Canada's Simon Fraser University points out that "post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression." Irony in this context means "the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning," or an "incongruity between the actual result...and the normal or expected result" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/). If Dr. Gillies wants examples to illustrate her lectures, she need look no further than President Obama's speech last Tuesday to the Joint Session of Congress. It was a post modern headtrip.

Arguably the most ironic feature of the speech was the day upon which it was delivered. Is it even possible that his staff overlooked the fact that he was to present the rationale of his budget proposals to Congress on Mardi Gras--Fat Tuesday? According to AmericanCatholic.org, "Fat Tuesday is the last hurrah before the Catholic season of Lent." The other name for the holiday of course, is Carnival, literally an exuberant and hedonistic "farewell to the flesh," a medieval opportunity to revel in sensual pleasures before the denials of Lent. It is a time for indulging appetites, for gluttony, excess, intemperance and dissipation. In other words, it is the opportunity the Democrat Party has been waiting for to call up the overwhelming tide of new spending and pet projects which have been thwarted by twelve years of Republican domination in the Congress. It's just the season for indulging pent-up desires, they say, and the President picked this one day to announce them. That's irony.

It's also bad news for all of us. The Democrat Congress is having the party, but we're going to suffer the hangover. The forty days of Lent began on Ash Wednesday, the day after the President's speech, and are a period of fasting, abstinence and the humiliation of the flesh, to cleanse us from the influences of world, and more pointedly, to atone for the excesses of Fat Tuesday. That's the scary part about the President's budget proposals. The load of taxation and borrowing that will have to be born to pay for the largest increase in government in history cannot possibly result in anything other than tight credit, a depressed business climate, and ultimately Carter Era style inflation. We may be making Lenten payments against the Fat Tuesday Budget literally for generations, which only heightens the irony of his timing.

It can't be that President Obama doesn't grasp the connection. In fact, the President himself clearly has a keen sense of irony. It's no secret that the total cost of his budget proposals, $3.6 trillion, will make Barak Obama the man who spent more money in one year than anyone, ever! One commentator noted that if the Federal Government spent a dollar a minute, a million dollars would last a little less than two years, a billion dollars would last until the year 3911, and a trillion dollars would last nearly two million years into the future. Barak Obama is going to spend over three-and-a-half times that amount in just one year. And what is the title of his budget document? "A New Era of Responsibility." That's either monumental irony or epic arrogance. It's hard to say which.

Perhaps the answer lies in the rest of Dr. Gillies' definition of post modern irony. "Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression," she says, "but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony." President Obama and his Party have promised us change which will stand the conventions of the American system on its head. The change will be what falls out of our pockets.

PS

Bad Omen?

2009-02-13T11:58:00.000-08:00

Do I have this right?
The catalyst for our current economic disaster was the collapse of the housing market, leading to mass foreclosures in which millions of people may lose their homes. Now the President's plan is to deal with this crisis by building more park benches, bridges, tunnels and overpasses.
Does anyone besides me think this is a bad omen?

Who do You Think You're Stimulating?

2009-02-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

This site is dedicated to pointing out logical fallacies and propaganda techniques employed by newsmakers--ok, politicians and the media, really--but it's always fun to find examples in the news and illustrate them with my own experiences.

A few years ago I was teaching a pre-college composition course. This is a course that used to be called developmental, and before that remedial, and before that "bonehead" English (Propaganda Alert: Euphemism). One member of the class was a big, beefy young man with an attitude about English, so when I handed back his first in-class essay with a "D" grade on it, he wasn't happy with me. After class he dropped his paper on my desk, glared at me and said, "Why can't we have a real test?"

I confess I have a weakness for sarcasm, but I hasten to point out that while it may not be particularly polite, it's not a fallacy. I replied, "This was a real test. See your real grade?"

I think that was clever, but it was lost on my student. He said, "No, like, one where there's different answers, and I pick the right one."

I patiently explained that this was a writing class, and to determine his abilities I had to evaluate his writing. He replied, "Well, that's just stupid. I've taken this class three times before, and nobody else does it like that."

Besides providing me with a great teaching story, my student was falling victim to a classic fallacy. He thought that because everybody does something one way, that must be the only right way to do it. Vox populi, vox dei. "The voice of the people is the Voice of God." Except it's not.

