(With apologies to Robert Bork)

One of the better-known Twilight Zone episodes concerns a five-year-old named Anthony Fremont who, for reasons never fully explained, obtains godlike powers which he uses to terrorize the people of a town called Peaksville.

Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines - because they displeased Him- and he moved an entire community back into the dark ages. The people in Peaksville … have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased, the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque, walking horror.
--It's a Good Life, Twilight Zone, Season 3, Episode 73

Given the emerging dystopia that confronts us it is difficult not to conclude much the same thing has happened to the United States. We have elevated to positions of great power a whole cohort of Anthony Fremont's. How such a thing could have come to pass will doubtless be the subject of soul-searching tomes for generations, but a good short answer is the kids tied us up while we were asleep.

If this sounds a little harsh, ask yourself what community of adults would elect someone to the highest office in the United States, about whom they knew virtually nothing, with no discernible experience or qualifications, on the basis of telegenic charm and lofty - if utterly empty - rhetoric. This is the rough equivalent of electing a class president because he has cool shoes and can spit between his teeth.

The consequence of this is a president wholly dedicated to the redistribution of wealth - necessarily involving de-development of the west - or as we curmudgeons like to refer to it "taking away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines - because they displease him - and moving an entire nation back into the dark ages."

If further evidence is required that the finger-painters are driving the car, consider the whole subject of personal responsibility. Children don't have it, adults do, or should. Many of us can remember the epiphanic moment when we realized throwing a baseball through someone's window couldn't be blamed on the baseball, sunspots or prevailing winds.

Reconcile this with a president who, in plain defiance of common sense and common experience, continues to blame his failures on the previous administration. This isn't much more sophisticated than "it was the baseball's fault", but the faithful seem willing to accept this and in fact repeat it with tiresome regularity at every opportunity.

Yet another characteristic of the very young is magical thinking. Just as my four-year-old considered it a perfectly reasonable proposition to walk from Toronto to Dallas in an hour, our leaders can somehow use the terms "trillion dollar health bill" and "fiscal responsibility" in the same sentence, without so much as a "huh?" It is similarly an article of faith that Obama has had insufficient time to accomplish his miracles and the promised utopia (best described as "Land of the Free Everything") is just around the corner. Linus, sitting forlornly in the middle of a field, awaiting the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, could not demonstrate more determination in the face of the obvious.

Those of us who didn't daydream our way through math class know full well that the only thing around the corner is a largish boulder (since we're operating at the level of cartoons) rolling toward us at some speed, and that the pumpkin patch at the bottom of the hill is really not the place to be.

The final, and easily the most disturbing, characteristic of the kids who would rule us and those who would consent to be ruled, is narcissism. Maturation is commonly associated with the ability to differentiate between self and others, establish rational boundaries (one of the more important ones being where my fist ends and your nose begins, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes) and develop a realistic and proportional sense of one's place in the universe. Children possess none of these things out of the shrink wrap. In a child's mind, self and the universe are synonymous. Needs must be met, gratification provided, more or less immediately, or there is crying, lots and lots of crying. Merely wanting something is its own justification.

That Obama is narcissistic is no longer considered fringy analysis. It permeates his style of governance, his view of foreign relations and his regard for any form of opposition. It is the reason he can utter breathtaking falsehoods without batting an eyelash, because his reality is the only one that counts. What is less commented upon is the degree of narcissism in the general population it took to elect him in the first place. In many ways it is a perfect form of symbiosis, between those who expect the world to meet all their needs and those who would be the world.

If all of this sounds condescending or elitist an important distinction must be made. Unlike Bill Maher I don't think the American people are stupid. I think a portion of them are stuck in perpetual childhood, and will willingly trade away their liberty for short-term pleasures and some ersatz form of security. This is bad but it doesn't have to be permanent. Eventually, like the kids on Pleasure Island in Pinocchio, everyone who takes this path comes to realize what a truly bad deal he has entered into. The smarter kids will realize this before they grow long ears, and there is evidence this is already happening.

