Posts
August 12, 2011
Stephen Goldstein
The Sun Snetinel
RE: Shades of Janet Cook! – Some comments on your prototypical “balloon juice” column in today’s Sun-Sentinel
My dear Professor,
Your nomination of Emmett, the Boston cab driver, as Everyman bespeaks another ailment common to practicing modern American Liberals.
Apparently fewer and fewer of us still remember the lessons of formal Logic.
It trained you, not what to think, but how to think.
One of the ways it did that was by pointing out how not to think.
I shant burden you with tales of the Trivium lest I overload your already overtaxed synapses.
I am loath to put too much on your plate so I will stick to one.
Particulars do not make universals.
You say that Barney Frank’s loud televised public eructations notwithstanding, he will be re-elected because Everyman Emmett “prizes free public education”. [An unasked and therefore unanswered question is why doesn’t the President share his feelings. No “free” public school system spends more per pupil than Washington, D.C. Could there be a more dramatic affirmation of “free” public education than to have a D.C. yellow school bus pull up in front of the White House and pick up the Obama children? I don’t think so either.]
Further, you quote Everyman Emmett thus: “We need jobs.”
Does he mean “shovel ready” jobs like those promised in February, 2009?
Does he mean jobs like those “created” in the legendary 2010 Summer of Recovery?
You say that Everyman Emmett wants Congress to “pass the Federal budget”.
Did you tell him that when Democrat was in the White House and had overwhelming majorities in both Houses no budget was ever introduced?
Silly me!
Monday, September 26, 2011
Stephen L Goldstein, The Sun Sentinel
September 4, 2011
Stephen L Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Modern American Liberalism, pet peeves, and your brutally honest explanation of the connection between them in your column in today’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
I can’t stand ending sentences with prepositions. There are but two exceptions to this hard and true rule. [Exceptions to rules – moral relativism - are one of the driving forces of modern American Liberalism, no?]
#1 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if there is a proposition attached to it. #2 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if you are a fan of Winston Churchill.
As to signing a statement, any statement, I suggest you remove the 2x4 from your eye before trying to get the mote out of your neighbor’s eye. When will the editorials of the Sun-Sentinel be signed? I have been told by a highly placed source, one that must remain confidential, that you will resign should your policy of signing everything not be adhered to. ”Adhered to”? Count me as a big fan of Churchill.
The next time a “highly placed source who must remain confidential” tips you on a private sin of a public servant you must instantly “out” him lest you wish to confirm that as a card carrying modern American Liberal your favorite color is still plaid.
I have been in Texas on personal business. Because of my international acclaim as a ditch digger I volunteered for the “shovel ready” moat project on the Rio Grande. Since I am from Florida I volunteered to bait my man eater traps with live baby manatees to secure a few dozen 10 to 12 foot bull gators for the soon to be finished moat. It was the least I could do for the Waiting for Godot “summer of recovery”.
I got to your column on the Internet. I never did thank Vice President Alpha Gump for his timely discovery of same. That was a busy time for him. His main job then was keelhauling Governor Dukakis – “Competence, not character”, remember? – for giving a weekend furlough to convicted rapist murderer Willie Horton who, mirabalie dictum, raped and murdered again. That’s one of the beauties of modern American Liberals. “They never let you down.”
“People should be required…” is the war cry of the Democratic Party. It is the iron fist in the iron glove. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Light bulbs, teenage obesity, Gibson guitars, 5th trimester abortions, drowning polar bears, Affirmative Action, furbish louseworts, Global WarmingCoolingClimateChange, bad war vs. good war, green jobs, “Pass the bill so we can see what’s in it”, the minimum wage, bad Bush deficits vs.
good Obama deficits, believing that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer, skipping the part where Keynes says tax cuts are must in a recession, “Will no one rid me of that damned Constitution”? airport groping, eating your seed corn, “fairness”, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the prototypical modern American Liberal Nazi, “reset” buttons – Thank God that tomorrow is a holiday! Listing all those sins could cause terminal carpal tunnel syndrome. I’ll dip both hands in freezing pickle brine like the morning after medicine.
“People should be required…” must be offset by “Quis custodes custodiet?”. Translation? Send a SASE.
“Average Americans are probably the world’s least informed people.” Would it mark me as a knuckle dragging, homophobic, gun toting, Tea Partying, Global Warming denying zealot if I were [N.B. the use of the subjunctive] to ask for the whole list?
Where do we rank compared to the Uighurs? How about the mighty Flems and their eternal foes, the stout Walloons? Serbs? Croats? The unfairly rich swells who summer on Martha’s Vineyard? The Kikuyus? The Goths? The people of Paraguay? The people of Zimbabwe? Les merdes du Quebec? The people who vote for Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters? The non-swimming Cubans? Los aficionados de Chavez? The people still yearning for Midnight Basketball? Wal*Mart haters? Moderate Muslim terrorists?
The election in 2008 of a total non-entity, a man devoid of any experience beyond that of perpetual victimhood, a man who would be hard pressed to find his ass using both his hands, may well buttress your argument.
I ask you to remember 1976 and 1980.
On the trip back to the White House after his inauguration in 1977 it became obvious to those Americans still capable of rational thought that America had blundered in electing Jimmy Carter. It took less than 3 years for him to convince the rest of America that he was without doubt the worst President of the 20th century. As soon as the Constitution allowed the “least informed average Americans” unelected him.
It may be too soon – it’s only 11 years into the new century – to give Lord Barack the Beneficent the same laurel earned by Clod Carter. He has set the bar of ineptitude so high that it would take 7 league boots to get near it.
One thought and one suggestion before getting back to the border for armed. night patrol.
Walls work very well when they are built to keep people. out Take a peek at China and the wall that Hadrian built. Both worked. The one best remembered for keeping people in, the Berlin Wall, worked for almost 30 years.
Obama said he wanted to “transform society”. I’ll start by transforming the way English is taught in this country. Serious thought must be given to Napoleon’s rule before a battle. 3 soldiers were chosen at random and tried for cowardice. They were found guilty and executed. He said it “encouraged the others”. It would work wonders with syntactically challenged teachers.
The thought is that the hiring of English teachers should be given the same status as the hiring of the football coach. Macbeth must be on par with the tight end coach. The retention and promotion of both should be on parallel track. Diagramming a sentence should be as important as attacking a two-deep zone. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda holds no water in the post-game film review. It should be given less tolerance in the FCATs. Try it. In fact it should be “required”.
Kevin Smith
PS – As to “conferring lifetime titles”…My father was born before man flew. He was graduated from grammar school on a Friday night. Saturday morning he was shoveling coal at the end of 22nd street in Bayonne, NJ. He was 26 years old before he went to high school. He was 36 years old when he passed his Bar exam. He won a lot of money betting on Truman in 1948. When he died, after man went to the moon, walked around, and came back, and after his time on the Bench, he was still called “Judge”. What’s your problem with that?
Stephen L Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Modern American Liberalism, pet peeves, and your brutally honest explanation of the connection between them in your column in today’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
I can’t stand ending sentences with prepositions. There are but two exceptions to this hard and true rule. [Exceptions to rules – moral relativism - are one of the driving forces of modern American Liberalism, no?]
#1 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if there is a proposition attached to it. #2 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if you are a fan of Winston Churchill.
As to signing a statement, any statement, I suggest you remove the 2x4 from your eye before trying to get the mote out of your neighbor’s eye. When will the editorials of the Sun-Sentinel be signed? I have been told by a highly placed source, one that must remain confidential, that you will resign should your policy of signing everything not be adhered to. ”Adhered to”? Count me as a big fan of Churchill.
The next time a “highly placed source who must remain confidential” tips you on a private sin of a public servant you must instantly “out” him lest you wish to confirm that as a card carrying modern American Liberal your favorite color is still plaid.
I have been in Texas on personal business. Because of my international acclaim as a ditch digger I volunteered for the “shovel ready” moat project on the Rio Grande. Since I am from Florida I volunteered to bait my man eater traps with live baby manatees to secure a few dozen 10 to 12 foot bull gators for the soon to be finished moat. It was the least I could do for the Waiting for Godot “summer of recovery”.
I got to your column on the Internet. I never did thank Vice President Alpha Gump for his timely discovery of same. That was a busy time for him. His main job then was keelhauling Governor Dukakis – “Competence, not character”, remember? – for giving a weekend furlough to convicted rapist murderer Willie Horton who, mirabalie dictum, raped and murdered again. That’s one of the beauties of modern American Liberals. “They never let you down.”
“People should be required…” is the war cry of the Democratic Party. It is the iron fist in the iron glove. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Light bulbs, teenage obesity, Gibson guitars, 5th trimester abortions, drowning polar bears, Affirmative Action, furbish louseworts, Global WarmingCoolingClimateChange, bad war vs. good war, green jobs, “Pass the bill so we can see what’s in it”, the minimum wage, bad Bush deficits vs.
good Obama deficits, believing that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer, skipping the part where Keynes says tax cuts are must in a recession, “Will no one rid me of that damned Constitution”? airport groping, eating your seed corn, “fairness”, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the prototypical modern American Liberal Nazi, “reset” buttons – Thank God that tomorrow is a holiday! Listing all those sins could cause terminal carpal tunnel syndrome. I’ll dip both hands in freezing pickle brine like the morning after medicine.
“People should be required…” must be offset by “Quis custodes custodiet?”. Translation? Send a SASE.
“Average Americans are probably the world’s least informed people.” Would it mark me as a knuckle dragging, homophobic, gun toting, Tea Partying, Global Warming denying zealot if I were [N.B. the use of the subjunctive] to ask for the whole list?
Where do we rank compared to the Uighurs? How about the mighty Flems and their eternal foes, the stout Walloons? Serbs? Croats? The unfairly rich swells who summer on Martha’s Vineyard? The Kikuyus? The Goths? The people of Paraguay? The people of Zimbabwe? Les merdes du Quebec? The people who vote for Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters? The non-swimming Cubans? Los aficionados de Chavez? The people still yearning for Midnight Basketball? Wal*Mart haters? Moderate Muslim terrorists?
The election in 2008 of a total non-entity, a man devoid of any experience beyond that of perpetual victimhood, a man who would be hard pressed to find his ass using both his hands, may well buttress your argument.
I ask you to remember 1976 and 1980.
On the trip back to the White House after his inauguration in 1977 it became obvious to those Americans still capable of rational thought that America had blundered in electing Jimmy Carter. It took less than 3 years for him to convince the rest of America that he was without doubt the worst President of the 20th century. As soon as the Constitution allowed the “least informed average Americans” unelected him.
It may be too soon – it’s only 11 years into the new century – to give Lord Barack the Beneficent the same laurel earned by Clod Carter. He has set the bar of ineptitude so high that it would take 7 league boots to get near it.
One thought and one suggestion before getting back to the border for armed. night patrol.
Walls work very well when they are built to keep people. out Take a peek at China and the wall that Hadrian built. Both worked. The one best remembered for keeping people in, the Berlin Wall, worked for almost 30 years.
Obama said he wanted to “transform society”. I’ll start by transforming the way English is taught in this country. Serious thought must be given to Napoleon’s rule before a battle. 3 soldiers were chosen at random and tried for cowardice. They were found guilty and executed. He said it “encouraged the others”. It would work wonders with syntactically challenged teachers.
The thought is that the hiring of English teachers should be given the same status as the hiring of the football coach. Macbeth must be on par with the tight end coach. The retention and promotion of both should be on parallel track. Diagramming a sentence should be as important as attacking a two-deep zone. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda holds no water in the post-game film review. It should be given less tolerance in the FCATs. Try it. In fact it should be “required”.
Kevin Smith
PS – As to “conferring lifetime titles”…My father was born before man flew. He was graduated from grammar school on a Friday night. Saturday morning he was shoveling coal at the end of 22nd street in Bayonne, NJ. He was 26 years old before he went to high school. He was 36 years old when he passed his Bar exam. He won a lot of money betting on Truman in 1948. When he died, after man went to the moon, walked around, and came back, and after his time on the Bench, he was still called “Judge”. What’s your problem with that?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Robert Watson, Ph.D. Lynn University
September 25, 2011
Robert Watson, Ph.D.
American Studies
Lynn University
3601 N. Military Trail
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Boca Raton, FL
RE: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Quaff deeply…” – Some comments on your “Kick me, please kick me” column in today’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
I’ve been away.
The manatee trapping – think low cholesterol sausage for the homeless – season doesn’t begin until Halloween. I’ve scheduled my Obamacare/Medicare cost reduction campaign – senior citizen python wrestling in a single elimination mode – to begin on Thanksgiving. With far too much time on my hands I seek targets of opportunity.
Bingo!
Guess whose ass is in the 10 ring?
#1 – “AMERICANS ALWAYS RALLY AROUND THE FLAG” – They did not fully do so in the American Revolution. They did not do so in the War of 1812. They did not do so in the Mexican War. They did not do so in the American Civil War. They did not do so in World War 2 until the modern American Liberals of the day were shocked, shocked when Hitler, Stalin’s best friend forever, invaded the rodinya. They did not in Vietnam. They did not in Iraq. I wonder where Cindy Sheehan was when this country supported the invasion of Libya.
#2 – “ FEAR IS A POWERFUL EMOTION” – You’re right. You may wish to add “Stones are hard and water is wet” to Watson’s List of really Useful Aphorisms”. Would you retroactively condemn Admiral Halsey, another proud son of New Jersey, for saying “the Japs are lousy yellow rat monkey bastards”?*
No navy in the History of the world was as ferocious and as victorious as the American Navy in 1942. Salamis, Lepanto, and Trafalgar were not 5 carnage filled days combined. Jutland was but a bloody afternoon.
Some portion of this staggering accomplishment – Tokyo to Midway to Ironbottom Sound – has to be attributed to the salutary effects of fear. The later Battles of the Philippine Sea and of Leyte Gulf followed by the invasion of Okinawa were won partly by the fear instilled in the American Navy in 1941.
#3 – “NO ONE POLITICAL PARTY OWNS PATRIOTISM” – True. True. I remember the call to arms issued by Senator John Pastore [D-RI]. He said that when the bad guys “looked down the barrel of the Kennedy/Johnson cannon” they knew that the American people were serious. How did that work out?
#4&5 – “IT IS NOT ENOUGH FOR AMERICA TO BE STRONG MILITARILY” & “A NATION CANNOT FIGHT 2 WARS SIMULTANEOUSLY” - The evidence of your own eyes demands acceptance of the fact that a nation can neither borrow nor can it tax its way to prosperity and power. No nation, anywhere, anytime has ever done so. I search vainly for answer to the poser that asks, if deficits under Bush were bad, why are they good under Obama.
As to the two front war I suggest that you familiarize yourself with World War 2. I had an uncle who went everywhere MacArthur went. I had another uncle who made 3 forced landings: North Africa, Sicily, and Anzio. My wife’s father was 8000 yards off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944. She had an uncle who ran convoys to Murmansk. 4 oceans, 3 continents, at least 9 countries.
There is no better definition of a two front war than that.
#6 – “THE OLD CONVENTIONAL, BI-POLAR WORLD” – You end by saying that “America is strongest when it is respected around the world”. I must have missed those lectures. Did Hellenic architecture enable a polyglot collection of city states to conquer the mightiest power on earth? Did Aeneas and Juvenal empower Rome to be able to enforce Pax Romanica?
Is it Ritalin or Thorazine that is the drug of choice for bi-polar disorders? If you are referring to the 45 year dust up with the Russkies, the one that Reagan won without firing a shot, what was the alternative therapy? If Walter Mondale had pushed the 1985 equivalent of the famous RESET button what would have happened?
Was there ever a stronger, more feared, and more respected power on earth than America on September 2, 1945? When MacArthur said, “These proceedings are closed”, he turned to Admiral Halsey and said, “Bill, where the Hell are those planes?” As if by magic 1000 planes overflew the USS Missouri. They blocked out the sun in a way not seen since Thermopylae.
That we chose to give away our treasure and our power is the subject of a different discussion.