Now President Obama is getting caught in the same type of error, and it's catching him from both directions. In fact, the whole Democrat power structure is engaged in the same kind of fallacious thinking. After his "stimulus" bill squeaked out of the House last week without a single Republican vote, the President held a pep rally to hearten his fainting party members. "We won," he told them, referring to last November's election, and so they get to do whatever they want. There's the Fallacy Alert: Vox populi, Vox dei.

The problem is that in our democratic republic the election is only the first opportunity for the people to speak, and the leaders continue to be accountable to them throughout their terms. Even if the Democrats did win last fall, they really can't do whatever they want because the people can change their minds so fast. At this point, less than a month after the Inauguration, barely 35% of the people--the same ones who voted for him last fall--now support the President's "stimulus" bill. They still like the President, but they recognize a pork-padded catastrophe when they see one. In fact, Congressional emails and telephones have been slammed by The People voicing their opposition. If the voice of the people really were the the great power in the land, the President would have withdrawn the bill long since. Hold your breath and wait for that to happen. At this point he really doesn't want to hear the voice of "God."

Instead the President is travelling around the country attempting to pump up support for his plan. It's a bad sign that he has to take to this extremity so early in his Presidency. If he really had the people behind him, it wouldn't be necessary to go out on the stump for it. President Obama has an unstoppable majority in both Houses of Congress that can pass whatever bills he wants, and probably will for a while. But I wonder if the President is starting to suspect the same thing that I am--that the people elected him as a symbolic President rather than as a working President. If that's the case, and it's looking more like it every day, it won't take long for them to begin resenting all that change he campaigned on in such vague terms.

PS

post script: After the quarter was over, I found out that beefy "kid" was twenty-six years old and had done time for assaulting an officer. It's probably just as well I didn't know that at the time.

Isn't that just like him?!

2009-02-04T23:00:00.000-08:00

Dang. Whether as Senate Majority Leader or as a disgraced Cabinet nominee, I can always count on Tom Daschle to work counter to my interests. Just when I've got him nailed as an example of media propaganda (see Dizzy is Just How They Want Us, below), he goes and withdraws his name from consideration. Still, it was spin that kept him on the table for as long as he was.

PS

Dizzy is Just How They Want Us

2009-02-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

There is an email making the rounds, which a good and honest man assures me he has researched and verified, comparing the media's reaction to Pres. Obama's Inauguration versus that to Pres. Bush's 2nd Inauguration. The contrast very effectively illustrates the political propaganda technique known as "spin" (see Propaganda Techniques).

Headlines On This Date 4 Years Ago:
"Republicans spending $42 million on inauguration while troops die in unarmored Humvees"
"Bush extravagance exceeds any reason during tough economic times"
"Fat cats get their $42 million inauguration party, Ordinary Americans get the shaft"

Headlines Today:
"Historic Obama Inauguration will cost only $120 million"
"Obama Spends $120 million on inauguration; America Needs A Big Party"
"Citibank executives contribute $8 million to Obama Inauguration"
"Everyman Obama shows America how to celebrate"

The content, the details, indicate that both Presidential parties were extravagant (I mean the "celebrations," not the "organizations," although...), but the difference in tone communicates volumes about how the media desires people to perceive the different administrations. That's spin.

Take another example. It was revealed in confirmation hearings that Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama Administration, had failed to pay "tens of thousands of dollars in taxes," according to CBS News, over a period of four years during which he signed 16 quarterly statements affirming that he knew those taxes were due. Nevertheless, CBS and many others defended his confirmation, observing, "The 47-year-old is seen by many as the best candidate for the job, and there was concern that rejecting him would mean a delay in confirming a replacement that the country could not afford." So he's in, and with media approval.

But Geithner won't be alone at the Obama Presidential Cabinet table filing his amended return. Health and Human Services Secretary Designate, former Senator Tom Daschle, has admitted he owes nearly $100,000 in back taxes on "gifts" he received as professional courtesies. (Has anyone ever given you a gift that would trigger a $100,000 tax bill?!) The Obama administration is referring to Daschle's delinquencies as the result of "an honest mistake." It's an interesting phrase, "honest mistake." Have you ever heard of a politician who made a "dishonest mistake?" But the media is accepting that explanation without question or investigation.