A therapist of some repute once observed that much of what he had learned about healing the human psyche could be summed up in two words: "grow up". (On reflection it may have been Joan Rivers but I digress.) Whoever it was, large segments of the population have ignored, or have been seduced away from, that very sensible injunction to our general detriment. It must also be said that the adults among us -- permissive parents in both the literal and figurative sense -- have allowed this infantilization to proceed unchecked for generations and we are currently paying a very high price for our apathy. The events of the past months have really been the opening salvoes in what will necessarily be a long war fought by growing numbers of adults who are very much awake and heavily invested in tough love.

So, Anthony (Barak, Nancy …) I am definitely not thinking happy thoughts. Do your worst.

Jim DeMint famously referred to the health care bill as President Obama's "Waterloo". With all due respect to Senator DeMint I think Stalingrad is a more apt analogy. Not only are the parallels more numerous and significant but they also portend outcomes that are, depending on your political persuasion, either ominous or hopeful.

Like Stalingrad, the health care bill is an overreach by a leader seduced into overconfidence by a string of early successes -- successes obtained primarily through the tactics of rapid advance, surprise, shock and misdirection, in which opponents are overwhelmed, surrounded or by-passed before proper responses can be mounted.

The Germans did it with Panzer divisions and Blitzkrieg, the White House and Congress did it with flurries of enormous (and largely unread) pieces of legislation and Cloward-Piven, but the basic principles remain the same.

The problem with such tactics is they have a limited window of effectiveness. Success is predicated on a quick and overwhelming victory before more conventional concerns -- like resupply and vulnerability to counter-attack -- can reassert themselves. If your opponent can survive long enough to understand your tactics he will adapt to them, realizing among other things that your breakneck pace is not sustainable.

The object then becomes attrition and delay. If the juggernaut can be worn down, made to consume its resources as quickly as possible and ultimately forced to slow down, it becomes just another army a long way from home with exploitable weaknesses and no cover. The Germans found this out at the gates of Stalingrad. The Democrats are increasingly finding this out in the halls of Congress.

The Tea Party rallies, Town Hall demonstrations, e-mails, phone calls have had a cumulative effect, although the participants could have been forgiven for questioning the significance or impact of any individual act or event. Like the Russians , the opponents of Obamacare (and other statist initiatives) seem to have spent most of their time retreating. But each engagement, no matter how lopsided, has taken its toll. The Germans weren't the only ones who expected to have things wrapped up by the end of summer.

History proves the tactical errors can be reversed or at least mitigated by leaders flexible enough to adapt in their turn. Whatever one thinks of Bill Clinton one has to concede that his own adjustments after the disastrous Hillarycare initiative and the subsequent congressional defeat in 1994 saved his presidency. Stalingrad was a terrible example of what happens when a leader shows no such flexibility.

For the Germans the beginning of the end came with the Russian breakthrough around both their flanks that eventually surrounded them (remember those exploitable weaknesses I was talking about). As bad as this was, it took the intransigence of their leader to turn a major, but survivable, defeat into a disaster, because rather than allow them to attempt a break out, Hitler ordered them to stand in place. The completely preventable loss of over a million men made the collapse of the Eastern front and, ultimately, the end of the war inevitable.

In the case of health care legislation it is becoming increasingly clear that our own leaders are equally resistant to any notion of retreat. As an ideologue, and someone apparently given over to the myth of his own invincibility, President Obama appears to disdain any kind of backward step, and there is no evidence to suggest the congressional leadership is any less extreme in their outlook. (There's a great deal of evidence to suggest that some are good deal more extreme but no need to put too fine a point on it.) Having poured enormous amounts of political capital down these particular shell holes, this is obviously where they want to make their stand.

This leaves the Blue Dog Democrats -- and anyone else in the party with a modicum of common sense -- in the unenviable position of realizing the corridor for escape is rapidly closing and their leaders aren't even thinking in those terms. Many, like those benighted soldiers before them, will decide the "every man for himself" approach is the only sensible one and will attempt breakouts on their own. This is called desertion, and there was a lot of that at Stalingrad, but it would be hard to fault anyone in those circumstances.