#7 – “THERE ARE DANGERS IN GROUP THINK” – Right again. When I think of all the buffoonish Luddite nitwit ohmadans who swear allegiance to the
“settled science” of Global Warming the dangers of “Group Think” are writ large. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is supposedly “settled science”. After more than 150 years it is still called a theory. Why is that? Just 2 days ago the “settled science” of Einstein was challenged in a way not seen in a century. You may remember that tomatoes were long thought to be poisonous. I’m glad that got cleared up. What would we do without pizza? Wasn’t it “settled science” that the sun revolved around the earth. It didn’t make Gus Ptolemy a bad guy.
If you are referring to “group think” when it comes to war time leaders making war time decisions a different dynamic applies. Information to a war time leader is like water to a garden. It takes a long time to judge the crop. Thus, when President Roosevelt called Governor Warren in 1942 and told him that he was sending him the 1940 Census data to him to help him lock up all the slopes, he was acting on what he thought was the best information available and in the nation’s best interest. One of those conveniently forgotten facts is that in addition to the 150,000 Japanese-Americans interned there were almost 30,000 German-Americans and Italian-Americans also locked up. Their “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean it. Please forgive us” compensation package is, I think, still being negotiated. Compared to the surgeon the pathologist has a far simpler task. Autopsies stop for lunch. Emergency pneumonectomies can’t.
#8 – “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.” – So what? The Logic that enabled Obama to join in the invasion of Libya is just as compelling as when it is applied to Sadam Hussein. Both were bad guys. Both killed a lot of people. All the world’s intelligence services plus a majority of Congressional Democrats thought he posed a clear and present danger to this nation. There are no mulligans in poker or realpolitik. Are dead American soldiers killed in Iraq – the bad war – anymore dead than American soldiers killed in Afghanistan – the good war?
#9 – “Ten years later…” – Your argument that we have created a “terrorism industrial complex” and that we have “established a monstrous bureaucracy” proves the History does repeat itself. I’ll leave it to you place the nametags of “tragedy” and “farce” on the proper chests.
The longest war in American History, the 48 year war on poverty, a war that we entered into without any stated goals and certainly no exit strategy, and if we are to believe the Congressional Black Caucus, is a continuing failure. The second longest, the war against drugs, is also a quagmire. About the latter at least it can be said that it has created thousands of “shovel ready” jobs. Alas, they are all South of the border. Why don’t we have a peace conference on a joint Oprah/Doctor Phil show and surrender?
Speaking of a “monstrous bureaucracy” what do you think will happen should Obamacare be fully implemented? Think of the best of the IRS, the DMV, and the Post Office on steroids cubed. “Anticipation is the greater joy” is still in force, yes?
#10 – “We were attacked by a handful of radical individuals” – Right again. You say it caused us to “weaken civil liberties and suspend constitutional rights”. Whatever Darth Cheney, the evil puppet master, made Bush do he did not suspend the writ of habeas corpus as Lincoln did. He didn’t arrest and exile a Congressman as Lincoln did.
The problem with the “radical individual” premise is that their forebears did the same thing. If Islam is a religion of peace what were they doing half way across Europe less than a century after the religion was begun? How did the basilica of Saint Sophia become a mosque? Who was Cervantes fighting when he was wounded?
If Camp Gitmo, America’s first Caribbean based adult sleep away camp, is used to recruit terrorists, how did the 20 WOG terrorists get together to kill 3000 people on September 11, 2001? If it so bad why didn’t Salama Yomama, as Senator Lard Kennedy used to call him, shut it down as promised?
The eternal conflict, to cite Burke, is between order and freedom.
There are lessons to be learned from History.
Nolo me tangere cum impecunis still rings true
Maybe it’s time to update Cartago delenda est to Mecca delenda est.
Look at the time! I have to get back to judging my essay contest “Why it is ‘settled science’ that polar bears should drown”.
Kevin Smith
Robert Watson, Ph.D.
American Studies
Lynn University
3601 N. Military Trail
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Boca Raton, FL
RE: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Quaff deeply…” – Some comments on your “Kick me, please kick me” column in today’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
I’ve been away.
The manatee trapping – think low cholesterol sausage for the homeless – season doesn’t begin until Halloween. I’ve scheduled my Obamacare/Medicare cost reduction campaign – senior citizen python wrestling in a single elimination mode – to begin on Thanksgiving. With far too much time on my hands I seek targets of opportunity.
Bingo!
Guess whose ass is in the 10 ring?
#1 – “AMERICANS ALWAYS RALLY AROUND THE FLAG” – They did not fully do so in the American Revolution. They did not do so in the War of 1812. They did not do so in the Mexican War. They did not do so in the American Civil War. They did not do so in World War 2 until the modern American Liberals of the day were shocked, shocked when Hitler, Stalin’s best friend forever, invaded the rodinya. They did not in Vietnam. They did not in Iraq. I wonder where Cindy Sheehan was when this country supported the invasion of Libya.
#2 – “ FEAR IS A POWERFUL EMOTION” – You’re right. You may wish to add “Stones are hard and water is wet” to Watson’s List of really Useful Aphorisms”. Would you retroactively condemn Admiral Halsey, another proud son of New Jersey, for saying “the Japs are lousy yellow rat monkey bastards”?*
No navy in the History of the world was as ferocious and as victorious as the American Navy in 1942. Salamis, Lepanto, and Trafalgar were not 5 carnage filled days combined. Jutland was but a bloody afternoon.
Some portion of this staggering accomplishment – Tokyo to Midway to Ironbottom Sound – has to be attributed to the salutary effects of fear. The later Battles of the Philippine Sea and of Leyte Gulf followed by the invasion of Okinawa were won partly by the fear instilled in the American Navy in 1941.
#3 – “NO ONE POLITICAL PARTY OWNS PATRIOTISM” – True. True. I remember the call to arms issued by Senator John Pastore [D-RI]. He said that when the bad guys “looked down the barrel of the Kennedy/Johnson cannon” they knew that the American people were serious. How did that work out?
#4&5 – “IT IS NOT ENOUGH FOR AMERICA TO BE STRONG MILITARILY” & “A NATION CANNOT FIGHT 2 WARS SIMULTANEOUSLY” - The evidence of your own eyes demands acceptance of the fact that a nation can neither borrow nor can it tax its way to prosperity and power. No nation, anywhere, anytime has ever done so. I search vainly for answer to the poser that asks, if deficits under Bush were bad, why are they good under Obama.
As to the two front war I suggest that you familiarize yourself with World War 2. I had an uncle who went everywhere MacArthur went. I had another uncle who made 3 forced landings: North Africa, Sicily, and Anzio. My wife’s father was 8000 yards off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944. She had an uncle who ran convoys to Murmansk. 4 oceans, 3 continents, at least 9 countries.
There is no better definition of a two front war than that.
#6 – “THE OLD CONVENTIONAL, BI-POLAR WORLD” – You end by saying that “America is strongest when it is respected around the world”. I must have missed those lectures. Did Hellenic architecture enable a polyglot collection of city states to conquer the mightiest power on earth? Did Aeneas and Juvenal empower Rome to be able to enforce Pax Romanica?
Is it Ritalin or Thorazine that is the drug of choice for bi-polar disorders? If you are referring to the 45 year dust up with the Russkies, the one that Reagan won without firing a shot, what was the alternative therapy? If Walter Mondale had pushed the 1985 equivalent of the famous RESET button what would have happened?
Was there ever a stronger, more feared, and more respected power on earth than America on September 2, 1945? When MacArthur said, “These proceedings are closed”, he turned to Admiral Halsey and said, “Bill, where the Hell are those planes?” As if by magic 1000 planes overflew the USS Missouri. They blocked out the sun in a way not seen since Thermopylae.
That we chose to give away our treasure and our power is the subject of a different discussion.
#7 – “THERE ARE DANGERS IN GROUP THINK” – Right again. When I think of all the buffoonish Luddite nitwit ohmadans who swear allegiance to the
“settled science” of Global Warming the dangers of “Group Think” are writ large. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is supposedly “settled science”. After more than 150 years it is still called a theory. Why is that? Just 2 days ago the “settled science” of Einstein was challenged in a way not seen in a century. You may remember that tomatoes were long thought to be poisonous. I’m glad that got cleared up. What would we do without pizza? Wasn’t it “settled science” that the sun revolved around the earth. It didn’t make Gus Ptolemy a bad guy.
If you are referring to “group think” when it comes to war time leaders making war time decisions a different dynamic applies. Information to a war time leader is like water to a garden. It takes a long time to judge the crop. Thus, when President Roosevelt called Governor Warren in 1942 and told him that he was sending him the 1940 Census data to him to help him lock up all the slopes, he was acting on what he thought was the best information available and in the nation’s best interest. One of those conveniently forgotten facts is that in addition to the 150,000 Japanese-Americans interned there were almost 30,000 German-Americans and Italian-Americans also locked up. Their “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean it. Please forgive us” compensation package is, I think, still being negotiated. Compared to the surgeon the pathologist has a far simpler task. Autopsies stop for lunch. Emergency pneumonectomies can’t.
#8 – “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.” – So what? The Logic that enabled Obama to join in the invasion of Libya is just as compelling as when it is applied to Sadam Hussein. Both were bad guys. Both killed a lot of people. All the world’s intelligence services plus a majority of Congressional Democrats thought he posed a clear and present danger to this nation. There are no mulligans in poker or realpolitik. Are dead American soldiers killed in Iraq – the bad war – anymore dead than American soldiers killed in Afghanistan – the good war?
#9 – “Ten years later…” – Your argument that we have created a “terrorism industrial complex” and that we have “established a monstrous bureaucracy” proves the History does repeat itself. I’ll leave it to you place the nametags of “tragedy” and “farce” on the proper chests.
The longest war in American History, the 48 year war on poverty, a war that we entered into without any stated goals and certainly no exit strategy, and if we are to believe the Congressional Black Caucus, is a continuing failure. The second longest, the war against drugs, is also a quagmire. About the latter at least it can be said that it has created thousands of “shovel ready” jobs. Alas, they are all South of the border. Why don’t we have a peace conference on a joint Oprah/Doctor Phil show and surrender?
Speaking of a “monstrous bureaucracy” what do you think will happen should Obamacare be fully implemented? Think of the best of the IRS, the DMV, and the Post Office on steroids cubed. “Anticipation is the greater joy” is still in force, yes?
#10 – “We were attacked by a handful of radical individuals” – Right again. You say it caused us to “weaken civil liberties and suspend constitutional rights”. Whatever Darth Cheney, the evil puppet master, made Bush do he did not suspend the writ of habeas corpus as Lincoln did. He didn’t arrest and exile a Congressman as Lincoln did.
The problem with the “radical individual” premise is that their forebears did the same thing. If Islam is a religion of peace what were they doing half way across Europe less than a century after the religion was begun? How did the basilica of Saint Sophia become a mosque? Who was Cervantes fighting when he was wounded?
If Camp Gitmo, America’s first Caribbean based adult sleep away camp, is used to recruit terrorists, how did the 20 WOG terrorists get together to kill 3000 people on September 11, 2001? If it so bad why didn’t Salama Yomama, as Senator Lard Kennedy used to call him, shut it down as promised?
The eternal conflict, to cite Burke, is between order and freedom.
There are lessons to be learned from History.
Nolo me tangere cum impecunis still rings true
Maybe it’s time to update Cartago delenda est to Mecca delenda est.
Look at the time! I have to get back to judging my essay contest “Why it is ‘settled science’ that polar bears should drown”.
Kevin Smith
Thursday, September 22, 2011
AN UPDATE ON FRAU OBERST DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
AN UPDATE ON
FRAU OBERST DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ
9/21/11
I Let the 10th anniversary of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she of the Medusa wanabee hair, she of the perpetual giving her husband’s bank a wink, a nod, and a long swig from the public teat, she of forgetting which President signed the homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” reg, she of the great civility speech given after a mad man shot her friend but before Chip off the old block Young Thug Hoffa, Jr, said, “Let’s take those bastards out”, she of “We own the economy” – Giving the devil her due, every time she stands up she should get a standing O, such is the burden of carrying big brass asymmetrical cojones – sending the cops [Agent Thomas as the Good Cop and Agent Mineva as the Bad Cop, both members of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement]] to my house because of something I wrote.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2001
2 men with badges and guns, 2 men with the full majesty of the law behind them, 2 men following their orders because an elected official, one who claims to have 2 degrees in Political Science, forgot the majestic 5 words at the start of the First Amendment – “CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW…”
“Free men speak with free tongues” was a good start to a free society when it was first used 25 centuries ago. For someone to say that she has 2 degrees in Political Science and not to be familiar with the agora and parrhesia would indicate that the only classes she ever attended were Chilling Effect 101 and Slippery Slope Seminar. Come to think of it there could be no better academic training for a modern American Liberal than those. “Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee” [Nat Hentoff] is one the books that Little Debbie uses to start her annual book burning raree.
I used to think Debbie was smart.
Smart was replaced by shrewd.
Now I know she’s dumb.
That she is not as dumb as her co-conspirator Commissioner Stacy Ritter is meant to be taken as “damning with faint praise”. Ms. Ritter is so dumb she thinks manual labor is the hombre who mows her lawn. She’s not called “Cementhead
for nothing. Debbie is gaining on her.
The reason for this harsh and cruel but valid and truthful judgment is because of her take on the special election in Brooklyn’s 9th Congressional District.
Move over Baghdad Bob! Here comes Debbie, Debbie!
She said “The Democratic Party has always had a problem with this district”.
Her tongue should have been rocket propelled out of her mouth and into a place of honor at Katz’s Deli.
They solved the problem when Warren Harding was President. That was 90 years ago. Sam Ervin and John C. Stennis, 2 lifelong Democrats and defenders, fierce defenders, of segregation – Did I just repeat myself? - marveled at the ability of the 9th district to elect any Democratic Son or Daughter of the Desert who drew breath on Election Day. District 9 encourages dead men voting. It draws the line at dead candidates winning. If they didn’t FDR would win every election for everything everytime.
Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schultz [Schultz? Perhaps a DNA check is in order] thought about running there. If they had they would have received 106% of the vote.
This is a district where delis are not permitted to advertise bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.
This is a district where anything less than medium well roast beef earns a visit from the dreaded Food Police and a trip to the culinary side of Camp Gitmo.
This is a district where, thanks to Chinese legerdemain, pork becomes chicken.
This is a district where bi-valve mollusks are allowed to pass through only if they are on sealed trucks and never on Shabbos.
This is a district where the vote to name a park after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is always close.
This is a district where being a junior mohel can earn you a merit badge.
This is a district where any mention of chicken liver and mayonnaise in the same
sentence can lead to a one-way trip to the stoning pit.
This is a district where Weiner, the eponymously named Congressman, waved his foreskinless weenie around for a month before a late night visit from the Stern Gang convinced him to fall on his sword. That’s the metaphorical sword, not the one eyed trouser snake that now is yet more proof of the law of diminishing returns.
This is a district that just elected a Roman Catholic Republican. It gets better. He was a TV executive who was instrumental in putting Rush Limbaugh on national TV.
And Debbie, Debbie, now the face of the Democratic Party, henceforth to be known as Dizzy Debbie, says that Democrat always had a problem with the 9th district?
The loonies are running the bin. The boobies are running the hatch.
In the big picture, the one that will be unveiled in November, 2012, that may be good.
On the other hand, 2 of the last 3 Vice Presidents – Alpha Gump and Curley Biden – have been, to be charitable, developmentally disabled. Can you imagine them on a tandem bike pedaling in opposite directions? I can. How many ways could they FUBAR a two car funeral? Thank God for logarithms!
This chick knows her base.
Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET
AN UPDATE ON
FRAU OBERST DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ
9/21/11
I Let the 10th anniversary of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she of the Medusa wanabee hair, she of the perpetual giving her husband’s bank a wink, a nod, and a long swig from the public teat, she of forgetting which President signed the homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” reg, she of the great civility speech given after a mad man shot her friend but before Chip off the old block Young Thug Hoffa, Jr, said, “Let’s take those bastards out”, she of “We own the economy” – Giving the devil her due, every time she stands up she should get a standing O, such is the burden of carrying big brass asymmetrical cojones – sending the cops [Agent Thomas as the Good Cop and Agent Mineva as the Bad Cop, both members of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement]] to my house because of something I wrote.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2001
2 men with badges and guns, 2 men with the full majesty of the law behind them, 2 men following their orders because an elected official, one who claims to have 2 degrees in Political Science, forgot the majestic 5 words at the start of the First Amendment – “CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW…”
“Free men speak with free tongues” was a good start to a free society when it was first used 25 centuries ago. For someone to say that she has 2 degrees in Political Science and not to be familiar with the agora and parrhesia would indicate that the only classes she ever attended were Chilling Effect 101 and Slippery Slope Seminar. Come to think of it there could be no better academic training for a modern American Liberal than those. “Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee” [Nat Hentoff] is one the books that Little Debbie uses to start her annual book burning raree.