Compare that to the treatment received by members of the Bush Administration. I can tell this one from personal experience. I get so tired of hearing of the inherent evil of that team that I occasionally invite my students to consider other possibilities. When I point out that Dick and Lynn Cheney donated over 70% of their 2007 income to charity, I never hear any appreciative response. Invariably I hear, "It was probably a tax dodge." Spin, you see, is subject to the Laws of Inertia--an idea set in motion by the media tends to stay in motion. That one will keep spinning long after the former Vice President's ashes are scattered over the Tetons.

Certainly no one party has a monopoly on spin as a propaganda technique. Both employ it regularly, and neither is as adept at spinning as their colleagues in the media. But judging from the current PR successes of the Obama Administration, supported by their media allies, and the dismal PR failures of the Bush Administration, there should be little doubt who is better at it.

Circus Animals for a Recession

2009-01-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

A note to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the Democrats' "Stimulus Package" moves from the House to the Senate without a single Republican vote:

Dear Senator McConnell,
I'm sure I'm not the first to notice the similarities between the work done by Congress and the labor of certain familiar draft animals. Getting legislative work done must indeed seem like pulling a wagon full of rocks on some days, and the abilities of those who work with you must count for much.
Donkeys and Elephants have a historic reputation for such work. For generations, various cultures have looked for them to get things done. I've seen both pull heavy loads over poor roads until they reach their goals. I've seen Donkeys carry heavy packs, walk impossibly narrow roads between a cliff on one side and an avalanche on the other, jump suddenly on command and form an impregnable circle to defend the herd. I've seen Elephants lift unbelievable burdens, walk faster than most others can run, and balance on one foot while picking a single straw out of a half-ton of hay. These are feats I cannot help but admire.
On the other hand, I've never seen a RINO* that could be trained to do anything. They're just not working animals. A RINO is blundering, intractable, unpredictable and dangerous. To keep them around in flush times as a curiousity is one thing; to expend precious resources on them when times are hard is just foolishness. Fence them in. Cut them off and let them forage for themselves or starve. Then later, if you want to display the stuffed head on the wall, that's fine. But don't waste our scant resources on a rogue beast that serves no useful purpose.
I hope as Minority Leader of the Senate, you'll be able to make the majority party own the upcoming "Stimulus" bill the way your House colleagues did.
Good luck!
PS

*Republican In Name Only

Religious Freedom Day

2009-01-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

For the past eleven years, under both a Republican and a Democrat, the Office of the President has issued a proclamation declaring January 16 to be Religious Freedom Day in the United States. There are a couple of coincidences in this that interest me--first that even though I'm an addicted news junkie, I've never heard of this in the past eleven years; and second that it should be scheduled just days before the inauguration of the President. I suspect there is significance in both those facts, but I don't intend to pursue them here. Something else has caught my attention.

Michael Newdow, the professional gadfly and theophobe who brought suit to have the phrase "under God" stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance, has sued now to prevent the offering of prayers at the Obama inauguration and to prohibit the President-Elect from uttering the words "...so help me God" at the end of Oath of Office, as every President since Washington has. He's been making these protests quadrennially for many years, never with any success, but he keeps at it, and he backs his argument with several egregious fallacies.

Newdow's website (http://www.restorethepledge.com/) asserts that he is pursuing his agenda in order to protect the "right of Christians to worship God and Jesus whenever and wherever they choose," and that the only way to do this is to banish all mention of God, Jesus or religion from the mouths of any public servant. This is a fallacious twofer. His proposition is both self-contradictory and absurd in its extremity. He suggests that in order for Christians (or anyone else) to freely exercise their Constitutional rights of unhindered religious belief (or non-belief), all statements of belief, all recognition of beliefs, all actions, symbols, behaviors and words that might remotely infer belief should be prohibited to anyone connected in any way with government and entirely banished from public view. In other words, he wants to protect religious worship by making it utterly and completely invisible, private and without any form of mutual support system (Fallacy alert: see Oxymoron). This is like the 19th century naturalists who sought to preserve wildlife by killing it and having it stuffed.