What seems to elude the "do or die" elements of the party is even if they manage to achieve something they can package as a win, the battle will rage on much longer than any of them imagine (like the Germans who actually made it into Stalingrad only to find themselves in a wilderness of snipers, booby-traps and room-to-room fighting). As the full implications of this bill become better known, they will face energized political opposition, judicial challenges and grassroots activism on a scale that will dwarf the events of last summer. They will also quickly find they have neither the time, resources, nor the support to move onto the next thing, and the pitched battles around health care coupled with a failing economy will consume them.

Like Stalingrad, the passage of the health care bill in the House of Representatives may well be remembered as their furthest point of advance. Like their counterparts, the Democrats would do well to look to the sky and note the coming of winter.

Plant v. To place or position an idea or series of ideas in public consciousness--typically through emphasis and repetition--for the express purpose of shaping public opinion and as a possible prelude to justification of normally prohibited acts at a later time.
-- Meed's Highly Unofficial Dictionary

Not satisfied with exploiting existing incidents of senseless violence to advance dark warnings of "right-wing hate mongering" the MSM has clearly decided to get out in front of the next one.

Consider ABC's model of balance and restrain: Fear for Obama's Safety Grows as Hate Groups Thrive on Racial Backlash. The justification for this subdued headline is 1) One protester holding up a really stupid threatening sign, 2) another protester stupidly (but legally) displaying a firearm outside the recent Town Hall and 3) an arrest of an individual with "mental problems" in California (relevance unexplained) . As an afterthought, the article also admits (almost with regret) that "the President's daily threat matrix has yet to reflect a sharp increase in threats".

Exhibit B is host Ed Schultz' oil-on-troubled-waters assertion that "Conservatives Want Obama To Get Shot." (By the way, is it possible in Schultz we at long last have the left's version of Ralph Kramden? Just asking.)

Typically we have to wait until a heinous act actually occurs before the usual suspects like Paul Krugman weigh in with boilerplate pieces like The Big Hate. Unhappily for the MSM, the Town Hall protesters are not the Red Brigades and the true crazies seem to have taken the summer off, so this leaves the MSM with the unenviable task of having to stir the pot with very thin ingredients.

Nevermind. Inasmuch as the laws of probability ensure that somewhere, somehow, sometime, some mental deficient will do something violent, it is only necessary to keep the pot boiling in anticipation. This is the very essence of the "plant". No conspiracy theories need apply; just plant the manufactured evidence then wait however long it takes for someone to "find" it.

The end game of all of this is disturbingly clear. Inasmuch as conservative talk radio and Fox News represent a significant thorn in the flesh to the liberal establishment it would be very much in its interest to classify conservative opinion--or at least insufficiently sterilized conservative opinion--as hate speech. If legislative muscle could be put behind this eventually, that would be game, set and match.

(For those who consider this far-fetched, please review the current proposed expansion of existing hate crime legislation, note the baby-steps that would be required in terms of definition of "injury" and "victim groups" to achieve the ends above, and tell me again why this wouldn't be attempted.)

During the worst of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, someone observed that if it were proven conclusively that God didn't exist the combatants would immediately resolve themselves into Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists. People who walk into public places with violence in mind are not driven by anything but their own demons, and, to paraphrase Mr. Krugman, those who attempt to exploit these tragedies for political gain do so at their peril.

Linda Douglass and John Adams are right, facts are stubborn things. The principal difference between them is Adams actually believed it.

The bone of contention was a video posted on Drudge of Obama at an SEIU forum in 2003 (available in uncut form) in which BHO clearly states his support for, and desire to implement, a single payer system. I have watched this video about a dozen times and there is no other rational interpretation.

So when I heard that Douglass (communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office) had decided to go on offense with a little video of her own I was curious as to what artful legerdemain she would engage in to somehow make us doubt our lying eyes. I needn't have gotten all worked up; Douglass is clearly no Houdini, she isn't even my Uncle Ed (who could do a marvelous trick when you pulled his finger, but I digress).

Douglass' sophisticated counter-attack consisted of asserting that the 2003 video had been spliced to give a false impression, providing no evidence for this claim, then presenting some of BHO's recent videos (which she claims, in a break from reality that rates an entry in the DSM, conservatives have never seen) as proof-positive, I guess, that at least it was the same guy in all of them. No that's unfair, she did demonstrate that in at least one of the videos BHO had to have been lying a priori.