I used to think Debbie was smart.
Smart was replaced by shrewd.
Now I know she’s dumb.
That she is not as dumb as her co-conspirator Commissioner Stacy Ritter is meant to be taken as “damning with faint praise”. Ms. Ritter is so dumb she thinks manual labor is the hombre who mows her lawn. She’s not called “Cementhead
for nothing. Debbie is gaining on her.
The reason for this harsh and cruel but valid and truthful judgment is because of her take on the special election in Brooklyn’s 9th Congressional District.
Move over Baghdad Bob! Here comes Debbie, Debbie!
She said “The Democratic Party has always had a problem with this district”.
Her tongue should have been rocket propelled out of her mouth and into a place of honor at Katz’s Deli.
They solved the problem when Warren Harding was President. That was 90 years ago. Sam Ervin and John C. Stennis, 2 lifelong Democrats and defenders, fierce defenders, of segregation – Did I just repeat myself? - marveled at the ability of the 9th district to elect any Democratic Son or Daughter of the Desert who drew breath on Election Day. District 9 encourages dead men voting. It draws the line at dead candidates winning. If they didn’t FDR would win every election for everything everytime.
Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schultz [Schultz? Perhaps a DNA check is in order] thought about running there. If they had they would have received 106% of the vote.
This is a district where delis are not permitted to advertise bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.
This is a district where anything less than medium well roast beef earns a visit from the dreaded Food Police and a trip to the culinary side of Camp Gitmo.
This is a district where, thanks to Chinese legerdemain, pork becomes chicken.
This is a district where bi-valve mollusks are allowed to pass through only if they are on sealed trucks and never on Shabbos.
This is a district where the vote to name a park after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is always close.
This is a district where being a junior mohel can earn you a merit badge.
This is a district where any mention of chicken liver and mayonnaise in the same
sentence can lead to a one-way trip to the stoning pit.
This is a district where Weiner, the eponymously named Congressman, waved his foreskinless weenie around for a month before a late night visit from the Stern Gang convinced him to fall on his sword. That’s the metaphorical sword, not the one eyed trouser snake that now is yet more proof of the law of diminishing returns.
This is a district that just elected a Roman Catholic Republican. It gets better. He was a TV executive who was instrumental in putting Rush Limbaugh on national TV.
And Debbie, Debbie, now the face of the Democratic Party, henceforth to be known as Dizzy Debbie, says that Democrat always had a problem with the 9th district?
The loonies are running the bin. The boobies are running the hatch.
In the big picture, the one that will be unveiled in November, 2012, that may be good.
On the other hand, 2 of the last 3 Vice Presidents – Alpha Gump and Curley Biden – have been, to be charitable, developmentally disabled. Can you imagine them on a tandem bike pedaling in opposite directions? I can. How many ways could they FUBAR a two car funeral? Thank God for logarithms!
This chick knows her base.
Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET
Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald
September 18, 2011
Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33316
RE: Death penalty? Death penalties? Some comments on your column “The Roman Arena of the Death Penalty” in today’s Miami Herald.
Mr. Pitts,
I found two conflicting numbers – 1173 & 1266 – about the number of executions in this country since Gary Gilmore restarted the hangman’s serenade in 1975. [ I was at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on an entirely different matter when Gilmore’s last stay was denied.]
Since statistical sampling was once the darling of modern American Liberals I will use 1224.5 as my paradigmatic template for the number of toe-tagged executed killers, alleged or otherwise.
What I can’t find, save for one example, is the alleged number of the alleged victims killed by the alleged perpetrators.
The poet was right. “After the first death there are no others.”
Missing from your feelings filled column about justice denied is the racial element. Usually, not today, there is an argumentum ad captandum decrying the racial disproportionality of the death penalty.
There is one death penalty that is applied in such a racially disproportional manner as to demand a genocide investigation. There is a backlog of cases in The Hague for participants in never ending ax fight between the Serbs and the Croats. For the most part they involved consenting adults killing for their culture. Why is there no outcry about abortion?
Black females make up about 6% of population.
They have had between 35% and 40% of the abortions in this country since 1973.
A social scientist would be comfortable with 20,000,000 as the number of Black babies being aborted in this country since Roe v Wade.
Has a potential Barack Obama or maybe even a Leonard Pitts been sucked out of a Black woman’s innards and sent on a one way trip to the “undiscovered country”?
You spoke of the “thumbs up-thumbs down” death penalty process in this country. In New Jersey, my home state, there are two basic rules concerning murder trials.
#1 – The alleged perpetrators cannot plead guilty.
#2 – A guilty verdict triggers an automatic appeal.
An about to be aborted baby – Black or White – has no access to due process. It can neither plead guilty nor can it enter an appeal. Some convicted murderers have waived any appeal and have demanded that death penalty be imposed post haste. There is no record of a foetus so doing.
You end your column thus:
“A reverence for life can still trump a need for death.
Consider this column a lonely cheer for life.”
An about to be aborted baby – White or Black – has no one speaking for it.
If not you then who?
Kevin Smith
PS – No mention of the death penalty in America is complete without mentioning the name Ricky Ray Rector. Whatever else Bill Clinton did to Sister Souljah he didn’t kill her.
Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33316
RE: Death penalty? Death penalties? Some comments on your column “The Roman Arena of the Death Penalty” in today’s Miami Herald.
Mr. Pitts,
I found two conflicting numbers – 1173 & 1266 – about the number of executions in this country since Gary Gilmore restarted the hangman’s serenade in 1975. [ I was at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on an entirely different matter when Gilmore’s last stay was denied.]
Since statistical sampling was once the darling of modern American Liberals I will use 1224.5 as my paradigmatic template for the number of toe-tagged executed killers, alleged or otherwise.
What I can’t find, save for one example, is the alleged number of the alleged victims killed by the alleged perpetrators.
The poet was right. “After the first death there are no others.”
Missing from your feelings filled column about justice denied is the racial element. Usually, not today, there is an argumentum ad captandum decrying the racial disproportionality of the death penalty.
There is one death penalty that is applied in such a racially disproportional manner as to demand a genocide investigation. There is a backlog of cases in The Hague for participants in never ending ax fight between the Serbs and the Croats. For the most part they involved consenting adults killing for their culture. Why is there no outcry about abortion?
Black females make up about 6% of population.
They have had between 35% and 40% of the abortions in this country since 1973.
A social scientist would be comfortable with 20,000,000 as the number of Black babies being aborted in this country since Roe v Wade.
Has a potential Barack Obama or maybe even a Leonard Pitts been sucked out of a Black woman’s innards and sent on a one way trip to the “undiscovered country”?
You spoke of the “thumbs up-thumbs down” death penalty process in this country. In New Jersey, my home state, there are two basic rules concerning murder trials.
#1 – The alleged perpetrators cannot plead guilty.
#2 – A guilty verdict triggers an automatic appeal.
An about to be aborted baby – Black or White – has no access to due process. It can neither plead guilty nor can it enter an appeal. Some convicted murderers have waived any appeal and have demanded that death penalty be imposed post haste. There is no record of a foetus so doing.
You end your column thus:
“A reverence for life can still trump a need for death.
Consider this column a lonely cheer for life.”
An about to be aborted baby – White or Black – has no one speaking for it.
If not you then who?
Kevin Smith
PS – No mention of the death penalty in America is complete without mentioning the name Ricky Ray Rector. Whatever else Bill Clinton did to Sister Souljah he didn’t kill her.
Dwight Garner @ the New York Times
September 16, 2011
Dwight Garner @ the New York Times
RE: Michael Moore and your inclusion of him in the hagiography of modern American Liberal wafflers, wimps, weasels, and wussies as recorded by you in the New York Times.
Mr. Garner,
Mother Jones? Woody Guthrie? Phil Ochs? Rachel Carson? [Why not Margaret Sanger? How did Margaret Mead miss the cut?] Harvey Pekar?
Mighty fine company for Michael Moore, America’s favorite fat man, now that Fatty Arbuckle and Oliver Hardy have gone to that great big Ben & Jerry’s in the sky, the one where Chunky Monkey and Death by Chocolate can be mainlined. Jowl liposuction on his moon pie puss could give Haiti a good, sit down Sunday dinner. But enough of that ad hominen stuff.
Your first five templates used to nominate Michael Moore, AKA “Pant Load Lard Ass”, to the Hall of Fame of Loutish Ohmadahns are either narcissistic phony bastards, Homerically dimensioned frauds, or world class “moonbat” wingnuts. Rachel Carson earns special mention for being a scientific faker worthy of Guinness Book accolades. Her book, Silent Spring, is helping to restore the unfairly tarnished reputations of Lysenko and the Piltdown Man.
It is your mention of Woody Guthrie that stirs the embers of an almost forgotten fire. It is one that has gone down the memory hole that modern American Liberals quickly dig when yet another of their gravity defying “balloon juice” pipe dreams runs into reality.
I’m glad that his guitar “fought Fascists”. It was a bit late in joining the fray but so was “Papa Doc” Joe Kennedy, the Hitler loving anti-Semite.
Some things are owed to the record.
From August 22, 1939 to June 21, 1941 Woody Guthrie’s guitar was not fighting Fascists. His weekly tract, aptly named Woody the Red, said that Hitler was an OK guy. In case you are not familiar with the above mentioned dates you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that they cover the period when Hitler and Stalin were pals. “BFF” as the new social networks would say.
Would I be too far out of line to say that Woody was OK with the flattening of Poland, the defeat and occupation of France, the bombing of London, and the construction of the abattoirs and charnel houses that were used to kill and cook the Jews? Qui tacet consentit still means Silence gives consent, doesn’t it?
No off handed reference to Christopher Hitchens can be allowed to pass without mentioning George Orwell. Orwell, one of Hitchens’s favorites, will not be in your Progressive Hall of Fame. “Homage to Catalonia”, “Animal Farm”, and “1984”, books that pilloried the brutal tactics of Stalin, would never pass the muster of the modern American Liberal word police who are in charge of such things.
I like to ask hacks of the New York Times if there have been any sightings of Walter Duranty. He was the bought and paid for KGB agent who won a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Reporting when he was the Moscow correspondent of – you guessed it – the New York Times.
Duranty began the “low, dishonest decade” that ended with Guthrie, who ignored the massacre of the Kulaks and the Moscow show trials because of his slavish devotion to Stalin, giving Hitler the green light to give a new meaning to murder.
Would it earn me permanent curmudgeon status if I were to say that Woody had a lot of really smart friends – Mr. & Mrs. Rosenberg, Lillian Hellman, and Alger Hiss leap to mind – who, believing in nothing, believed that Stalin’s shit didn’t stink? I hope so.
Why doesn’t Saint Fatso do a documentary movie on the “unpleasantness” at the Katyn Forest or the Gulag?
Just one more sign of my never ending naiveté’
Sorry about that.
Kevin Smith
Dwight Garner @ the New York Times
RE: Michael Moore and your inclusion of him in the hagiography of modern American Liberal wafflers, wimps, weasels, and wussies as recorded by you in the New York Times.
Mr. Garner,
Mother Jones? Woody Guthrie? Phil Ochs? Rachel Carson? [Why not Margaret Sanger? How did Margaret Mead miss the cut?] Harvey Pekar?
Mighty fine company for Michael Moore, America’s favorite fat man, now that Fatty Arbuckle and Oliver Hardy have gone to that great big Ben & Jerry’s in the sky, the one where Chunky Monkey and Death by Chocolate can be mainlined. Jowl liposuction on his moon pie puss could give Haiti a good, sit down Sunday dinner. But enough of that ad hominen stuff.
Your first five templates used to nominate Michael Moore, AKA “Pant Load Lard Ass”, to the Hall of Fame of Loutish Ohmadahns are either narcissistic phony bastards, Homerically dimensioned frauds, or world class “moonbat” wingnuts. Rachel Carson earns special mention for being a scientific faker worthy of Guinness Book accolades. Her book, Silent Spring, is helping to restore the unfairly tarnished reputations of Lysenko and the Piltdown Man.
It is your mention of Woody Guthrie that stirs the embers of an almost forgotten fire. It is one that has gone down the memory hole that modern American Liberals quickly dig when yet another of their gravity defying “balloon juice” pipe dreams runs into reality.
I’m glad that his guitar “fought Fascists”. It was a bit late in joining the fray but so was “Papa Doc” Joe Kennedy, the Hitler loving anti-Semite.
Some things are owed to the record.
From August 22, 1939 to June 21, 1941 Woody Guthrie’s guitar was not fighting Fascists. His weekly tract, aptly named Woody the Red, said that Hitler was an OK guy. In case you are not familiar with the above mentioned dates you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that they cover the period when Hitler and Stalin were pals. “BFF” as the new social networks would say.
Would I be too far out of line to say that Woody was OK with the flattening of Poland, the defeat and occupation of France, the bombing of London, and the construction of the abattoirs and charnel houses that were used to kill and cook the Jews? Qui tacet consentit still means Silence gives consent, doesn’t it?
No off handed reference to Christopher Hitchens can be allowed to pass without mentioning George Orwell. Orwell, one of Hitchens’s favorites, will not be in your Progressive Hall of Fame. “Homage to Catalonia”, “Animal Farm”, and “1984”, books that pilloried the brutal tactics of Stalin, would never pass the muster of the modern American Liberal word police who are in charge of such things.
I like to ask hacks of the New York Times if there have been any sightings of Walter Duranty. He was the bought and paid for KGB agent who won a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Reporting when he was the Moscow correspondent of – you guessed it – the New York Times.
Duranty began the “low, dishonest decade” that ended with Guthrie, who ignored the massacre of the Kulaks and the Moscow show trials because of his slavish devotion to Stalin, giving Hitler the green light to give a new meaning to murder.
Would it earn me permanent curmudgeon status if I were to say that Woody had a lot of really smart friends – Mr. & Mrs. Rosenberg, Lillian Hellman, and Alger Hiss leap to mind – who, believing in nothing, believed that Stalin’s shit didn’t stink? I hope so.
Why doesn’t Saint Fatso do a documentary movie on the “unpleasantness” at the Katyn Forest or the Gulag?
Just one more sign of my never ending naiveté’
Sorry about that.
Kevin Smith
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Stephen L Goldstein, The Sun Sentinel
September 4, 2011
Stephen L Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Modern American Liberalism, pet peeves, and your brutally honest explanation of the connection between them in your column in today’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
I can’t stand ending sentences with prepositions. There are but two exceptions to this hard and true rule. [Exceptions to rules – moral relativism - are one of the driving forces of modern American Liberalism, no?]
#1 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if there is a proposition attached to it. #2 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if you are a fan of Winston Churchill.
As to signing a statement, any statement, I suggest you remove the 2x4 from your eye before trying to get the mote out of your neighbor’s eye. When will the editorials of the Sun-Sentinel be signed? I have been told by a highly placed source, one that must remain confidential, that you will resign should your policy of signing everything not be adhered to. ”Adhered to”? Count me as a big fan of Churchill.
The next time a “highly placed source who must remain confidential” tips you on a private sin of a public servant you must instantly “out” him lest you wish to confirm that as a card carrying modern American Liberal your favorite color is still plaid.
I have been in Texas on personal business. Because of my international acclaim as a ditch digger I volunteered for the “shovel ready” moat project on the Rio Grande. Since I am from Florida I volunteered to bait my man eater traps with live baby manatees to secure a few dozen 10 to 12 foot bull gators for the soon to be finished moat. It was the least I could do for the Waiting for Godot “summer of recovery”.