Newdow's arguments against public expressions of religious belief are based in an extension of the concept of freedom of religion. The right itself is well-established in law (even though it appears in the Constitution only by inference), but Newdow's interpretation carries it to an absurd extreme (Fallacy alert: see Reductio ad absurdum), contending that the only way to freely exercise religious belief or non-belief is never to have to acknowledge the existence of any belief that differs from your own. Consequently, Americans could only enjoy freedom OF religion when they are made free FROM religion. It's an interpretation that suits Newdow's belief system, but only at the expense of all others who may disagree.

When challenged on this Newdow responds with his own question: "Why don't you want to follow the Constitution?" Sadly, he's gotten away with this false choice fallacy for so long that he feels smugly secure in making the charge. Here's the rub. The Constitution doesn't say what he wants it to say. The 1st Amendment prohibits Congress from creating any law "respecting an establishment of religion." Granted, the phrase can be read in various ways, either to prohibit legislative action to "establish" a state-sponsored religion or to prohibit legislative interference with any religious establishment, i.e. an organized church. But the Constitution does not say that religious organizations must be forced out of the public arena. Newdow is right when he contends that the Presidential Oath required by the Constitution does not include the the phrase "...so help me God," but neither did the Constitution prohibit George Washington from appending that humble phrase when he took the Oath. Nor does it require any other President to depart from the tradition Washington established, and which has been followed by every American President since, without exception. What Newdow fails to understand is the essential nature of the Constitution itself, and that the rights, powers and actions not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are "retained by" and "reserved to...the people," to be exercised at their discretion (9th and 10th Amendments). The people, by an 80-90% majority, retain the right to practice their religion openly, and no court can take that from them however many suits Newdow brings. His contention that the supporters of an appeal to God's grace appended to the Presidential Oath are not following the Constitution poses a false dilemma.

In defending his legal actions in various interviews, Newdow has jumped behind the favorite of his verbal barricades. He habitually recites that tired old argument that more wars have been fought over religion than any other cause or issue. He's right, or course--unless you count the Peloponnesian Wars, the Philippic and Alexandrian Conquests, the First and Second Punic Wars, Caesar's Conquests of Germany, Gaul and Britain (not to mention the Roman Civil War), the Gothic, Frankish and Vandal Invasions of Rome, the Incan and Mayan Conquests, the Norse Invasions of Europe, the Hundred Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the American, French and Russian Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars (engulfing four continents for a generation)the American and Spanish Civil Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Manchurian Invasion, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and hundreds of other conflicts that have consumed lives and treasure and in the course of steering history. The truth is that mankind has found a hundred excuses for war, including religion, and no one of them can reasonably be burdened with the entire blame. Newdow's claim is a textbook example of the Big Lie, told loudly, told often and told consistently until even the liars believe it, but it's a load of hooey.

It is cliche to note that the 1st amendment protects Newdow's right to make these ridiculous and fallacious claims, but it's also beside the point. He is free to be as wrong as he wants to be. It's just that his arguments don't hold up under scrutiny. That's why he and his supporters are so often wrong at the top of their lungs.

Technical Fallacies

2008-12-31T13:37:00.000-08:00

I wrote this last Christmas, but Ken said I should post it for all of you. Merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year!