Having proven exactly nothing she concluded with an exhortation for the faithful to forward any "fishy" e-mails to whitehouse.gov, somehow avoiding the urge to pop in a monocle and fire up a cigarette as she asked for "ze names".

Barak, it's one thing to run a sweatshop, quite another to run a sweatshop badly. This is what you get when you put an MSM-toadie into the job and not one of Chicago guys. Send Douglass down to the minors (can Michelle use another PR flack, just asking) and get someone in the position who can at least lie in an entertaining fashion. Not insulting our collective intelligence would be a boon as well.

As I watch an increasing number of tweets and posts related to the BHO Birth Certificate issue it is difficult not to conclude we are either being set up or are walking into a cul-de-sac of our own making. Without prejudice to the validity of the claims being made, a number of fundamental questions need to be asked.

1. What's the end-game here? If tomorrow morning some court somewhere rules that a proper BC has not been provided, does anyone seriously think BHO will step down or be impeached? The more likely, and highly undesirable, outcome would be an extended, and distracting, court battle, easily outlasting BHO's first term.
   
   
2. Is this the issue we want to pour our blood and treasure into? BHO and the Congress are flooding the zone with new bills, executive orders and appointments. Do we really want to siphon off time and energy that could be spent researching and responding to these in favor of a manifestly unprofitable, and unquestionable divisive, line of attack.
   
   
3. Is this really the way to win friends and influence people? The American people are waking up to the real meaning of BHO's promise to "fundamentally transform America." They don't like it, they are asking questions and looking for alternatives. This is probably the worst time in the world to be presenting ourselves as black helicopter theorists at worst and legalistic opportunists at best.
   
   
4. Who is really served by all this? The BC issue hands BHO two things he likes most: opportunity for misdirection and a caricatured enemy. It shifts focus from the manifest failure of his policies and his true socialist intent to the "crazies, obstructionists and flat-earthers" who are trying to bring him down. This is so clearly to his advantage that I would submit if his operatives aren't making extended efforts to keep this alive they aren't doing their job.

Someone once said it is wise not to interrupt an enemy bent on self-destruction. I see the BC issue as an interruption that he will exploit. As his numbers plummet, Democrat allies reconsider their allegiances based on very real electoral threats and at least a part of the MSM emerges from its anesthesia, this is an inopportune time to be throwing him any life-lines.

I wrote previously of the apparent enormity of the obstacles facing us as we attempt to restore the republic, and tried to offer some realistic comfort regarding our ability to prevail nonetheless. I suggested that people like me (previously politically passive) are now off the couch and learning--often mastering--tools hitherto used most effectively by the left. I hoped as I wrote those words my optimism wasn't running ahead of my discernment.

My experiences of late have convinced me that my assessment may have been, if anything, overly pessimistic. I truly believe the left's attempted takeover of this country will fail, primarily because they waited about a decade too long.

Consider an Obama presidency elected in November 1999. There is no Fox News, no Facebook, no Twitter, no meaningful online social networking. Rush is out there, but he is isolated and easily dealt with with some back-door form of the Fairness Doctrine. There is certainly an Internet but it is neither fast nor particularly interactive. "High-speed" for the vast majority of users is a 56K modem and anything beyond simple forms entry is still in the future. Even e-mail is by no means ubiquitous.

In this context Obama's Blitzkrieg techniques, already formidable, would have been more effective by orders of magnitude. I think the American people would still have responded but the response would have been delayed, communication would have lagged behind events, and, like the French confronting the original Blitzkrieg, effective coordination of response would have been all but impossible. Add to this the wholesale collusion of a near monopolistic mainstream media and it is easy to envision BHO running the table before the rest of us knew we were in a game.

Happily for us--unhappily for the left--non-ideologues know how to use computers too, and have quickly turned their own weapons against them. If we are willing to pay attention, and do the work, we can use the technology to stay informed, organize and respond, as fast as they choose to try to overwhelm us.

My only caveat is the importance of the Internet is not lost on the left, and the appointment of an Internet Czar should be seen as nothing but ominous. It is altogether likely that in the name of "security" (the seeds of which have already been planted through the MSM) this administration will seek to control key elements of the IS infrastructure such as the DNS super-servers or regulate bandwidth and/or downloads. Again, I think they are too late and any such measure would meet with the fiercest resistance but that doesn't mean we don't need to be vigilant.