I got to your column on the Internet. I never did thank Vice President Alpha Gump for his timely discovery of same. That was a busy time for him. His main job then was keelhauling Governor Dukakis – “Competence, not character”, remember? – for giving a weekend furlough to convicted rapist murderer Willie Horton who, mirabalie dictum, raped and murdered again. That’s one of the beauties of modern American Liberals. “They never let you down.”
“People should be required…” is the war cry of the Democratic Party. It is the iron fist in the iron glove. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Light bulbs, teenage obesity, Gibson guitars, 5th trimester abortions, drowning polar bears, Affirmative Action, furbish louseworts, Global WarmingCoolingClimateChange, bad war vs. good war, green jobs, “Pass the bill so we can see what’s in it”, the minimum wage, bad Bush deficits vs.
good Obama deficits, believing that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer, skipping the part where Keynes says tax cuts are must in a recession, “Will no one rid me of that damned Constitution”? airport groping, eating your seed corn, “fairness”, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the prototypical modern American Liberal Nazi, “reset” buttons – Thank God that tomorrow is a holiday! Listing all those sins could cause terminal carpal tunnel syndrome. I’ll dip both hands in freezing pickle brine like the morning after medicine.
“People should be required…” must be offset by “Quis custodes custodiet?”. Translation? Send a SASE.
“Average Americans are probably the world’s least informed people.” Would it mark me as a knuckle dragging, homophobic, gun toting, Tea Partying, Global Warming denying zealot if I were [N.B. the use of the subjunctive] to ask for the whole list?
Where do we rank compared to the Uighurs? How about the mighty Flems and their eternal foes, the stout Walloons? Serbs? Croats? The unfairly rich swells who summer on Martha’s Vineyard? The Kikuyus? The Goths? The people of Paraguay? The people of Zimbabwe? Les merdes du Quebec? The people who vote for Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters? The non-swimming Cubans? Los aficionados de Chavez? The people still yearning for Midnight Basketball? Wal*Mart haters? Moderate Muslim terrorists?
The election in 2008 of a total non-entity, a man devoid of any experience beyond that of perpetual victimhood, a man who would be hard pressed to find his ass using both his hands, may well buttress your argument.
I ask you to remember 1976 and 1980.
On the trip back to the White House after his inauguration in 1977 it became obvious to those Americans still capable of rational thought that America had blundered in electing Jimmy Carter. It took less than 3 years for him to convince the rest of America that he was without doubt the worst President of the 20th century. As soon as the Constitution allowed the “least informed average Americans” unelected him.
It may be too soon – it’s only 11 years into the new century – to give Lord Barack the Beneficent the same laurel earned by Clod Carter. He has set the bar of ineptitude so high that it would take 7 league boots to get near it.
One thought and one suggestion before getting back to the border for armed. night patrol.
Walls work very well when they are built to keep people. out Take a peek at China and the wall that Hadrian built. Both worked. The one best remembered for keeping people in, the Berlin Wall, worked for almost 30 years.
Obama said he wanted to “transform society”. I’ll start by transforming the way English is taught in this country. Serious thought must be given to Napoleon’s rule before a battle. 3 soldiers were chosen at random and tried for cowardice. They were found guilty and executed. He said it “encouraged the others”. It would work wonders with syntactically challenged teachers.
The thought is that the hiring of English teachers should be given the same status as the hiring of the football coach. Macbeth must be on par with the tight end coach. The retention and promotion of both should be on parallel track. Diagramming a sentence should be as important as attacking a two-deep zone. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda holds no water in the post-game film review. It should be given less tolerance in the FCATs. Try it. In fact it should be “required”.
Kevin Smith
PS – As to “conferring lifetime titles”…My father was born before man flew. He was graduated from grammar school on a Friday night. Saturday morning he was shoveling coal at the end of 22nd street in Bayonne, NJ. He was 26 years old before he went to high school. He was 36 years old when he passed his Bar exam. He won a lot of money betting on Truman in 1948. When he died, after man went to the moon, walked around, and came back, and after his time on the Bench, he was still called “Judge”. What’s your problem with that?
Stephen L Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Modern American Liberalism, pet peeves, and your brutally honest explanation of the connection between them in your column in today’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
I can’t stand ending sentences with prepositions. There are but two exceptions to this hard and true rule. [Exceptions to rules – moral relativism - are one of the driving forces of modern American Liberalism, no?]
#1 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if there is a proposition attached to it. #2 – It is acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition if you are a fan of Winston Churchill.
As to signing a statement, any statement, I suggest you remove the 2x4 from your eye before trying to get the mote out of your neighbor’s eye. When will the editorials of the Sun-Sentinel be signed? I have been told by a highly placed source, one that must remain confidential, that you will resign should your policy of signing everything not be adhered to. ”Adhered to”? Count me as a big fan of Churchill.
The next time a “highly placed source who must remain confidential” tips you on a private sin of a public servant you must instantly “out” him lest you wish to confirm that as a card carrying modern American Liberal your favorite color is still plaid.
I have been in Texas on personal business. Because of my international acclaim as a ditch digger I volunteered for the “shovel ready” moat project on the Rio Grande. Since I am from Florida I volunteered to bait my man eater traps with live baby manatees to secure a few dozen 10 to 12 foot bull gators for the soon to be finished moat. It was the least I could do for the Waiting for Godot “summer of recovery”.
I got to your column on the Internet. I never did thank Vice President Alpha Gump for his timely discovery of same. That was a busy time for him. His main job then was keelhauling Governor Dukakis – “Competence, not character”, remember? – for giving a weekend furlough to convicted rapist murderer Willie Horton who, mirabalie dictum, raped and murdered again. That’s one of the beauties of modern American Liberals. “They never let you down.”
“People should be required…” is the war cry of the Democratic Party. It is the iron fist in the iron glove. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Light bulbs, teenage obesity, Gibson guitars, 5th trimester abortions, drowning polar bears, Affirmative Action, furbish louseworts, Global WarmingCoolingClimateChange, bad war vs. good war, green jobs, “Pass the bill so we can see what’s in it”, the minimum wage, bad Bush deficits vs.
good Obama deficits, believing that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer, skipping the part where Keynes says tax cuts are must in a recession, “Will no one rid me of that damned Constitution”? airport groping, eating your seed corn, “fairness”, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the prototypical modern American Liberal Nazi, “reset” buttons – Thank God that tomorrow is a holiday! Listing all those sins could cause terminal carpal tunnel syndrome. I’ll dip both hands in freezing pickle brine like the morning after medicine.
“People should be required…” must be offset by “Quis custodes custodiet?”. Translation? Send a SASE.
“Average Americans are probably the world’s least informed people.” Would it mark me as a knuckle dragging, homophobic, gun toting, Tea Partying, Global Warming denying zealot if I were [N.B. the use of the subjunctive] to ask for the whole list?
Where do we rank compared to the Uighurs? How about the mighty Flems and their eternal foes, the stout Walloons? Serbs? Croats? The unfairly rich swells who summer on Martha’s Vineyard? The Kikuyus? The Goths? The people of Paraguay? The people of Zimbabwe? Les merdes du Quebec? The people who vote for Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters? The non-swimming Cubans? Los aficionados de Chavez? The people still yearning for Midnight Basketball? Wal*Mart haters? Moderate Muslim terrorists?
The election in 2008 of a total non-entity, a man devoid of any experience beyond that of perpetual victimhood, a man who would be hard pressed to find his ass using both his hands, may well buttress your argument.
I ask you to remember 1976 and 1980.
On the trip back to the White House after his inauguration in 1977 it became obvious to those Americans still capable of rational thought that America had blundered in electing Jimmy Carter. It took less than 3 years for him to convince the rest of America that he was without doubt the worst President of the 20th century. As soon as the Constitution allowed the “least informed average Americans” unelected him.
It may be too soon – it’s only 11 years into the new century – to give Lord Barack the Beneficent the same laurel earned by Clod Carter. He has set the bar of ineptitude so high that it would take 7 league boots to get near it.
One thought and one suggestion before getting back to the border for armed. night patrol.
Walls work very well when they are built to keep people. out Take a peek at China and the wall that Hadrian built. Both worked. The one best remembered for keeping people in, the Berlin Wall, worked for almost 30 years.
Obama said he wanted to “transform society”. I’ll start by transforming the way English is taught in this country. Serious thought must be given to Napoleon’s rule before a battle. 3 soldiers were chosen at random and tried for cowardice. They were found guilty and executed. He said it “encouraged the others”. It would work wonders with syntactically challenged teachers.
The thought is that the hiring of English teachers should be given the same status as the hiring of the football coach. Macbeth must be on par with the tight end coach. The retention and promotion of both should be on parallel track. Diagramming a sentence should be as important as attacking a two-deep zone. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda holds no water in the post-game film review. It should be given less tolerance in the FCATs. Try it. In fact it should be “required”.
Kevin Smith
PS – As to “conferring lifetime titles”…My father was born before man flew. He was graduated from grammar school on a Friday night. Saturday morning he was shoveling coal at the end of 22nd street in Bayonne, NJ. He was 26 years old before he went to high school. He was 36 years old when he passed his Bar exam. He won a lot of money betting on Truman in 1948. When he died, after man went to the moon, walked around, and came back, and after his time on the Bench, he was still called “Judge”. What’s your problem with that?
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Stephen L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel
August 24, 2011
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: New Tea Party outrage! Red men give Black men the boot! Kemo Sabe wants to know wazupwidat.
My dear Professor.
In my Western travels I came across what may be the worst offense yet to have been caused by the accursed Tea Party.
It seems that the “sovereign” Cherokee nation, a nation soon to be part of the Security Council of the beloved United Nations, a nation with a better credit rating than its former keeper, has decided to deport their ubermenschen. [And I’ll bet you thought Arizona was hard on undocumented visitors]
The evil White man exiled the noble Red man from the Eastern United States in 1838. They were allowed to take their personal property with them. They took their Black slaves. After all, somebody had to clean the teepee when Chief Kickapoo was talking to Manitou.
Fast forward to today.
Descendants of those Black slaves, long considered Cherokees, have been voted off the island. Not only have they been denied more than 150 years of a common heritage of scalping, cattle rustling, and buffalo hunting they are now cut off from owning casinos.
Who but a Sarah Palin could have orchestrated such an evil symphony? That she was able to turn these irenic Noble Savages into heartless rotters is a testament to her growing demonic power. Say what you will about the excesses of the Salem witch trial but when was the last time you had a witch problem there? Let’s not rule it out for her.
I tell you because you are my favorite ink-stained modern American Liberal wretch. I hope you will rally to the cause of these Diaspora bound Black/Red men. I know of your concern for tran-gendered, nongendered, u-gendered, and degendered teens. Imagine being Black and Red and trending androgynous. Oh, the horrors of it!
At the very least you can reach out to Broward’s resident Hecate, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, our own Medusa wanabee, to save some shovel ready jobs in Summer of Recovery 2. Maybe you could get some of Florida’s own abos, the Seminoles, the Osceolas, and the fiercely feral Fugowis to teach these displaced persons how to hire Eye-Ties to run their soon to be built casinos. The first one featuring a nightly replay of Little Big Horn will be so popular it will be able to put a triple zero slot on its roulette table.
I hope that these not quite Red men don’t get the Wounded Knee treatment. As the paradigmatic template used to measure guilty White men I want you to open your modern American Liberals bag of tricks to help these undeserving victims of life’s circumstances. It’s not too late to prevent a replay of Last of the Mohicans.
I was going to sign off on this when word reached me in Texas, the Reddest of the Blessed Red states, of the earthquake in Washington. I am sure that the spirit of Woodward and Bernstein lives on. If you set some of your more inquiring hounds on the trail – What’s Janet Cook doing these days? Can you find any of Walter Duranty’s spawn? – I am sure you will find the fine hand of Halliburton behind the sudden shift of tectonic plates, not Teutonic plates as Birdbrain Bozo Barack said.
Where was Congressman West when the Richter scale went minor league berserk? How about Senator Rubio? You know that there are no coincidences in political life. Don’t you think it a bit too passing strange that Darth Cheney’s bilious bio, “Snarling Lies I Told The American People” is published and then the Washington Monument cracks?
Do you know if Van Jones, the Blackest Green man man in America, will speak at the 10th anniversary of the WOG terrorist attack?
Kevin Smith
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: New Tea Party outrage! Red men give Black men the boot! Kemo Sabe wants to know wazupwidat.
My dear Professor.
In my Western travels I came across what may be the worst offense yet to have been caused by the accursed Tea Party.
It seems that the “sovereign” Cherokee nation, a nation soon to be part of the Security Council of the beloved United Nations, a nation with a better credit rating than its former keeper, has decided to deport their ubermenschen. [And I’ll bet you thought Arizona was hard on undocumented visitors]
The evil White man exiled the noble Red man from the Eastern United States in 1838. They were allowed to take their personal property with them. They took their Black slaves. After all, somebody had to clean the teepee when Chief Kickapoo was talking to Manitou.
Fast forward to today.
Descendants of those Black slaves, long considered Cherokees, have been voted off the island. Not only have they been denied more than 150 years of a common heritage of scalping, cattle rustling, and buffalo hunting they are now cut off from owning casinos.
Who but a Sarah Palin could have orchestrated such an evil symphony? That she was able to turn these irenic Noble Savages into heartless rotters is a testament to her growing demonic power. Say what you will about the excesses of the Salem witch trial but when was the last time you had a witch problem there? Let’s not rule it out for her.
I tell you because you are my favorite ink-stained modern American Liberal wretch. I hope you will rally to the cause of these Diaspora bound Black/Red men. I know of your concern for tran-gendered, nongendered, u-gendered, and degendered teens. Imagine being Black and Red and trending androgynous. Oh, the horrors of it!
At the very least you can reach out to Broward’s resident Hecate, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, our own Medusa wanabee, to save some shovel ready jobs in Summer of Recovery 2. Maybe you could get some of Florida’s own abos, the Seminoles, the Osceolas, and the fiercely feral Fugowis to teach these displaced persons how to hire Eye-Ties to run their soon to be built casinos. The first one featuring a nightly replay of Little Big Horn will be so popular it will be able to put a triple zero slot on its roulette table.
I hope that these not quite Red men don’t get the Wounded Knee treatment. As the paradigmatic template used to measure guilty White men I want you to open your modern American Liberals bag of tricks to help these undeserving victims of life’s circumstances. It’s not too late to prevent a replay of Last of the Mohicans.
I was going to sign off on this when word reached me in Texas, the Reddest of the Blessed Red states, of the earthquake in Washington. I am sure that the spirit of Woodward and Bernstein lives on. If you set some of your more inquiring hounds on the trail – What’s Janet Cook doing these days? Can you find any of Walter Duranty’s spawn? – I am sure you will find the fine hand of Halliburton behind the sudden shift of tectonic plates, not Teutonic plates as Birdbrain Bozo Barack said.
Where was Congressman West when the Richter scale went minor league berserk? How about Senator Rubio? You know that there are no coincidences in political life. Don’t you think it a bit too passing strange that Darth Cheney’s bilious bio, “Snarling Lies I Told The American People” is published and then the Washington Monument cracks?
Do you know if Van Jones, the Blackest Green man man in America, will speak at the 10th anniversary of the WOG terrorist attack?
Kevin Smith
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Gary Stein The Sun-Sentinel
August 17, 2011
Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: “Artwork Isn’t the Best Use Of $610,000 In Public Funds” – Your column on the uses of public moneys, “what were you thinking?” the rule of “de gustibus”, and, perhaps, a sublimely teachable moment.
Big Stein:
Before revealing two things about public money and public art and the unspoken nexus between them and modern American Liberalism full disclosure demands that I reveal that I spent much unhappy time in a Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan. It was the one made famous by Tom Wolfe’s comments on “Tilted Arc”. It was a 4 inch thick, 10 feet high, and 25 feet long parabolic hunk of rusted metal plopped down in the interior courtyard. Too bad the construction couldn’t have waited until we borrowed the money from the Bank of Wong to finance it. If enough nouveau riche Mandarin or Hunanese tourists saw it they might have gone home and tossed their inscrutable rascals out for wasting their money.