Peanut Brittle
Philip Snider, ©2007

The trouble with Mr. Van Camp, my high school chemistry teacher, was you couldn’t read him. He wasn’t Mr. Monotone, but he wasn’t what you’d call sparkling either. He was like his lab assignments—controlled. When his student teacher was telling us how to get out of the draft by inhaling a little bit of hydrogen sulfide gas to induce asthma right before a pre-induction physical, I don’t remember if Mr. Van Camp even blinked. I don’t have a clue how he felt about the war. And when that hippie kid with the beard and long hair that all merged into one huge helmet used to come in late every morning and sit on the front row in the middle of the classroom, stretch out his dirty feet and go right to sleep by 8:10 every day, Mr. Van Camp didn’t say anything about that either. But then later that year, when he was teaching us about colloidal suspensions, he mixed up a rust-colored paste, spun it out in the centrifuge and shook it onto a 3x5 card. He explained that it was a compound of mercury and, by the way, a contact explosive. Then he laid the card on the floor next to the hippie kid and dropped a pencil eraser on it and blew the kid out of his chair. You just couldn’t read Mr. Van Camp.
That’s probably why he could get away with the surprise lab on the Friday right before Christmas break. We walked in and saw all the lab stations set up with ring stands and Bunsen burners, and beakers of white crystals and small packet of other compounds, and a sheet of tinfoil, and lab instructions all laid out. The large beakers were marked with so-many cc’s of C12H22O11, and the instructions said we were going to reconfigure this carbohydrate chain. We added another so-many cc’s of NaCl and so many ml of H2O and dissolved the crystals over the burner. The sweet smell, of course, was a dead giveaway, and those of us who had watched our mothers make candy started to figure it out. When the dissolved crystals started to boil and then turn golden, we were to dump in the packet labeled “organic matter,” which turned out to be raw peanuts, and Mr. Van Camp walked around the chem lab and poured vanilla from a glass-stoppered bottle into our beakers. Then we poured the stuff out onto the tinfoil and it hardened into peanut brittle. It was my favorite lab of the whole year.
So I decided I was going to make peanut brittle for my family for a Christmas surprise. Mom made all kinds of candy every year. She would put the cookie sheet on the same cutting board where she sliced onions for our everyday meals, and then pour out the molten sugar that would become almond roca onto that cookie sheet, which would heat up the wood and bring out the scent of the onions every time. I can’t taste almond roca , even now, without smelling onions. Candy making at Christmas was Mom’s family tradition, and she was good at it.
Which was fitting because Dad had a sweet tooth. I was well into adulthood when I figured out the connection, but the fact that Dad was alcoholic probably played into that. He wasn’t what most people picture when they think of alcoholics. He didn’t drink in the mornings, and it wasn’t until after I had moved out that he ever actually passed out without getting undressed and going to bed first. I don’t think he ever even drank during the work day, and it’s only now in retrospect that I’ve begun to realize what it must have cost him to manage his addiction that tightly every day of his life. But part of that must have been that he substituted one hydrocarbon chain for the other—sugar for alcohol—every morning. I know when he finally did stop drinking, there were dishes of candy all around the house for the rest of his life. And I knew he loved peanut brittle.
Everybody else went to bed about eleven, and I told them I was going to stay up and watch the Carson show, which I usually did on Friday nights, and then I got things together to make the peanut brittle. Johnny was on it that night, and that was back when he did an hour-and-a-half show, so I didn’t even get started until about 1:30. The problem was that Mr. Van Camp’s lab instructions were for such a small batch, and they were all in metric measurements, so I had to convert them and then multiply them. Math was always my worst subject, but at that time I still believed Mrs. Shoebridge’s propaganda, that anybody could do math if they just took it slowly and followed the order of operations. I was probably the one who finally changed her mind on that. I suppose I should have known there was something wrong when it worked out to a cup of salt for one batch of candy, but the sugar was boiling on the stove, and the peanuts were getting burned, and I was committed.
It was awful. The sweet flavor came first, but then the salt bit like a mouth full of ants. The roof of my mouth went raw immediately, and it made my teeth tingle. I never could put salt on a slug after that peanut brittle. The cruelty of it was too clear and too familiar. All I can think of is that my tongue must have looked like a salted slug that night. I was so frustrated and disappointed, I just left everything on the counter and went to bed.
When I got up I heard my folks in the kitchen, and I went in to explain to them what had happened. Dad was drinking a glass of water, or as Mom said, “another glass of water,” and just stared at me. He never said anything. He just stared. It wasn’t a glare, really, because there was no anger or malice in it, but there wasn’t any holiday mirth there either. It was like he was looking into my head, with a face like Geraldo when he opened up Al Capone’s empty vault.
Mom saw the humor in it, but I’m not sure Dad ever did, which is odd because Dad was a great storyteller with a sharp sense of humor. Years later I tried telling the story once in his hearing, but he didn’t join in.

What's Next

2008-11-13T12:58:00.000-08:00

A few days before the election I had lunch with some of my liberal friends. (I do have liberal friends. An English professor without liberal friends probably has no friends at all.) I enjoy their company. They usually inspire me to write, but immediately after the election, for obvious reasons, I felt pretty uninspired.

Then a few days later I heard a conversation on one of the news shows, and another on a political talk show, each recalling something I had heard from my liberal friends, and I began to recognize the fallacy that is going to be the first line of defense for the Obama Administration. As happened so often in the election, each of these conversations, no matter the original topic, came promptly around to the charge of racism. The groundwork has been laid, and from this point on you can be sure that any opposition to President Obama and his policies will, by definition, be racist.