For now, however, I think we can all be grateful Al Gore didn't invent the Internet ten years later.

An open letter to Reps Mack (CA), Castle (DE), Kirk (IL), Lance (NJ) LoBiondo (NJ), McHugh, Reichert (WA), Smith (NJ)

Apologies for writing this after the fact but not in my wildest dreams did I think you would actually vote for Cap and Tax last night.  I never underestimate the venality of politicians but I do presume that even the most intellectually challenged of them will have some working sense of self-preservation.

To be blunt, you have been played, and that smoking crater on the horizon is what's left of your political career.  This probably something one of your aides should have brought up, or you might have put on your thinking cap and come up with yourself, but here we are.

Allow me to state, what is for most of us, the obvious:

Nancy Pelosi, short of votes, was presented with a basic set of options last night.  She could either try to strong-arm Democratic representatives from vulnerable districts into committing political suicide, or postpone the vote ...

OR (cha-ching) get enough gullible Republicans to commit political suicide in their place so she could give them a pass.

While I am sure those Democrats to whom you have provided cover are abjectly grateful, did you realize that's what you were doing, exactly?

There is no downside for the Democrats in having had you swallow this particular grenade.

• In the unlikely chance you secure the Republican nomination in 2010, your Democratic opponent will face a critically weakened candidate.

• If you cross the floor to the Dems, that's all the same to them.  Enjoy being a back-bencher while it lasts, and make no mistake, Pelosi is no Einstein but even she understands that turncoats, especially relatively obscure ones, are best left out there on the spiral arm.

• Whatever deal you cut will likely be of short duration, and may not even survive reconciliation, if the bill gets that far.  They have your vote, and if they have to throw you over the side in furtherance of another deal, they will not hesitate.  At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, preserving your career is not uppermost in Pelosi's mind.

For this mess of pottage you have advanced the cause of a bureaucratic monster that will cripple or kill the economy while providing yet another massive slush-fund for government social engineering.  Had you read the bill this might have been clearer to you.

Best of luck in your future endeavors,

Mark Meed

The title of this piece is an attempt to trump my counterparts on the left, for whom the term "hate" has become the verbal tic of choice (just edging out "like" and "um") when referring to anything conservative.  The latest such throat-clearing exercise is Paul Krugman's piece in the the June 11 edition of the New York Times entitled (now get ready) ... The Big Hate.

Mr. Krugman's thesis is that the recent murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller and the fatal shooting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum more or less vindicate the DHS Advisory in April (since withdrawn--I guess the vindication didn't come soon enough) warning of a growing threat to national security from "Right-Wing Extremists".  (I usually dislike it when  writers use snotty quotation marks in this fashion, but when you are suggesting, as DHS did, that anyone with a Ron Paul bumper-sticker is a suspect, you're getting the quotation marks.) 

Mr. Krugman goes on to imply that Fox News and conservative talk radio are the Svengali to these various lunatic Trilby's, and have spurred them on to their monstrous acts.  Leave aside the fact that the perpetrator of the Holocaust Museum murder held positions not remotely associated with conservativism (we like Israel, the Jews, African-Americans and Bill O'Reilly just fine actually), he and the murderer of Dr. Tiller actually held views outside what could best be described as "the mainstream community of sane people."  In this, they were indistinguishable from the recent convert to Islam who attacked the two recruiters in Arkansas, killing one, except of course there is nothing there for the left to exploit which is why that story is currently free-falling down the memory hole.

Mr. Krugman's article, with its heavy reliance on innuendo, a credulous audience and sparse fact-checking (did Glenn Beck do anything except debunk the FEMA camp urban myth, really?) is unremarkable.  What is far more interesting is the larger campaign by the left to conflate conservative commentary and "hate speech" (please see previous note on the snottiness waiver).  To that end, the article in question is just one more plant.