#1 – Broward County Mayor Sue Gunzberger, a title sometimes worn by the smartest bear in the zoo or the county’s tallest midget, says, with absolutely no hint of wryness or absurdity, says “beauty and solitude” are important in front of a to be built courthouse because sometimes the day inside will be “heavy”. If the day inside includes the possibility of the Judge asking if you brought your tooth brush it could be very “heavy”. If it involves something as mundane as the Judge saying that contracts are not only binding at parties it still could be “heavy”.
Commissioner Gunzberger, being one of the legion of mush brained modern American Liberals nesting in Broward County, not only proselytizes such “balloon juice”, she votes her conscience in such matters.
She confirms one of the unassailable truths of contemporary American life. Giving a modern American Liberal access to any check book other than her own is like giving your hormone raging 17 year old the keys to your car, said car having a case of beer in the front seat. I was going to say firewater to the Indians but I can’t risk a nocturnal visit from the PC speech squad of the Perpetually Outraged Sons of Cochise.
But then I got to #2. I quote in its entirety
“Conservatism is not my one of my favorite words.”
That’s what my copy said. Honest. Have the proof reader flogged. A dozen well laid on will suffice if it’s a first offense.
It wasn’t as bad as Al Sharpton saying that adjectives can double as gerunds and snarling that the subjunctive is racist. Any use of litotes by him is absolutely and positively unintended. It wasn’t as bad as Barney Frank’s televised eructation. It wasn’t as bad as Senator Stabenow [D-MI] saying that if you want proof of Global Warming fly from Utopia to the Land of Rainbow Stew and feel how hot it is at 35,000 feet.
It wasn’t as bad as the Quixotic quest of Lord Barack the Beneficent to find a rare first edition of “The Ivy League Guide to English/Austrian Grammar and Composition”. I hope he won’t have to go to all 57 or was it 58 states to find it. His Death Star Debt Laden Bus – Ken Kesey would have loved it [Tom Wolfe, yet again] – gets an MPG rating not as bad as an F-16 but not as good as an Abrams A1A tank. As an alumnus of the Concorde I am pretty sure that it is as good as that proud bird. Talk about carbon footprints! It’s about the same as Chicago. Perhaps he can find the “shovel ready” jobs promised in last year’s “Summer of Recovery”. Perhaps not. Can I mention the inconvenient fact that the Damn thing was made in Canada? I can’t? Drat.
I spent a big part of yesterday reading yet more about Russell Kirk.
You can’t read Kirk without bumping into Edmund Burke. Fast forward and you find yourself arm wrestling with T.S.Eliot. Kirk without Burke or Eliot would be like Damian without Pythias or Achilles without Patroclus.
One of the mental warm ups I do when any name from the above paragraph enters the arena is to construct a parallel universe that has but one free flying Death Star; modern American Liberalism.
Who is the counterpart to Edmund Burke in the writings, assuming there are any, of modern American Liberalism?
Which 20th century modern American Liberal poet speaks to modern man like T.S.Eliot? Please don’t say Rod McKuen.
Is there a modern American Liberal chronicler like Kirk?
Kirk can draw from Johnson, Madison, Randolph, Wadsworth, Tennyson, Brownson, Newman, Disraeli, Kipling, Chesterton, Yeats, Babbit, Faulkner, Orwell, von Mises, Tate, Koestler, Dos Passos, Warren, Chambers, Friedman, Hayek, Bradford, Nash, Dulles….the list goes on and on.
Waiting to be summoned are Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas. Do you agree that we can call that a deep bench?
Let’s assume a modern American Liberal chronicler was to appear.
Saul Alinsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Charles Reich, Alvy Singer, Paul Ehrlich, Alpha Gump….an absolute Murderers’ Row, no? I know that when you strike the pitcher out it goes into the scorebook as a K. Shouldn’t it be asterisked?
KS
Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: “Artwork Isn’t the Best Use Of $610,000 In Public Funds” – Your column on the uses of public moneys, “what were you thinking?” the rule of “de gustibus”, and, perhaps, a sublimely teachable moment.
Big Stein:
Before revealing two things about public money and public art and the unspoken nexus between them and modern American Liberalism full disclosure demands that I reveal that I spent much unhappy time in a Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan. It was the one made famous by Tom Wolfe’s comments on “Tilted Arc”. It was a 4 inch thick, 10 feet high, and 25 feet long parabolic hunk of rusted metal plopped down in the interior courtyard. Too bad the construction couldn’t have waited until we borrowed the money from the Bank of Wong to finance it. If enough nouveau riche Mandarin or Hunanese tourists saw it they might have gone home and tossed their inscrutable rascals out for wasting their money.
#1 – Broward County Mayor Sue Gunzberger, a title sometimes worn by the smartest bear in the zoo or the county’s tallest midget, says, with absolutely no hint of wryness or absurdity, says “beauty and solitude” are important in front of a to be built courthouse because sometimes the day inside will be “heavy”. If the day inside includes the possibility of the Judge asking if you brought your tooth brush it could be very “heavy”. If it involves something as mundane as the Judge saying that contracts are not only binding at parties it still could be “heavy”.
Commissioner Gunzberger, being one of the legion of mush brained modern American Liberals nesting in Broward County, not only proselytizes such “balloon juice”, she votes her conscience in such matters.
She confirms one of the unassailable truths of contemporary American life. Giving a modern American Liberal access to any check book other than her own is like giving your hormone raging 17 year old the keys to your car, said car having a case of beer in the front seat. I was going to say firewater to the Indians but I can’t risk a nocturnal visit from the PC speech squad of the Perpetually Outraged Sons of Cochise.
But then I got to #2. I quote in its entirety
“Conservatism is not my one of my favorite words.”
That’s what my copy said. Honest. Have the proof reader flogged. A dozen well laid on will suffice if it’s a first offense.
It wasn’t as bad as Al Sharpton saying that adjectives can double as gerunds and snarling that the subjunctive is racist. Any use of litotes by him is absolutely and positively unintended. It wasn’t as bad as Barney Frank’s televised eructation. It wasn’t as bad as Senator Stabenow [D-MI] saying that if you want proof of Global Warming fly from Utopia to the Land of Rainbow Stew and feel how hot it is at 35,000 feet.
It wasn’t as bad as the Quixotic quest of Lord Barack the Beneficent to find a rare first edition of “The Ivy League Guide to English/Austrian Grammar and Composition”. I hope he won’t have to go to all 57 or was it 58 states to find it. His Death Star Debt Laden Bus – Ken Kesey would have loved it [Tom Wolfe, yet again] – gets an MPG rating not as bad as an F-16 but not as good as an Abrams A1A tank. As an alumnus of the Concorde I am pretty sure that it is as good as that proud bird. Talk about carbon footprints! It’s about the same as Chicago. Perhaps he can find the “shovel ready” jobs promised in last year’s “Summer of Recovery”. Perhaps not. Can I mention the inconvenient fact that the Damn thing was made in Canada? I can’t? Drat.
I spent a big part of yesterday reading yet more about Russell Kirk.
You can’t read Kirk without bumping into Edmund Burke. Fast forward and you find yourself arm wrestling with T.S.Eliot. Kirk without Burke or Eliot would be like Damian without Pythias or Achilles without Patroclus.
One of the mental warm ups I do when any name from the above paragraph enters the arena is to construct a parallel universe that has but one free flying Death Star; modern American Liberalism.
Who is the counterpart to Edmund Burke in the writings, assuming there are any, of modern American Liberalism?
Which 20th century modern American Liberal poet speaks to modern man like T.S.Eliot? Please don’t say Rod McKuen.
Is there a modern American Liberal chronicler like Kirk?
Kirk can draw from Johnson, Madison, Randolph, Wadsworth, Tennyson, Brownson, Newman, Disraeli, Kipling, Chesterton, Yeats, Babbit, Faulkner, Orwell, von Mises, Tate, Koestler, Dos Passos, Warren, Chambers, Friedman, Hayek, Bradford, Nash, Dulles….the list goes on and on.
Waiting to be summoned are Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas. Do you agree that we can call that a deep bench?
Let’s assume a modern American Liberal chronicler was to appear.
Saul Alinsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Charles Reich, Alvy Singer, Paul Ehrlich, Alpha Gump….an absolute Murderers’ Row, no? I know that when you strike the pitcher out it goes into the scorebook as a K. Shouldn’t it be asterisked?
KS
Monday, August 15, 2011
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!
If you thought a government capable of spending $600,000.00 – 40% of it borrowed – to study the relationship between the size of a man’s penis and whether or not the short stick holder will be the catcher on the Hershey Highway Traveling Javelin Team would be incapable of doing anything great you would be forgiven.
Buttressing that argument is the news that the President and his Readin’, Ritin’, & Rithmetic Czar, neither of whom has any of their children in any of the really fine public schools in Washington, D.C., decided that the “No Child Left Behind” law is too tough on the tots. It seems that not enough of the nippers can pass it. Their solution, the paradigmatic template so beloved by modern American Liberals, was simple. Don’t enforce the law. Specifically, don’t enforce the law in states where the kids don’t do well on tests. [Only a cad would suggest that a poorly hitting Little League team be given 4 strikes or that a very tall basketball team be forced to have an obese melanin challenged point guard]
Is it permitted to ask how an admitted Constitutional scholar could have forgotten Article 2, Section 3 of said Constitution? It says “…he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. There are no exceptions for ones that the President doesn’t like. In fact, there are no exceptions.
Maybe it’s time to bring back my idea to change pi to 3.0
Doing that would increase everyone’s geometry grade. Self-esteem would soar. Perhaps it would lead to a decrease in teenage bullying. In a real “Git’r done” mood it would be a Win/Win/Win/Win deal.
It might be tough on any future Bridges to Nowhere but, to quote the great Lord Keynes, “In the long run we’re all dead”.
It is hard to believe but this country once did great things.
We are within the octave of the 66th anniversary of the most successful arms control treaty of the 20th century. It is so successful that it is in the 2nd decade of the 21st century. In an age where less than 30 year old football stadiums are considered out of date it is an achievement worthy of a secular Te Deum.
In less than 4 days of intense negotiation, beginning in the skies above Hiroshima and ending with a bang at Nagasaki, the United States of America ended World War 2.
Nobody, specifically Harry Truman or Paul Tibbets, got a Nobel Peace Prize for what they did. The framers of the Kellogg-Briand Naval Treaty got a passel of them. Not until Arafat, Rigoberta Menchu, Billy Carter’s brother, Potty Mouth Alpha Gump, and Lord Barack the Beneficent became winners in the International Affirmative Action Big Time Poke Uncle Sam in the Eye sweepstakes have more laurels been granted. Despite solemn promises about lions and lambs two of the signators, Germany and Japan, tried to sink the ship my wife’s father, Lt. Cdr. Walter Chapman, served on. It was General Quarters on two oceans. As bad as that was – 11 years – it was exponentially better than the deal at Munich. That one lasted about ½ the time needed for a decent rendition of Flight of the Valkyries.
Truman, “Captain Harry” to the men he commanded in World War 1, said, “If the American people knew that I had a weapon that could end the war and didn’t use it they would have been right to run me out of town on a rail”. The United States and Great Britain were taking 1,000 casualties a day. It is estimated that Operation Olympic Coronet, the invasion of the home islands of Japan, would bring an additional 1,000,000 casualties. The short, still correct retort to the mush brained cry “No More Hiroshimas” is “No More Pearl Harbors”. Nolo me tangere cum impecunis is still on the books.
Eisenhower commanded 10,000,000 men. He ended the war in Western Europe 11months and 4 days after his armies landed. When he said, “I will go to Korea” the boys in the Kremlin knew he wasn’t going there for the waters. The shooting stopped 6 months after he was sworn in.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, John McCain’s father’s boss in WW2, said he did 2 things well when he was in the Navy: he improved the landscaping at the Pentagon and he was responsible for the Polaris missile. It would have made no sense to shoot something 3,000 miles into the men’s room window at the Kremlin and have it filled with water balloons.
1962 and 1973 validated yet again the unilaterally imposed treaty. The jury is still out on whether or not President Bush, invoking the Cartago delenda est maxim, should have used some of the small ones to open Friday prayers in a half a dozen mosques.
Since it was OK to start the Israeli/Egyptian/Syrian/Hashemite/Shia/Sunni/WOG war on Yom Kippur and since turnabout is fair play maybe Ramadan would have been a lovely day to start a war.
It could end tomorrow.
We know it didn’t end yesterday.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!
Kevin Smith
Stephen L. Goldstein The Sun Sentinel
August 7, 2011
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun Sentinel
RE: “3 Incidents Give Strong Message” – Some comments on today’s typical Jeremiad laced column and how the Republicans, those rotters, those bounders, caused them.
My dear Professor,
As to your first 2 incidents I suggest a possible response, not an answer, can be found in poetry.
“Honor and shame from no condition rise.
Act well your part. There, all honor lies.”
As to your 3rd incident, the one where the knuckle dragging, gun toting, snake handling, homophobic, racist, Koch Brothers financed, Tea Partying, Global Warming denying louts were able to overcome the oodles of cash from that great Hungarian-American George Soros, a man whose CV lists employment experience under the Nazis and the Communists, were able to impose their evil will on the country, doubtless to the disproportional detriment of women and minorities, my mind boggles.
All and all a good day’s work from the Nixon, Reagan, Bush stalkers, don’t you think?
As an aside, let me show you one of my unknown qualities. It is my attempting to fulfill a Spiritual Work of Mercy. Christ instructed His followers to “instruct the uninformed”. Whether you are able to differentiate between Caravaggio and Chiaroscuro is of no great import. Based on your writings you are abysmally ignorant of how the real world works. I reach out in the spirit of non-denominational charity to show you that, in the end, debits always equal credits.
The vote to increase the Federal debt limit, a vote similar to the one that Senator Obama and all, all as in 100%, of the Democratic members of the Senate voted against in 2007, has nothing to do with default. I tremble when I think you may call me a cynic if I mention that a Republican was President in 2007.
Try to imagine the Federal debt limit as the limit on your credit card. When you “max out” the card it does not – repeat – trigger default. As long as you service the debt, that means to the uninitiated that you are paying it down, you are not in default. No number of really wretched rascally Republicans can undo that. Got it? Want me to repeat it? There will be a test. In your case, it will be an open book quiz.
Alas, we live in a world where “stones are hard and water is wet”. This is hard for a fire breathing, non-thinking modern American Liberal to grasp let alone understand. That’s why you are able to write your last sentence.
“But we should honor everyone like them, living and dead,
by having the guts to take back America”
“Them” are your first two “incidents”.
#1 – Young victims of Progeria, a brutally cruel disabling and disfiguring disease are interviewed by Barbara Walters.
#2 – A friend of yours, a man already on the 18th green, a nonagerian who has had a stroke, has had his ticket stamped for the one way voyage to the “undiscovered country”.
Pray tell how will “taking back the country” benefit them?
Speaking of “taking back the country” I may be having a senior moment. Wasn’t there an election in 2008? Didn’t the country elect a man who never once in his adult life did anything save getting his wife a $4,000 a week raise as payment for getting her employer a $1,000,000.00 earmark?
Didn’t he travel to either 57 or 58 states and promise to calm the seas, reverse the tides, and cool the earth? Did not the country give him overwhelming majorities in both Houses?
Couldn’t some people say that the country was “taken back”?
What will you do if the ones who exercise “raw revenge” and “take back America” are the wrong people? What will the fire breathing, card carrying, mush brained, pointy headed modern American Liberals do if the people throw Bozo Barack out?
I had hoped that I would never have to compare another President to Jimmy Carter. That he was the worst President in the 20th century there can be no doubt, debate, or dispute. It only took the boob in the White House 3 years to have an insurmountable lead for honors in the 21st century. And he has 15 months to go! He could turn a 2 car funeral into a FUBARed train wreck.
He is modern American Liberalism at its best or worst. To an adult, even an “average” one, the words are interchangeable.
On behalf of all “decent, average Americans”, people like his “average white grandmother”, let him be gone.
Kevin Smith
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun Sentinel
RE: “3 Incidents Give Strong Message” – Some comments on today’s typical Jeremiad laced column and how the Republicans, those rotters, those bounders, caused them.
My dear Professor,
As to your first 2 incidents I suggest a possible response, not an answer, can be found in poetry.
“Honor and shame from no condition rise.
