my least favorite voice on the conservative rant-wagon (for now, anyway; i mean, with so many motoring mouths offering mistruths, poor conclusions, and illogic, it’s hard to focus on just one for any length of time…) is charles krauthammer. i read somewhere (christine’s blog, perhaps?) where he’s considered by some to be “one of the greatest thinkers of our time.”
perhaps.
and i guess snoop dogg is one of our greatest musicians, eminem one of our greatest poets, and w one of our greatest presidents…
anyway, all my envious character assassinations aside, here’s a quote from a piece he wrote that appeared in yesterday’s ajc:
liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. new york times columnist charles blow chided obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.”
let’s compare that with a statement from this past week from the opening speech at the (stupidi)tea party convention:
people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in english, put a committed socialist ideologue in the white house. his name is barack hussein obama…
the speaker then lamented the fact that…
…we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.
hmmm… a lot of white southerners tried to keep this kind of thing on the books for years, to make it difficult for blacks to vote. but at least it’s good that someone at the convention was at least honest about the racist nature of the ‘party’…
and the ’someone’ who gave this obviously controversy-seeking speech? former u.s. representative and staunchly-anti-immigrant presidential candidate tom tancredo – from colorado, no less, the home of a lot of the organizations making up the most anti-Christlike arm of evangelical Christians.
you know, the (simplici)tea party wouldn’t be all that fun to pick on if it weren’t for the blatant contradictions poured out every time two of its ‘leaders’ open their mouths.
i keep saying this over and over: you couldn’t even make this stuff up…
caught a few minutes of the beginning of mark levin’s show last night. his lead discussion was centered on the snowstorm that was rapidly approaching washington d.c.. he commented on the fact that america had had a noticeable share of bitter cold weather this year.
of course, you didn’t have to be a genius to see where his monologue was headed.
so, being a genius…
…i didn’t stick around.
you know, by the (typical il)logic i guessed he was going to share with his racist, lemming-esque audience, we need only focus on babe ruth’s 0-for-4 games and draw a defensible conclusion that ruth wasn’t any kind of major league caliber player.
and, by that same reasoning, we need only focus on new morning’s ‘if dogs run free’ and shot of love’s ‘lenny bruce’ and conclude that dylan has no songwriting talent.
and, following that same thought-line, we could listen to mark levin’s radio show, hear a single (though random) useful-for-airing point he made (of course, you’d have to wait awhile…), and conclude that he is an intelligent thought-leader worthy of his vast following.
ahem.
as any amateur mathematician knows, statistics aren’t built on the isolated examples in small sample populations.
of greater note is the fact that he failed to lead off with the day’s news of the nearly half-a-percentage point drop in the unemployment rate. this is certainly more telling of his consistently selective use of facts than his global warming analysis.
(now, personally, i think global warming has turned – like all grant- and government-money funded endeavors, into a walk-up-to-the-trough feeding frenzy for anyone with a green idea. in fact, i read where linda blair got a $100,000 green grant for something to do with peas… however, the ultimate target of reducing fossil fuel dependency is a necessary thing – regardless, to me, of the hysteria used to get there – despite what all the republican-crony drill-here-drill-now thieves and selfish ‘conservatives’ want to believe.)
both sides no doubt will put their spin on the new unemployment figure – democrats saying that the stimulus worked, although it’s clear that’s not a provable assertion no matter how many different ways you analyze the data (after all, it’s another stat, right?); republicans arguing that the economy is showing its historically cyclical nature, and that job growth has actually been slower than it would have been without the stimulus spending.
but all that can be inferred in isolated drops in unemployment – and deep cold spells – is that they cannot be used to disprove a longer-term view of reality.
just ask the eskimos, who see first hand the melting of the polar ice caps.
and the penguins, who need to watch their steps so they don’t wind up on a section of ice breaking off into the ocean.
and, of course, ask a lot of your neighbors – after all, nearly one out of every ten of them remains jobless.