(Plant  n. The creation, invention or exaggeration of a problem with the express purpose of employing it later as justification for doing something normally prohibited.  Logical successor of the "crisis that is too valuable to waste".
  -- Meed's Highly Unofficial Dictionary)

The exact dance-steps are as yet to be determined, but the general intent is pretty clear.  Inasmuch as conservative talk radio and Fox News represent a significant thorn in the flesh to the liberal establishment it would be very much in its interest to classify conservative opinion--or at least insufficiently sterilized conservative opinion--as hate speech.  If legislative muscle could be put behind this eventually, that would be game, set and match.

(For those who consider this far-fetched, please review the current proposed expansion of existing hate crime legislation, note the baby-steps that would be required in terms of definition of "injury" and "victim groups" to achieve the ends above, and tell me again why this wouldn't be attempted.)

All this said, I was encouraged that the comments section of the Krugman article was by no means the uniform Gilbert and Sullivan patter-chorus I would have expected.  Among the more or less obligatory denunciations of conservatives as gap-toothed hillbillies whose demagogues must be silenced, there seemed a good representation of people (at least one of whom identified herself as an Obama supporter) who understood the speciousness of the arguments, and more importantly, the primacy of First Amendment over the latest Kill-The-Bogey-Man appeal.

During the worst of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, someone observed that if it were proven conclusively that God didn't exist the combatants would immediately resolve themselves into Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists.  People who walk into public places with murder on their minds are not driven by anything but their own demons, and, to paraphrase Mr. Krugman, those who attempt to exploit these tragedies for political gain do so at their peril.

There is a fear that dares not speak its name in the the bosom of some of my confreres.  It comes out in little ways, like facial ticks and high-pitched laughter whenever President Obama's approval rating is mentioned, or any time "hope" and "change" are used in the same sentence.  Like the Herbert Lom character in the Pink Panther movies, my friends are vulnerable to the quiet dread that comes with knowing not only that you are the only person in the room who gets what a fool Clouseau is, but you may be the only person who gets that for a long time.

(Note:  To the extent that people are reading this at all, it might be inferred by some that I am implying that President Obama is something less than the walking cerebral cortex he has been portrayed to be.  Notwithstanding his tendency to blue-screen every time his teleprompter fails, I am suggesting no such thing.  Foolishness, popular misconception aside, has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with pride.  That's what makes comedies comic and, unfortunately, tragedies tragic.)

The latest manifestation is the possibility that the much anticipated groundswell in 2010--the one that will decimate the Democratic Congress and leave President Obama peering down from his lonely tower like Saruman--might not materialize.  On its face, there isn't a whole lot to recommend optimism there:  the Republicans are firing all their guns at once, mostly at each other,  the Democrats are taking over everything that isn't nailed down (until of course they get around to nationalizing nails) and the mainstream media is pretty much perpetually torn between trying to prove that Obama invented penicillin and Rush Limbaugh invented syphilis.  Against this backdrop, the reactions of the American people--if polls and the aforementioned MSM are to be believed--run the gamut from "woo-hoo" to "I can't believe the other guy didn't win American Idol".

Against such things one wants to offer a ray of hope.  At the same time one does not want to sound crazy-desperate like whatshisname in the fuhrer-bunker, commanding armies that no longer existed to fend off hoards of Russians who very much did.

That said, I still think my friends overlook an obvious point. 

It's all about me.

Okay, not me exactly.  I don't work alone, and besides there are enough self-proclaimed Messiah's setting up shop as it is without my adding to the congestion.

It's all about me, as a sort of unofficial and imperfect poster-child for the kinds of people who are now getting into this game.

Like many of my ilk, I coasted into middle age with no particular involvement in politics.  I have been blessed with interesting and profitable work, a family of whom I am entirely unworthy, and all sorts of diverting activities and hobbies.  (If this sounds like a segue into " ... and I enjoy long walks on the beach,"  take heart, I am moving on.)  On the odd occasion news of some obvious injustice has crossed my transom, I have always reserved the right to grumble about it, then vaguely assume that someone in government, the loyal opposition or the media would get around to fixing it eventually. 

Accordingly, in default mode, I don't do protests, especially in the middle of a work-week, or phone, write or otherwise harass my elected representatives.  I don't spend hours blogging and developing social networks, and I certainly don't eschew my must-read copy of "Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates" so I can dig into "American Progressivism." 