Act well your part. There, all honor lies.”
As to your 3rd incident, the one where the knuckle dragging, gun toting, snake handling, homophobic, racist, Koch Brothers financed, Tea Partying, Global Warming denying louts were able to overcome the oodles of cash from that great Hungarian-American George Soros, a man whose CV lists employment experience under the Nazis and the Communists, were able to impose their evil will on the country, doubtless to the disproportional detriment of women and minorities, my mind boggles.
All and all a good day’s work from the Nixon, Reagan, Bush stalkers, don’t you think?
As an aside, let me show you one of my unknown qualities. It is my attempting to fulfill a Spiritual Work of Mercy. Christ instructed His followers to “instruct the uninformed”. Whether you are able to differentiate between Caravaggio and Chiaroscuro is of no great import. Based on your writings you are abysmally ignorant of how the real world works. I reach out in the spirit of non-denominational charity to show you that, in the end, debits always equal credits.
The vote to increase the Federal debt limit, a vote similar to the one that Senator Obama and all, all as in 100%, of the Democratic members of the Senate voted against in 2007, has nothing to do with default. I tremble when I think you may call me a cynic if I mention that a Republican was President in 2007.
Try to imagine the Federal debt limit as the limit on your credit card. When you “max out” the card it does not – repeat – trigger default. As long as you service the debt, that means to the uninitiated that you are paying it down, you are not in default. No number of really wretched rascally Republicans can undo that. Got it? Want me to repeat it? There will be a test. In your case, it will be an open book quiz.
Alas, we live in a world where “stones are hard and water is wet”. This is hard for a fire breathing, non-thinking modern American Liberal to grasp let alone understand. That’s why you are able to write your last sentence.
“But we should honor everyone like them, living and dead,
by having the guts to take back America”
“Them” are your first two “incidents”.
#1 – Young victims of Progeria, a brutally cruel disabling and disfiguring disease are interviewed by Barbara Walters.
#2 – A friend of yours, a man already on the 18th green, a nonagerian who has had a stroke, has had his ticket stamped for the one way voyage to the “undiscovered country”.
Pray tell how will “taking back the country” benefit them?
Speaking of “taking back the country” I may be having a senior moment. Wasn’t there an election in 2008? Didn’t the country elect a man who never once in his adult life did anything save getting his wife a $4,000 a week raise as payment for getting her employer a $1,000,000.00 earmark?
Didn’t he travel to either 57 or 58 states and promise to calm the seas, reverse the tides, and cool the earth? Did not the country give him overwhelming majorities in both Houses?
Couldn’t some people say that the country was “taken back”?
What will you do if the ones who exercise “raw revenge” and “take back America” are the wrong people? What will the fire breathing, card carrying, mush brained, pointy headed modern American Liberals do if the people throw Bozo Barack out?
I had hoped that I would never have to compare another President to Jimmy Carter. That he was the worst President in the 20th century there can be no doubt, debate, or dispute. It only took the boob in the White House 3 years to have an insurmountable lead for honors in the 21st century. And he has 15 months to go! He could turn a 2 car funeral into a FUBARed train wreck.
He is modern American Liberalism at its best or worst. To an adult, even an “average” one, the words are interchangeable.
On behalf of all “decent, average Americans”, people like his “average white grandmother”, let him be gone.
Kevin Smith
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Gary Stein The Sun-Sentinel
August 3, 2011
Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Cricket fields and modern American Liberalism – Their nexus and how your column today fails to make the fatal connection.
Big Stein,
I decided to vote against all – no exceptions, none – bond issues in 1990. I believed, believe, that they are in violation of Federal law, specifically the Truth in Lending Law.
A $100,000,000.00 bond issue to save the manatees, to fight teenage obesity and the bullying of tentative trans-gendered artistes, to shelter women of color who are single moms with children in need of a good Ritalin program AND Midnight Basketball who lack access to public transportation that could get them to a Wal*Mart where $4 prescriptions will exploit them, anything, everything, is illegal on its face.
Imagine you stumble into a used car lot. There, an enterprising suede shoe shod, electric blue slacked, with a matching restrained hibiscus shirt entrepreneur, sells you a gas guzzling, carbon belching, and polar bear drowning SUV.
He says he can arrange financing.
He must tell you how much the loan will cost if carried to term. He must tell you, doubtless invoking the sacred rule of 78, what the pre-payment penalties are. He must spell this out so that even Curly Biden will get it. Should he fail to do so you will get your car free plus 2 or 3 years of walking around money. If you have an above average werewolf on your side you could end up owning his lot.
Why are municipal bonds exempt from this?
Broward County built a cricket stadium to proclaim that they were not culturally arrogant. [Alas, the facts would support the interpretation you may be] Any sport that has a position called “silly mid-off” deserves to have a world class venue, right? The good people of Broward County should feel proud that they have been chosen to pay for this. Should cricket become part of March Madness it would be better to have a wave of tea drinking Pakis rather than a boatload of English fans, right?
Follow the math. I’ll try to write slowly.
$100,000,000.00 @ 5% for 30 years ain’t $100,000,000.00 in 30 years.
There is $150,000,000.00 in interest. Think 30 year mortgage.
The true cost of the loan is $250,000,000.00. That’s two hundred and fifty million dollars. “Pretty soon”, as Everett McKinley Dirksen used to say, “It adds up to real money.”
15 years ago, as a fresh faced newly arrived émigré, I had to explain to an earnest information officer of the Broward County Board of Education the difference between an expense budget and a capital budget. Although I spoke English it may as well have been Linear B or Pashto. She looked at me “like my nose was being eaten by weevils”. By now she’s probably a finalist for head customer service rep on the ObamaCare – That’s the word that head Hecate and the paradigmatic template of modern American Liberalism, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, wanted outlawed on the floor of the House, remember? – Death Panels.
Any chance for a bull ring?
It would be a Win/Win/Win.
It would show our multi-cultural streak.
It would cut back on excessive bovine methane eructations.
It would provide fresh beef for the homeless.
Broward County residents would be overjoyed to hit that 3 run homer.
Kevin Smith
Board Certified Life Coach
Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Cricket fields and modern American Liberalism – Their nexus and how your column today fails to make the fatal connection.
Big Stein,
I decided to vote against all – no exceptions, none – bond issues in 1990. I believed, believe, that they are in violation of Federal law, specifically the Truth in Lending Law.
A $100,000,000.00 bond issue to save the manatees, to fight teenage obesity and the bullying of tentative trans-gendered artistes, to shelter women of color who are single moms with children in need of a good Ritalin program AND Midnight Basketball who lack access to public transportation that could get them to a Wal*Mart where $4 prescriptions will exploit them, anything, everything, is illegal on its face.
Imagine you stumble into a used car lot. There, an enterprising suede shoe shod, electric blue slacked, with a matching restrained hibiscus shirt entrepreneur, sells you a gas guzzling, carbon belching, and polar bear drowning SUV.
He says he can arrange financing.
He must tell you how much the loan will cost if carried to term. He must tell you, doubtless invoking the sacred rule of 78, what the pre-payment penalties are. He must spell this out so that even Curly Biden will get it. Should he fail to do so you will get your car free plus 2 or 3 years of walking around money. If you have an above average werewolf on your side you could end up owning his lot.
Why are municipal bonds exempt from this?
Broward County built a cricket stadium to proclaim that they were not culturally arrogant. [Alas, the facts would support the interpretation you may be] Any sport that has a position called “silly mid-off” deserves to have a world class venue, right? The good people of Broward County should feel proud that they have been chosen to pay for this. Should cricket become part of March Madness it would be better to have a wave of tea drinking Pakis rather than a boatload of English fans, right?
Follow the math. I’ll try to write slowly.
$100,000,000.00 @ 5% for 30 years ain’t $100,000,000.00 in 30 years.
There is $150,000,000.00 in interest. Think 30 year mortgage.
The true cost of the loan is $250,000,000.00. That’s two hundred and fifty million dollars. “Pretty soon”, as Everett McKinley Dirksen used to say, “It adds up to real money.”
15 years ago, as a fresh faced newly arrived émigré, I had to explain to an earnest information officer of the Broward County Board of Education the difference between an expense budget and a capital budget. Although I spoke English it may as well have been Linear B or Pashto. She looked at me “like my nose was being eaten by weevils”. By now she’s probably a finalist for head customer service rep on the ObamaCare – That’s the word that head Hecate and the paradigmatic template of modern American Liberalism, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, wanted outlawed on the floor of the House, remember? – Death Panels.
Any chance for a bull ring?
It would be a Win/Win/Win.
It would show our multi-cultural streak.
It would cut back on excessive bovine methane eructations.
It would provide fresh beef for the homeless.
Broward County residents would be overjoyed to hit that 3 run homer.
Kevin Smith
Board Certified Life Coach
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Michael Mayo The Sun-Sentinel
July 31, 2011
Michael Mayo
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Debbie and the Colonel – Some comments about your column about a saint and a knave in today’s Sun-Sentinel
Mr. Mayo,
There is one constant about modern American Liberals.
They never let you down.
I was reading your column about the brouhaha between perky, snippy Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and boorish, insensitive Congressman Alan West. When I got to the part about Little Debbie being “courageous” because she’s had cancer and had a friend shot I stopped to marvel at what passes for reasoned discourse these days.
Another constant of modern American Liberals is that the absence of knowledge of the “permanent things” allows, indeed encourages, the morphing of their innate narcissism into a warm, fuzzy solipsism. Think “We are the World…”
You say her speech is “benign”. Not so, not so. She is, to use one of her favorite words, “literally” incapable of being benign. She gives rabid shrews a bad name. Kipling would have recognized her as Nagaina, the queen of all vipers.
She has said the Republicans “literally” want to bring flogging, the strapado, and the vigorous dunking of shrill female ideologues. Giving the devil her due but she may be on to something.
One of Cossack wanabee Debbie’s favorite words is literally “literally”. It would suggest that her academic background in English Grammar and Composition was of the non-traditional type. Perhaps she was a correspondence student at the prestigious Rangoon School of Proctology and Origami. Wherever she studied she makes both Strunck & White cringe.
If Debbie’s ailments and travails “literally” make her courageous what honors can I expect?
I have had cancer 3 times. The last operation left a scar so memorable that my granddaughter used me and it in a show and tell session at Lovejoy Elementary School in Allen, Texas. Let me add atrial fibrilation lead to congestive heart failure for which I was treated less than a month ago. Two titanium hips plus a bone on bone knee prepared me for two torn rotator cuffs – one on each side, thankfully. Tomorrow, early in the AM, a urologist gets a shot at me.
I have a hangnail and dandruff compared to my wife.
As an aside, I can’t wait for full blown ObamaCare. [Do you remember when Debbie wanted that word struck from debate in the House? I forget. Was it “bile” or its evil twin “vitriol”?] Why do you think we have had an explosion in the number of TSA agents? Can you think of better training for Death Panel work? When the Post Office collapses the ex-employees will run it. Somebody will have to deliver the one way tickets for the nighttime cruises on the River Styx. A “shovel ready” job will be done by DMV agents. It’s tough to convince Granny and Gramps to get into senior power lifting so they can compete in the python wrestling contests. As masters of customer service who is better qualified? The real estate recovery will be led by the explosion of time share abattoirs and ossuaries in the “undiscovered country”
My last gun fight was in 1993. The first officer was dead before he hit the ground. The officer whose life I saved had a hole the size of a twenty five cent piece just off his sternum.
Even though I know that Jimmy Carter, Alpha Gump, and Lord Barack the Beneficent have debased and greatly cheapened the Nobel Prize I would gladly accept the soon to be created prize for Courage. Maybe my wife and I could be the Brad and Angelina of the newly Valiant and Courageous.
I saved the best for the last.
Little Debbie says she is shocked and disappointed at Congressman West’s reaction to her comments on the floor of the House. She says it is called “debate”. Further, she says “it’s our job”.
Shades of Cato! Burke/Fox and Webster/Hayne redux?
I’ve writing to you since the last century.
Do you recall any threats?
I ask you that because maybe you can get her to explain why she sent 2 Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents, men with badges and gun, to my house on September 18, 2001. Agent Thomas, the “good cop”, said he enjoyed my writings and shared them with other officers. Agent Mineva, the “bad cop”, strongly suggested not only that I stop writing to Czarina Debbie but that I stop writing to all public officials.
Slippery Slope? Don’t be silly
Chilling effect? Fuhgedaboutit.
Hell hath no fury like a modern American wench who objects being objected to.
I consider it my “job”.
She considered it a “threat”.
I would say “existential” threat but for a woman who claims to have 2 degrees in Political Science to have gotten this far in life with no knowledge – none, zip, nada – of Natural Law, Common Law, or Constitutional Law “existential” would have put entirely too much on her plate.
It didn’t take much for the world to find out where Congressman West lived. Her friends, doubtless purple shirted SEIU thugs, posted his address, phone number, Social Security number, blood type, rifle number, shoe size, boxer or briefs, one lump or two, inter alia, on the Internet. [Let me take this opportunity to thank Alpha Gump, that old sexed crazed poodle, for inventing it] Say this for him. Unlike her pal Congressman Toad Wexler he lives in Florida.
You end by saying that if the good Colonel were to apologize to Florida’s favorite Hecate the debt ceiling will be raised, Wong, our increasingly nasty Mandarin moneylender, will forgive us our debts, and “the voice of the turtle will be heard in the land”.
Eliot, yet another Nobel Prize winner, said “In our end is our beginning”.
I began today’s tutorial by saying that ”modern American Liberals never let you down”.
Thank you for the perfect ending.
Kevin Smith
Michael Mayo
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Debbie and the Colonel – Some comments about your column about a saint and a knave in today’s Sun-Sentinel
Mr. Mayo,
There is one constant about modern American Liberals.
They never let you down.
I was reading your column about the brouhaha between perky, snippy Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and boorish, insensitive Congressman Alan West. When I got to the part about Little Debbie being “courageous” because she’s had cancer and had a friend shot I stopped to marvel at what passes for reasoned discourse these days.
Another constant of modern American Liberals is that the absence of knowledge of the “permanent things” allows, indeed encourages, the morphing of their innate narcissism into a warm, fuzzy solipsism. Think “We are the World…”
You say her speech is “benign”. Not so, not so. She is, to use one of her favorite words, “literally” incapable of being benign. She gives rabid shrews a bad name. Kipling would have recognized her as Nagaina, the queen of all vipers.
She has said the Republicans “literally” want to bring flogging, the strapado, and the vigorous dunking of shrill female ideologues. Giving the devil her due but she may be on to something.
One of Cossack wanabee Debbie’s favorite words is literally “literally”. It would suggest that her academic background in English Grammar and Composition was of the non-traditional type. Perhaps she was a correspondence student at the prestigious Rangoon School of Proctology and Origami. Wherever she studied she makes both Strunck & White cringe.
If Debbie’s ailments and travails “literally” make her courageous what honors can I expect?
I have had cancer 3 times. The last operation left a scar so memorable that my granddaughter used me and it in a show and tell session at Lovejoy Elementary School in Allen, Texas. Let me add atrial fibrilation lead to congestive heart failure for which I was treated less than a month ago. Two titanium hips plus a bone on bone knee prepared me for two torn rotator cuffs – one on each side, thankfully. Tomorrow, early in the AM, a urologist gets a shot at me.
I have a hangnail and dandruff compared to my wife.
As an aside, I can’t wait for full blown ObamaCare. [Do you remember when Debbie wanted that word struck from debate in the House? I forget. Was it “bile” or its evil twin “vitriol”?] Why do you think we have had an explosion in the number of TSA agents? Can you think of better training for Death Panel work? When the Post Office collapses the ex-employees will run it. Somebody will have to deliver the one way tickets for the nighttime cruises on the River Styx. A “shovel ready” job will be done by DMV agents. It’s tough to convince Granny and Gramps to get into senior power lifting so they can compete in the python wrestling contests. As masters of customer service who is better qualified? The real estate recovery will be led by the explosion of time share abattoirs and ossuaries in the “undiscovered country”
My last gun fight was in 1993. The first officer was dead before he hit the ground. The officer whose life I saved had a hole the size of a twenty five cent piece just off his sternum.