That sounds so stark, and frankly ridiculous, when presented as a conclusion, but the deft academic gymnastics that are employed to establish the charge are worth examination. The argument goes like this: If you object to Obama's long-term relationship with terrorist William Ayers, what you are objecting to in essence is that Barack Obama is not "one of us." The average person of good judgment of course would never consider fraternizing with a person of that character, but President-elect Obama is smart enough and dedicated enough to handle such a relationship without being tainted. He's not like you and me, and if you object to that, it's because you hate and fear anyone that is different from you, someone who is "not one of us." (By the way, don't even raise the question of elitism in this regard. Anyone who considers any member of an oppressed race as elitist is clearly making an insensitive and racist argument. You don't want to go there.)

If you reject him because of his affiliation with a church where race-baiting and hate speech are part of the worship service, it's because you don't understand the Black Christian experience, and what you're really saying is "he's not one of us." If you think his tax policies and spending plan turn too much toward government control and too far from the free market, when you call that socialism you're trying to distance him from the mainstream of white American society and say "he's not one of us."

Now here's the payoff. The rejection of his "otherness" (one of those wonderful, made-up academic terms that supposedly freshens a stale concept by its very childishness) converts all these objections into an objection to his race; thus, rejection of his elitist attitudes, disapproval of his poor judgment in friends, disagreement with his fiscal policies, even concern over his lack of experience are all just code words to hide irrational, evil, racist opposition. (Fallacy Alert: Over-generalizing.) It's a very neatly packed argument, provided you don't look too closely at the label.

Besides being a vast over-generalization--for certainly it is possible to reject unsound, out-dated, Keynesian socialism or other leadership flaws without even knowing the racial heritage of the man--besides being an over-generalization, this argument is a classic red herring, a distraction right down to its spiny, segmented vertebrae (see Fallacies: Red herring).

But it's a red herring on steroids. When liberals deflect any single argument by calling it racism, they turn the discussion away from an argument that is capable of question, difficult to win, and toward an argument they cannot lose. Once the opponent must defend against the charge of racism, the debate is won. Better still, when they can group all objections into just one, and that one is the oppositions' "obvious" racism, then they never have to deal with logic or policy at all. No challenge has to be addressed as a discreet, rational issue. They can all be turned aside in one smooth counter-stroke as racist code words, not only not worthy of an answer, but clearly indicative of a moral failing in the opponent. You have to admire the audacity, to employ one of the President-elect's favorite words. This is a red herring the size of a halibut!

My timing, of course is a bit behind. It would have been useful to have posted this before the election, but have no fear. The charge of racism is not going away for at least the next four years. This particular fallacy worked well for liberals in the recent campaign, and if the Clinton Presidency taught us anything, it's that the campaign for the second term begins with the first inaugural. Don't expect the Obama team to be throwing down their tools anytime soon. If conservatives don't speak out and identify this tactic for the distraction it is, racism will certainly be the defining topic of debate for the entire Obama presidency.

I figured it out!

2008-11-01T15:59:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama's definition of the "wealthy" whose taxes will increase under his plan keeps drifting downward.

For months, Obama had said that any family making less than $250,000/yr would get a tax break, but a couple of weeks ago that slipped to $200,000/yr. Then last week, Sen. Biden said it would be $150,000/yr, followed by Gov. Bill Richardson of NM setting the bar at $125,000. It doesn't look like it's going any lower--for now--and I think I know why.

The Palin family's annual income last year was $140,000. That'll fix her!

(I had actually intended this as a joke, but when I look at the investigation the Obama campaign launched against Joe "the Plumber" Wurtzelbacher, and the reporters they've kicked off their airplane, and the hit pieces published on Orlando reporter Barbara West for asking Sen. Biden some direct questions, I'm not sure it's all that funny.)

How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

2008-10-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine announced the other day that he didn't much like any of the presidential/vice presidential nominees, but that whoever he voted for, it wasn't going to be Sarah Palin--that having a woman so stupid a heartbeat away from the presidency was more than he could contemplate. Of course, this isn't the first time we've heard this. The problem is, it doesn't square with the facts.