The thing is, I am now doing all these things and more, and inasmuch as I am demonstrably not alone, this may represent more of a problem than the Masters of the Universe would like to acknowledge. 

My personal, and admittedly unscientific, opinion is there is a growing body of people just like me who have gone through or are about the go through, a similar epiphany.  They are smart, accomplished and come with a work-ethic already installed.  What they don't know about history, government, strategy and tactics they are learning very quickly.  The Tea Parties were basically a shakedown cruise; we got some things right, we got some things wrong, but everybody took notes.

I don't honestly know how 2009 is going to work out, much less 2010.  I do know that for many of us the toughest step, that creaky sort of lurch out of inertia, has already been taken. 

The message of the Tea Parties, completely lost on the mainstream media, is that the couch potatoes have left the couch.  And you will be truly astounded where they start popping up.

There is a famous scene in "A Guide for the Married Man" in which Joey Bishop, caught in bed with another woman by his wife, gets up, gets dressed, straightens up the room, and sends the other woman on her way--all the while responding to his wife's escalating outrage with protestations of "What bed? What girl?"  Once the last of the evidence has been removed, the wife's umbrage dissolves into bewilderment and Joey lives to (um) do whatever, another day.

This illustration, while hardly a teaching moment in morality, is nonetheless a perfect analog for the political/social climate in which we find ourselves.  We are repeatedly told words and actions don't mean what we clearly know them to mean, while the deniers play for time with an audience not exactly renowned for its long attention span. 

A current case in point of course is Sonia Sotomayor.  Much has been made of the fact that Rush Limbaugh and others have labeled certain of her remarks racist.  The remarks in question, delivered at University of California, Berkeley in 2001 were as follows:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." 

If we define racism as the ascription of superiority of one race over another, by what objective standard does the foregoing quote not apply?  If, as some have suggested, this was taken out of context, what possible context (apart from "I don't agree with my Aunt Matilda who once said ... " or "ha ha kidding, got you there didn't I") would materially change the meaning?

It is similarly considered almost gauche in some circles (including moderate Republicans) to describe President Obama or any of his minions as socialist in any way.  Again, the proper question (in the spirit of "if it walks like a duck...") is what is the term commonly understood to mean and does it apply?  Merriam-Webster defines it as:

"Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy."

Let's see:  de facto nationalization of the auto industry, impending takeovers of the banking and energy industries (the latter through Cap and Trade), universal health care on the order paper ... seems to me you could make the case.  It is, in fact, ridiculous to even debate this.  In terms of where Obama and the Congress are taking this country, "socialism" is probably a mile-marker in the rear view mirror.

It is pointless, and often disingenuous, to reject the use of any descriptor on the basis that it might be misunderstood, or might be offensive or inflammatory, or might deflect debate from the core issues.  If the descriptors are valid and true, they are valid and true (and typically at least part of the core issue).  If they are not, let's hear the arguments.

Just stop telling me there is no girl and no bed.  Like many others, I am showing up with a camera and a private eye these days.

The inspiration for the name of this blog comes from a famous construct by Rene Descartes, father of most things philosophical or scientific in the western world, to say nothing of that little diver-in-a-jar that goes up and down with the help of a membrane.

Descartes suggested that there was nothing inherently true in a perception of a thing.  There was no reason, he argued, that his own sense impressions couldn't be the work of a clever demon bent on deceiving him.  He was after bigger game (oh, like, "What can truly be known?", "Would it sound better in Latin?", that sort of thing) and this was just a building block, but well before I had seen "The Matrix" (or confronted the many inconsistencies in Gilligan's Island) this kind of crystallized the importance of critical thinking and healthy skepticism for me.

In an era based largely on disinformation, misdirection and managed illusion, there is probably no higher calling than to be the guy at the back of the room yelling "It's up his sleeve?"  The elevated (and not half self-important) term we use for such people these days is "truth seekers".  When I was growing up we called them "writers".  Whatever the moniker, the tools are the same:  logic, language, history and humour.  Other people (many of them contributors in here) are already using them to great effect, but there is a palpable and exigent sense of "all hands on deck" these days compels me to contribute what I can.

So, that's what I am doing here.  Thanks for having me.