Even though I know that Jimmy Carter, Alpha Gump, and Lord Barack the Beneficent have debased and greatly cheapened the Nobel Prize I would gladly accept the soon to be created prize for Courage. Maybe my wife and I could be the Brad and Angelina of the newly Valiant and Courageous.
I saved the best for the last.
Little Debbie says she is shocked and disappointed at Congressman West’s reaction to her comments on the floor of the House. She says it is called “debate”. Further, she says “it’s our job”.
Shades of Cato! Burke/Fox and Webster/Hayne redux?
I’ve writing to you since the last century.
Do you recall any threats?
I ask you that because maybe you can get her to explain why she sent 2 Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents, men with badges and gun, to my house on September 18, 2001. Agent Thomas, the “good cop”, said he enjoyed my writings and shared them with other officers. Agent Mineva, the “bad cop”, strongly suggested not only that I stop writing to Czarina Debbie but that I stop writing to all public officials.
Slippery Slope? Don’t be silly
Chilling effect? Fuhgedaboutit.
Hell hath no fury like a modern American wench who objects being objected to.
I consider it my “job”.
She considered it a “threat”.
I would say “existential” threat but for a woman who claims to have 2 degrees in Political Science to have gotten this far in life with no knowledge – none, zip, nada – of Natural Law, Common Law, or Constitutional Law “existential” would have put entirely too much on her plate.
It didn’t take much for the world to find out where Congressman West lived. Her friends, doubtless purple shirted SEIU thugs, posted his address, phone number, Social Security number, blood type, rifle number, shoe size, boxer or briefs, one lump or two, inter alia, on the Internet. [Let me take this opportunity to thank Alpha Gump, that old sexed crazed poodle, for inventing it] Say this for him. Unlike her pal Congressman Toad Wexler he lives in Florida.
You end by saying that if the good Colonel were to apologize to Florida’s favorite Hecate the debt ceiling will be raised, Wong, our increasingly nasty Mandarin moneylender, will forgive us our debts, and “the voice of the turtle will be heard in the land”.
Eliot, yet another Nobel Prize winner, said “In our end is our beginning”.
I began today’s tutorial by saying that ”modern American Liberals never let you down”.
Thank you for the perfect ending.
Kevin Smith
Stephen L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel
July 24, 2011
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Some comments on the miraculous appearance of altruistic “nonprofits” and their quest for truth, justice, and the Goldstein way as reported by you in this morning’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
Although a strong case, a very strong case, can be for you being a horse’s ass of Homeric, Brobdanaglian proportions, it is one that I do not normally subscribe to. It’s just that there is so, so much that you don’t know.
Your opening sentence – “Nonprofits are the heart and soul of America” – is worthy of inclusion in the soon to be built “Jeezus Haitch Keerist but that’s really, really dumb” wing at the Guinness Hall of Fame. I am told that while there will be no charge to get in there will be a huge charge to get out. It takes an educated man, you, to believe and spread such incoherent, anti-rational ca-ca as the inclusion of Rainbow Stew in the basic daily food groups.
Lest you think me a heartless curmudgeon who would rival the unredeemed Scrooge I funded and ran a merit based scholarship fund beginning in 1979. As further proof that acorns never far from the tree, Caroline Hanson, my 10 year old granddaughter and the middle one of my 3 Texas ladies, recently raised almost $3,000 for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
What is absent from your opening paragraph is any mention of how “nonprofits became the heart and soul of America”.
It is an inconvenient truth that without “profits” there would be no “nonprofits”.
The first library I wandered around in was in Bayonne, NJ. It was built by the non-profit Carnegie Foundation. By the time I moved to Orange, NJ Carnegie had already been there.
This magazine insert in today’s Sun-Sentinel has Bill and Melinda Gates on its cover. Their foundation gives away 3 billion dollars – that’s $3,000,000,000.00 – a year. Every year.
Carnegie and Gates have many things in common. First and foremost is that they made mind boggling, Olympian amounts of money. They made so much money that modern American Liberals would have a reverse quiver running down their legs. One of the revealed truths of modern American Liberalism is that for someone to win someone has to lose. It is belief premised on the non-fact that life is a zero sum game.
It isn’t.
Candidate Obama said that he “wanted to spread the wealth around”. It is a mindset that fails to realize, is incapable of realizing, that wealth must be “created” before it can be ”spread around”.
“Creation” of wealth, like the “creation” of a symphony or a family or a novel can be a messy business. Maybe that’s why modern American Liberals shy away from it like Dracula from Holy Water. “Fairness”, whatever the Hell that means, trumps the turmoil of the marketplace. Wouldn’t “fairness” dictate that every sporting event ends in a tie?
I don’t know who the next Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates will be. I do know that he is out there tinkering with an idea, failing with it, trying another one until man, moment, and magic meet.
I believe it is a testament to American exceptionalism that there is another Sam Walton out there. When he succeeds in squaring his circle he will be as rich as Croesus. If History is a guide he will consume conspicuously while simultaneously giving it away. Both tasks will “create” more jobs than all the “shovel ready not quite shovel ready projects” could ever dream of. Think of all the lawyers and claims adjustors who have found gainful employment because of the Kennedy family. That’s why, as the legendary Big Mike from Bayonne says, “You never see anybody swimming to Cuba”.
The only thing better than giving away other peoples’ money is giving away your own. Ask the Koch Brothers. Ask George Soros.
Kevin Smith
PS – Would you think ill of me if I were to suggest that the United States Post Office is a nonprofit?
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: Some comments on the miraculous appearance of altruistic “nonprofits” and their quest for truth, justice, and the Goldstein way as reported by you in this morning’s Sun-Sentinel.
My dear Professor,
Although a strong case, a very strong case, can be for you being a horse’s ass of Homeric, Brobdanaglian proportions, it is one that I do not normally subscribe to. It’s just that there is so, so much that you don’t know.
Your opening sentence – “Nonprofits are the heart and soul of America” – is worthy of inclusion in the soon to be built “Jeezus Haitch Keerist but that’s really, really dumb” wing at the Guinness Hall of Fame. I am told that while there will be no charge to get in there will be a huge charge to get out. It takes an educated man, you, to believe and spread such incoherent, anti-rational ca-ca as the inclusion of Rainbow Stew in the basic daily food groups.
Lest you think me a heartless curmudgeon who would rival the unredeemed Scrooge I funded and ran a merit based scholarship fund beginning in 1979. As further proof that acorns never far from the tree, Caroline Hanson, my 10 year old granddaughter and the middle one of my 3 Texas ladies, recently raised almost $3,000 for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
What is absent from your opening paragraph is any mention of how “nonprofits became the heart and soul of America”.
It is an inconvenient truth that without “profits” there would be no “nonprofits”.
The first library I wandered around in was in Bayonne, NJ. It was built by the non-profit Carnegie Foundation. By the time I moved to Orange, NJ Carnegie had already been there.
This magazine insert in today’s Sun-Sentinel has Bill and Melinda Gates on its cover. Their foundation gives away 3 billion dollars – that’s $3,000,000,000.00 – a year. Every year.
Carnegie and Gates have many things in common. First and foremost is that they made mind boggling, Olympian amounts of money. They made so much money that modern American Liberals would have a reverse quiver running down their legs. One of the revealed truths of modern American Liberalism is that for someone to win someone has to lose. It is belief premised on the non-fact that life is a zero sum game.
It isn’t.
Candidate Obama said that he “wanted to spread the wealth around”. It is a mindset that fails to realize, is incapable of realizing, that wealth must be “created” before it can be ”spread around”.
“Creation” of wealth, like the “creation” of a symphony or a family or a novel can be a messy business. Maybe that’s why modern American Liberals shy away from it like Dracula from Holy Water. “Fairness”, whatever the Hell that means, trumps the turmoil of the marketplace. Wouldn’t “fairness” dictate that every sporting event ends in a tie?
I don’t know who the next Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates will be. I do know that he is out there tinkering with an idea, failing with it, trying another one until man, moment, and magic meet.
I believe it is a testament to American exceptionalism that there is another Sam Walton out there. When he succeeds in squaring his circle he will be as rich as Croesus. If History is a guide he will consume conspicuously while simultaneously giving it away. Both tasks will “create” more jobs than all the “shovel ready not quite shovel ready projects” could ever dream of. Think of all the lawyers and claims adjustors who have found gainful employment because of the Kennedy family. That’s why, as the legendary Big Mike from Bayonne says, “You never see anybody swimming to Cuba”.
The only thing better than giving away other peoples’ money is giving away your own. Ask the Koch Brothers. Ask George Soros.
Kevin Smith
PS – Would you think ill of me if I were to suggest that the United States Post Office is a nonprofit?
Michael Putney The Miami Herald
July 13, 2011
Michael Putney
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: No questions for Rick Scott? Some answers for Mikey Putney
Mr. Putney,
Ouch!
The governor stood you up?
I volunteer to fill in for him. I have more hair than he does plus I would make a better guest.
I spent time as a missionary in rural Mexico. I was hit in the head by a policeman during a Civil Rights march. Neither the Marines nor the Army wanted me. I am an alumnus of Outward Bound. I know why Oedipus went to Colonnus. I “created” infinitely more jobs in the 1980s than all of the companies on the DJIA. I am a world class hackle raiser plus a much envied buckler of swashes. I am an alumnus of Jeopardy. I saved a policeman’s life. I testified at the murder trial of the man who shot the one I couldn’t save. Tom Fiedler has tolerated me since 1997. I have actually read Keynes. I never confuse Chiaroscuro and Caravaggio. I once was paid $5,000 for lunch. I have been 1000 feet underground mining for coal. I owned North American rights to 47 English movies. The only significant sale we made was to WCIX-TV, a Spanish language station in Miami. I can’t understand why my manatee sausage program for the homeless never caught on. I spent 7 years on trial in Federal Tax Court. I “focus on the absurd lest reality drive me mad”.
Those are some of the reasons why I look at your column today like a big bad wolf looks at Bo Peep’s sheep.
#1 – High Speed Rail –Please show me somewhere where this has worked. Cost overruns and astronomical operating expenses are never mentioned. I mention them because in the real world, “the solid world where stones are hard and water is wet”, these things matter. Government conducts its business in a place where the rules governing gravity are suspended. Sometimes “shovel ready” isn’t quite as “shovel ready” as people who dine daily on “rainbow stew” would have us believe. I confess that I am not the first person to say that this month.
You say “a lot of us want it [it being tax dollars sent to DC where they are recycled back to us minus the ATM fee] back for useful, productive projects”. Would you care to mention a few?
Johnny couldn’t read before the Department of Education was begun. How is that working out? How much electricity has the Department of Energy produced since it’s been here? Crop prices are at all-time highs. Is that because of or in spite of the Department of Agriculture? Deep six those dinosaurs.
Pass the word. I just solved the Federal debt ceiling crisis. Speaking of which, I tell you that as a former CFO of a public company it should be a flogging offense for a CEO to announce that if he can’t roll over some paper on a Tuesday he can’t meet current obligations on a Wednesday. If anything his cash flow position is improved because he’s not making any note payments.
#2 – I ran 2 nursing homes in the 1980s. Inter alia, I could get a Federally guaranteed mortgage on a golf course if the property was contiguous to mine. Nursing home honchos never drive small cars. The more expensive the car the bigger the Federal reimbursement, it becoming part of your cost basis. This was 25 years ago. Why do I know it hasn’t changed?
#3 – Private sector vs. Public sector – When it “absolutely, positively has to get there” where do you go? FedEx or UPS, right?
The Post Office is analogous to public education. Let us stipulate that many bright, hardworking people work in both places. A system that can neither reward excellence nor punish failure is destined, in fact it is preordained, for failure.
#4 – As a big time media mogul, even if it is the “lamestream” media, maybe you can tell me what happened to the War on Poverty. Thucydides tells us that the Athenians and the Spartans settled their differences in less time than we have been fighting this troll. We have had 47 years to pick the “useful, productive programs”. Can you name two? Have you heard anything about an “exit strategy”? Maybe it’s time for a “surge”. How will we know when we win? Will we all be farting through silk? Here’s a thought. Let’s raise taxes. That’s always “created” jobs, hasn’t it?
In my life time, until the arrival of the great Reagan, the United States government did 2 things superbly well: A – Fighting World war 2 and - B – Being the General Contractor on the moon shot.
#5 – Where would you have Governor Scott sign his bills? Why not have Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz host a reception? I mention her because I get to tell of the time when she sent policemen, men with guns and badges, agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, to my house because of something I wrote. Don’t you just love it when modern American Liberals proclaim their belief in free speech? I’ll risk the “chilling effect” of being out on that “slippery slope” but that Hecate is, at heart, a friggin’ Nazi.
#6 – Spending cuts, particularly painful ones – You don’t say who should get the last bucks in the state budget. Should Farm Share, a presumably not-for-profit entity that feeds poor people, or the Dan Marino Foundation, a presumably not-for-profit entity that tends afflicted children, get the money? Who gets to pick? You? Me? The guy behind the tree? Who gets to pick who gets to pick?
Last summer candidate Scott went all over the state, on his own dime, telling people what he would do if they elected him. He was elected. As Governor he is doing what he promised he would do. The Constitution guarantees Florida a republican form of government. The people have spoken just like they spoke in 2008. They will have a chance to correct any mistakes that they have made. These self-correcting mechanisms are called elections
I can’t wait for ObmaCare to be run by DMV and TSA rejects
Elections as well as ideas have consequences.
Single malt whiskys enhance conversation. What is your policy in re on air potables?
Kevin Smith
PS – I just saw a news story where HHS, the people in charge of the Death Panels, is sending survey letters to predominantly Black and Latino zip codes requesting some minority feedback on Medicare tontines. Each of the letters contains 2 one dollar bills. I hope nobody tells Uncle Wong, our increasingly unfriendly Chinese lender. That’s why I can’t write fiction.
Michael Putney
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: No questions for Rick Scott? Some answers for Mikey Putney
Mr. Putney,
Ouch!
The governor stood you up?
I volunteer to fill in for him. I have more hair than he does plus I would make a better guest.
I spent time as a missionary in rural Mexico. I was hit in the head by a policeman during a Civil Rights march. Neither the Marines nor the Army wanted me. I am an alumnus of Outward Bound. I know why Oedipus went to Colonnus. I “created” infinitely more jobs in the 1980s than all of the companies on the DJIA. I am a world class hackle raiser plus a much envied buckler of swashes. I am an alumnus of Jeopardy. I saved a policeman’s life. I testified at the murder trial of the man who shot the one I couldn’t save. Tom Fiedler has tolerated me since 1997. I have actually read Keynes. I never confuse Chiaroscuro and Caravaggio. I once was paid $5,000 for lunch. I have been 1000 feet underground mining for coal. I owned North American rights to 47 English movies. The only significant sale we made was to WCIX-TV, a Spanish language station in Miami. I can’t understand why my manatee sausage program for the homeless never caught on. I spent 7 years on trial in Federal Tax Court. I “focus on the absurd lest reality drive me mad”.
Those are some of the reasons why I look at your column today like a big bad wolf looks at Bo Peep’s sheep.
#1 – High Speed Rail –Please show me somewhere where this has worked. Cost overruns and astronomical operating expenses are never mentioned. I mention them because in the real world, “the solid world where stones are hard and water is wet”, these things matter. Government conducts its business in a place where the rules governing gravity are suspended. Sometimes “shovel ready” isn’t quite as “shovel ready” as people who dine daily on “rainbow stew” would have us believe. I confess that I am not the first person to say that this month.
You say “a lot of us want it [it being tax dollars sent to DC where they are recycled back to us minus the ATM fee] back for useful, productive projects”. Would you care to mention a few?
Johnny couldn’t read before the Department of Education was begun. How is that working out? How much electricity has the Department of Energy produced since it’s been here? Crop prices are at all-time highs. Is that because of or in spite of the Department of Agriculture? Deep six those dinosaurs.
Pass the word. I just solved the Federal debt ceiling crisis. Speaking of which, I tell you that as a former CFO of a public company it should be a flogging offense for a CEO to announce that if he can’t roll over some paper on a Tuesday he can’t meet current obligations on a Wednesday. If anything his cash flow position is improved because he’s not making any note payments.