I've spent enough time in business, education and politics to know that, however little we may think of bosses, administrators and leaders, truly stupid people don't get very far in their fields. Truly stupid people get duped, get overwhelmed, get revealed, and then they get fired, early on. This is why the criticism of Sarah Palin, and for that matter Barack Obama, Joe Biden and George W. Bush, is so far off the mark. With careful editing and constant repetition in the media, anyone can be made to look like a fool (Fallacy Alert: Card Stacking). Certain conservative commentators have replayed ad nauseum Obama's claim to have visited 57 states, with just one or two more to go, as well as Joe Biden's invitation to a paraplegic to "Stand up, and let the people have a look at you." Such gaffs, and Palin has made her share, are red meat to the media critics, but they're not a valid standard for judgment.

So what is? Palin's resume provides some excellent examples. As Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and later as Governor of Alaska, Palin not only successfully negotiated with the world's most expensive lawyers, representing Exxon, BP and Conoco/Phillips, to obtain the most favorable development contracts the state has ever had, but then took them to court to force compliance--and won. You don't get to that point by being stupid. To accept the idea that Sarah Palin is stupid, you must also accept the idea that the oil companies are kind, beneficent, charitable institutions. Does anyone care to defend that proposition?

The truth is, the charge of stupidity is the default liberal argument applied to all Republicans, and it has worked for them for nearly four decades (Propaganda Alert: Name calling). Palin is a stupid, back-woods redneck. McCain is a dull, angry man. George W. Bush is a "village idiot" (the History faculty at Yale and the MBA faculty at Harvard ought to cringe at those charges, since they granted him his degrees). His father was a competent but uninspired bureaucrat, and Ronald Reagan was the original Dumb Republican President. But Reagan's economic policies laid the foundation for the longest, peacetime economic expansion in our nation's history, and his foreign policy pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse. Bush Senior presided over that collapse, and his quiet diplomacy helped prevent the dissolution of that empire into multiple armed conflicts in all but a very few cases. An objective evaluation of George W.'s invasion of Iraq will have to wait for some future historian, but it should be remembered that this "village idiot" outsmarted two Democrat presidential candidates, a Supreme Court Challenge, and the American Congress on tax policy, education, court appointments and a variety of other issues. If these people are stupid, what does that make the ones they defeated?

There are any number of legitimate policy issues on which to base voting decisions in this election. The tired old charge that the candidate must be dumb because she's Republican isn't one of them.

An Ordinary Joe

2008-10-17T17:41:00.000-07:00

Joe Wurzelbacher looks like the guy who plays third base at a Labor Day softball game, but he got a taste of political hardball this time. It seems that without any hostile intent, he threw Presidential Nominee Barack Obama a brush back curve and brought the Senator's team out of the dugout with bats in their hands.

Wurzelbacher is the ambitious plumber who wants to buy his own business, and whom Sen. Obama told he'd have to "share the wealth" (Propaganda alert: Euphemism--"Sharing the wealth" sounds so much less intrusive and punitive than "redistributing" it.) a terrific slip for the Presidential front-runner. Up to that point the Senator had contended that small businesses would be protected, and that all the little guys would get tax breaks, but in a moment of unfortunate candor, Sen. Obama admitted this would-be small businessman would have his wealth "shared out," which is to say, redistributed. Without time to spin his words, the Senator just blurted out the truth, which in his case is definitely a strike.

In the days that followed, Obama's team announced to the public that Wurzelbacher isn't a licensed plumber, that he owes the IRS back taxes, that he probably really isn't ready to buy that business anyway and that he doesn't make enough money to worry about the Obama Tax Plan, so he's just a trouble-maker after all. The Senator himself said to a rally, "Come on. How many $250,000 a year plumbers do you know?" (Fallacy alert: Red herring. the number of plumbers who make $250,000/year has no bearing on the impact of Obama's Tax Plan on small businesses. He's is trying to distract us.) There are, of course, defenses for each of these charges. As an employee, Wurzelbacher doesn't need to hold his own license. He works under the license of his boss. Many of us owe the IRS back taxes. If we don't have enough taxes withheld during a tax year (which is actually a better plan than giving the government a one-year interest-free loan), we may suddenly discover on April 15th that we owe the IRS a significant sum of money. There is even an automatic payment plan any taxpayer can apply for in order to pay off the deficit. The idea that Wurzelbach doesn't yet own the business and therefore shouldn't even be asking about the Tax Plan ignores the native ambition and high hopes of the American entrepreneur, or even the would-be entrepreneur. As Peter Stone wrote in his play 1776, most Americans would rather preserve the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor. Wurzelbacher has even been falsely accused of being a Republican plant, set up to trap the Senator, even though it was Obama who walked into Wurzelbacher's front yard. All of this, however, is entirely irrelevant.

And for the Obama Team, that's just the point. If Joe the Plumber can be made the focus of the discussion, and if he can be made to appear as an unreliable, or unworthy, or unsympathetic character, then the spotlight can be taken off Sen. Obama and his gaff. (Fallacy alert: Ad hominem)This is the essence of the ad hominem argument, to attack the man and thereby draw attention away from the argument. No one has denied that Sen. Obama want to redistribute the wealth created by successful workers, but by tarnishing the image of Joe Wurzelbacher, the Obama Team hopes to make people forget the suddenly public truth about the Tax Plan. It's a classic dodge.

It's also, as old time Democrat pollster Pat Caudell says, "Nixonian." Through it all though, Joe the Plumber has been a paragon of good-sportsmanship. He hasn't complained in the least, but he has made a very disturbing observation. To one interviewer this week he said, "When you can't ask a question of our leaders anymore, that gets scary." And it's still the first inning.

Bill Maher's "Religulous"

2008-09-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

(*In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am an unapologetic member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the churches Maher derides in his new film, Religulous.)

Bill Maher has made a career of mocking the beliefs and values of those with whom he disagrees. Unfortunately, the poverty of this one-note shtick escapes his most devoted fans because it appeals to their biases. His new film Religulous holds true to form, but it reveals perhaps as much about the man as it does about his subject, and that bears scrutiny.

For his victims, the appeal of Maher's diatribes may be hard to understand, but it goes to the very nature of humor. Mark Twain said (and he should know), "All humor is pathos." Pathos is a classic Greek concept that refers to suffering, empathy with it, sympathy for it or passive observation of it. We laugh at Chaplin's Little Tramp or John Heder's Napolean Dynamite because we empathize with the experience of playing the fool, and we find the characters sufficiently sympathetic that we hope for their eventual triumph. But Maher's derisive contempt demonstrates neither empathy nor sympathy. Instead he consciously relishes the discomfiture of those he considers his intellectual inferiors for the pure delight of seeing them suffer. His humor is quite literally pathetic.

Is this just sadism on Maher's part? No, that would be hypocritical, and clearly his contempt for most Americans is entirely sincere but, as noted before, revealing. It is one of the cliches of our contemporary society that hate is born of fear. Ask Mr. Maher. People who reject homosexuality are homophobic. People who oppose illegal immigration are xenophobic. Bill Maher, who hates God, religion and all who believe, is theophobic. The idea that he fears what religious people do to our society and in our government is a red herring (Fallacy Alert: Red herring). Somewhere at his core, beyond the clever sophistry and the glib mockery, Maher fears that those who believe are right, and if they are, the consequences for him are too appalling to contemplate. However much he may protest or profane, neither Maher nor anyone else would expend so much energy trying to tear something down if he were not threatened by it. The more insistently this fear nags at him, the more loudly he must shout to keep from hearing.

Bill Maher mocks the thing he hates because Bill Maher is a theophobe.

Propaganda Alert: The Big Lie

2008-09-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

In all three of his debates with Senator McCain, and regularly on the stump, Senator Obama repeatedly refers to cutting the business tax as a tax cut for the rich. The phrase "tax cuts for the rich" is a buzz word designed to promote class envy from which liberal demagogues hope to profit. It imputes a nefarious purpose to those who support a healthy business climate and implies that their motives are nothing but greed for money and power. Even more harmful, and more dangerous for our economy and our nation, it eliminates the possibility that any two people can have a disagreement without one of them being "evil," "corrupt" and "exploitative of the poor." The wedge that this tactic has driven in American politics and society is appalling, but it has worked, and those who have used it are loath to give it up.

It's a lie. It's a Big Lie. And they're sticking to it.