#2 – I ran 2 nursing homes in the 1980s. Inter alia, I could get a Federally guaranteed mortgage on a golf course if the property was contiguous to mine. Nursing home honchos never drive small cars. The more expensive the car the bigger the Federal reimbursement, it becoming part of your cost basis. This was 25 years ago. Why do I know it hasn’t changed?
#3 – Private sector vs. Public sector – When it “absolutely, positively has to get there” where do you go? FedEx or UPS, right?
The Post Office is analogous to public education. Let us stipulate that many bright, hardworking people work in both places. A system that can neither reward excellence nor punish failure is destined, in fact it is preordained, for failure.
#4 – As a big time media mogul, even if it is the “lamestream” media, maybe you can tell me what happened to the War on Poverty. Thucydides tells us that the Athenians and the Spartans settled their differences in less time than we have been fighting this troll. We have had 47 years to pick the “useful, productive programs”. Can you name two? Have you heard anything about an “exit strategy”? Maybe it’s time for a “surge”. How will we know when we win? Will we all be farting through silk? Here’s a thought. Let’s raise taxes. That’s always “created” jobs, hasn’t it?
In my life time, until the arrival of the great Reagan, the United States government did 2 things superbly well: A – Fighting World war 2 and - B – Being the General Contractor on the moon shot.
#5 – Where would you have Governor Scott sign his bills? Why not have Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz host a reception? I mention her because I get to tell of the time when she sent policemen, men with guns and badges, agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, to my house because of something I wrote. Don’t you just love it when modern American Liberals proclaim their belief in free speech? I’ll risk the “chilling effect” of being out on that “slippery slope” but that Hecate is, at heart, a friggin’ Nazi.
#6 – Spending cuts, particularly painful ones – You don’t say who should get the last bucks in the state budget. Should Farm Share, a presumably not-for-profit entity that feeds poor people, or the Dan Marino Foundation, a presumably not-for-profit entity that tends afflicted children, get the money? Who gets to pick? You? Me? The guy behind the tree? Who gets to pick who gets to pick?
Last summer candidate Scott went all over the state, on his own dime, telling people what he would do if they elected him. He was elected. As Governor he is doing what he promised he would do. The Constitution guarantees Florida a republican form of government. The people have spoken just like they spoke in 2008. They will have a chance to correct any mistakes that they have made. These self-correcting mechanisms are called elections
I can’t wait for ObmaCare to be run by DMV and TSA rejects
Elections as well as ideas have consequences.
Single malt whiskys enhance conversation. What is your policy in re on air potables?
Kevin Smith
PS – I just saw a news story where HHS, the people in charge of the Death Panels, is sending survey letters to predominantly Black and Latino zip codes requesting some minority feedback on Medicare tontines. Each of the letters contains 2 one dollar bills. I hope nobody tells Uncle Wong, our increasingly unfriendly Chinese lender. That’s why I can’t write fiction.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
July 18, 2011
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
Democratic National Committee
430 Capitol Street, NE
Washington, DC 20003
RE: Reporting for duty, frau oberst!
Dearest Debbie,
Who says you can’t learn from a card carrying modern American Liberal? Not I, at least not anymore.
In February, 2009 Congressman Ron Klein spoke to a group of blue collar factory workers in Pompano Beach. These are the kind of people who drive 11 year old cars, send their kids to public schools, know all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, and know how to use coupons. Limousine Liberals, people like you, like to adopt them for political purposes.
Congressman Klein, your former colleague, told these workers to be “the eyes and ears of the Obama Stimulus Program”. Honest.
Using that as precedent I hereby volunteer to be your “eyes and ears” in your never ending search for the “bile and vitriol that is tearing us apart”.
Here is my first report.
Several days ago, Bill Maher, a man on the short list to be the keynote speaker at next year’s Democratic Convention, had a man named Marc Moron on his show. He said that he would “like to fuck Michelle Bachman angrily”. While modern American Liberals believe profiling is wrong an exception may be made here.
At the very least Mr. Moron should be asked to explain – How about in front of a Federal Grand Jury? – the “bilious vitriol” that threatens a sitting member of Congress. Unlike Jared Loughner, the man who shot your other colleague, Congresswoman Giffords, the man who until it was shown that he had snakes for brains, was inspired, as you said, by Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and the survivors of the original “vast Right-Wing conspiracy” to shoot a sitting member of Congress. Mr. Moron seems to be in full control of his faculties.
I don’t know if rape falls under the bile category or if it is more properly described by vitriol, its evil twin. I do know that a sitting member of Congress has been publically threatened with it. Would not common sense and a respect for the collegiality that is supposed to be double-helixed into the warp and the woof of Congress command you to “drop a dime” on this Trousered Ape? After all, you sent the cops, men with badges and guns, after me for suggesting that your politics and policies were a bit stupid.
Men with badges and guns, men with the full force and majesty of the law behind them, came to my house to inquire about something I wrote about you. “Slippery slope” and “chilling effect” notwithstanding, I do believe that I would have been hauled out of my home in cuffs if either of the policemen, Agent Mineva in particular, thought I was hatching a plot to rape you. [I absolutely waive my 5th Amendment rights and declare that at no time – before, during, and since – was rape ever on my mind. What’s the opposite of Viagra?]
On the same show gay rights activist Dan Savage said “I sometimes think about fucking the shit out of Rick Santorum”. Far be it for me to say that homosexual rape is different from heterosexual rape but listening to these two modern American Liberal favorites I don’t think I would want or would want any member of my family to be a catcher on any javelin team featuring Mr. Moron or Mr. Savage. I imagine that “don’t ask, don’t tell” may have reached its natural limits here but that’s a tale – tail? – for a different time. Do you suppose the irenic Savage cut his teeth, so to speak, at the Barney Frank Happy Bottom French Knocking Shoppe? Just kidding…maybe.
Anyway, you can count on me to be your “eyes and ears”. I add that is passing strange that modern American Liberals, a loosely defined cabal of which you are the chief doyenne, want citizens to snitch on fellow citizens. I don’t think Lillian Hellman, and if there is a better definition of modern American Liberal than she I don’t want to see it, would approve. Thank God that she is still dead!
I think Lord Barack the Beneficent, your main airborne squeeze, should walk back his “don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”. On the other hand maybe he can use it the next time he talks to House Republicans. Michelle Bachman comes to mind.
Kevin Smith
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
Democratic National Committee
430 Capitol Street, NE
Washington, DC 20003
RE: Reporting for duty, frau oberst!
Dearest Debbie,
Who says you can’t learn from a card carrying modern American Liberal? Not I, at least not anymore.
In February, 2009 Congressman Ron Klein spoke to a group of blue collar factory workers in Pompano Beach. These are the kind of people who drive 11 year old cars, send their kids to public schools, know all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, and know how to use coupons. Limousine Liberals, people like you, like to adopt them for political purposes.
Congressman Klein, your former colleague, told these workers to be “the eyes and ears of the Obama Stimulus Program”. Honest.
Using that as precedent I hereby volunteer to be your “eyes and ears” in your never ending search for the “bile and vitriol that is tearing us apart”.
Here is my first report.
Several days ago, Bill Maher, a man on the short list to be the keynote speaker at next year’s Democratic Convention, had a man named Marc Moron on his show. He said that he would “like to fuck Michelle Bachman angrily”. While modern American Liberals believe profiling is wrong an exception may be made here.
At the very least Mr. Moron should be asked to explain – How about in front of a Federal Grand Jury? – the “bilious vitriol” that threatens a sitting member of Congress. Unlike Jared Loughner, the man who shot your other colleague, Congresswoman Giffords, the man who until it was shown that he had snakes for brains, was inspired, as you said, by Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and the survivors of the original “vast Right-Wing conspiracy” to shoot a sitting member of Congress. Mr. Moron seems to be in full control of his faculties.
I don’t know if rape falls under the bile category or if it is more properly described by vitriol, its evil twin. I do know that a sitting member of Congress has been publically threatened with it. Would not common sense and a respect for the collegiality that is supposed to be double-helixed into the warp and the woof of Congress command you to “drop a dime” on this Trousered Ape? After all, you sent the cops, men with badges and guns, after me for suggesting that your politics and policies were a bit stupid.
Men with badges and guns, men with the full force and majesty of the law behind them, came to my house to inquire about something I wrote about you. “Slippery slope” and “chilling effect” notwithstanding, I do believe that I would have been hauled out of my home in cuffs if either of the policemen, Agent Mineva in particular, thought I was hatching a plot to rape you. [I absolutely waive my 5th Amendment rights and declare that at no time – before, during, and since – was rape ever on my mind. What’s the opposite of Viagra?]
On the same show gay rights activist Dan Savage said “I sometimes think about fucking the shit out of Rick Santorum”. Far be it for me to say that homosexual rape is different from heterosexual rape but listening to these two modern American Liberal favorites I don’t think I would want or would want any member of my family to be a catcher on any javelin team featuring Mr. Moron or Mr. Savage. I imagine that “don’t ask, don’t tell” may have reached its natural limits here but that’s a tale – tail? – for a different time. Do you suppose the irenic Savage cut his teeth, so to speak, at the Barney Frank Happy Bottom French Knocking Shoppe? Just kidding…maybe.
Anyway, you can count on me to be your “eyes and ears”. I add that is passing strange that modern American Liberals, a loosely defined cabal of which you are the chief doyenne, want citizens to snitch on fellow citizens. I don’t think Lillian Hellman, and if there is a better definition of modern American Liberal than she I don’t want to see it, would approve. Thank God that she is still dead!
I think Lord Barack the Beneficent, your main airborne squeeze, should walk back his “don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”. On the other hand maybe he can use it the next time he talks to House Republicans. Michelle Bachman comes to mind.
Kevin Smith
Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer The Sun-Sentinel
July 30, 2011
Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: A teachable moment? – Some comments on your column in today’s Sun-Sentinel about the beauty of the income tax and the heretofore hidden modern American Liberal tendencies of A. Lincoln and R. Reagan.
Mr. Lyons,
First, I sentence you to a major timeout in the ethnic no-no sensitivity woodshed.
120 years ago my father’s father left Ballyglass, Ireland to come to this country. His 3 bothers chose 3 other countries, one of which was Wales. That makes me an honorary Welshman. [I get chills when I hear a Welsh Choir sing “Men of Harlech”] Thus, when I read your sentence “The United States is close to welshing on its debts…” I was shocked. I was hurt and diminished. Not since August, 2008 has the Sun-Sentinel published such an insensitive term. You remember when pre-Tea Party thugs took over the front page of your paper and, acting on direct orders from the Koch Brothers and Rush Limbaugh, published the headline Michele Obama – Her Time To Shine? I do. I understand that reproductions of that headline are the walls of every NRA Confederate flag waving club in South Florida.
If you can use the word “welsh” with impunity would it not put you on the slippery slope to “sneaky Japs” of “drunken Irish”? How about “cowardly French” or “Eye-Tie Gangsters”? Would “greasy Mexicans” or “smelly Pakis” be allowed? Would “cheap Jew” or its buzz word cousin, “hook nosed diamond merchant” be acceptable? Would “African-Americans not overwhelmed by ambition” be inside the Pale?
But I digress.
You say that Lincoln imposed an income tax on America 150 years ago. You imply that we have had one since. Not so, not so. On February 3, 1913 the 16th Amendment, the one permitting an income tax, was ratified. It ended a 58 year income tax holiday.
Since you introduced Lincoln to the conversation it is only fair to mention a few other things he did.
#1 – His goal was to preserve the Union. He was perfectly willing, at the beginning of his first term, to allow slavery to continue if it kept the Union together.
#2 – He suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
#3 – He arrested a Congressman for sedition and exiled him to Canada.
#4 – The Emancipation Proclamation was a masterstroke. He freed the slaves where he couldn’t. He kept then in bondage where he could have freed them. He set the nation on a noble cause while keeping an anchor to windward. He followed one of Napoleon’s maxims to a tee. “If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna”
#5 – I may be having a senior moment here. I can’t remember whether it was June or July, 1864 that the Union Army had 50,000 casualties. Maybe it was both. And we thought the phrase “pay any price and bear any burden” was original when we heard it one hundred years later.
#6 - Your snarky suggestion that Republicans are stuck in a time warp fails to disclose the inconvenient fact that during the Civil War the Democratic Party and its official mouthpiece, the New York Times, favored a negotiated settlement with the South. No matter how you spin that it meant that both of them were OK with slavery. “Baboon” was one of the more interesting terms used by the Democrats in the 1864 election to call Lincoln. Do you think Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz would place that term in her eclectically chosen “bile and vitriol” list?
#7 – He approved Grant’s decision to turn Sherman loose in the late fall of 1864. That means he allowed the implementation of America’s first “surge”. It was so successful that Pershing, Patton, and Petraeus copied it. Did you support the 2007 “surge”?
About the debt ceiling…
The last time Bush 43 proposed a raise in the debt ceiling every Democratic Senator – each and every one of them with no exceptions – voted against it. I am not sure what the difference 5 years makes but you either you cover your marker or you don’t. Is it possible to “welsh” retroactively?
The President has said that if the debt ceiling is not raised by Tuesday he won’t be able to pay any bills by Wednesday. I am shocked, shocked that 2 and ½ years into his administration no one has yet mastered the budgeting process. Do you think we could get some money back from those not quite shovel ready “shovel ready projects”? In 2009 his administration was filled either with grifters, crooks, and masters of the famous five finger discount, or it was filled with incompetents and incompetency not seen since the glory days of Jimmy Carter. Do you remember when you couldn’t find two West Wingers in a row who could find their ass using both hands? I do. The worst possible nightmare would have been if both possibilities are true. The evidence would support that interpretation.
In hindsight, 2009 will prove to be the highlight of his administration. All things considered, he has done exactly what a man who had done nothing in his adult life would do. Maybe he spent too much time with his non-Black grandmother whom he described as “an average White woman”. Maybe the combination of Saul Alinsky and Reverend Wright proved to be a Sophist too far. Maybe he thought being a community organizer was something useful, something of which to be proud. It is indeed passing strange that the community he was organizing against sent him to the Illinois legislature and then the United States Senate. I guess we’re lucky the job in the Vatican was filled.
Weren’t we told that the Social Security system was chockablock filled with assets? Why are we dependent on Wong, an increasingly hostile Mandarin Shylock, to pay current operating expenses? Where did almost 80 years of American workingmen’s dollars go? This makes Bernie Madoff look like a penny chiseler.
The President, and may I say that he is the best President we have, wants to raise the debt ceiling so it does not interfere with the November, 2012 election. You cite the great Reagan and how he is close to political canonization. As a Roman Catholic I would be opposed to that. Mt. Rushmore is a suitable alternative. You say he raised the debt ceiling 18 times. That means he had to go to Congress every 6 months. Using that formula we would revisit the question in January, 2012 and June, 2012.
Put the question to the electorate. Put it right into the election cycle. I know that this is anathema to modern American Liberals but what’s wrong with that?
If nothing else the debt debate proves that Shakespeare was right. “…borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry”.
Did you hear the one about the old Black man and the old Jew?
The police see an old Black man and an old Jew wrestling in the street….
Kevin Smith
PS – I cannot lay my finger upon the word summon anywhere in the Constitution Do you think James Madison, wherever he might be, is smiling?
Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer
The Sun-Sentinel
RE: A teachable moment? – Some comments on your column in today’s Sun-Sentinel about the beauty of the income tax and the heretofore hidden modern American Liberal tendencies of A. Lincoln and R. Reagan.
Mr. Lyons,
First, I sentence you to a major timeout in the ethnic no-no sensitivity woodshed.
120 years ago my father’s father left Ballyglass, Ireland to come to this country. His 3 bothers chose 3 other countries, one of which was Wales. That makes me an honorary Welshman. [I get chills when I hear a Welsh Choir sing “Men of Harlech”] Thus, when I read your sentence “The United States is close to welshing on its debts…” I was shocked. I was hurt and diminished. Not since August, 2008 has the Sun-Sentinel published such an insensitive term. You remember when pre-Tea Party thugs took over the front page of your paper and, acting on direct orders from the Koch Brothers and Rush Limbaugh, published the headline Michele Obama – Her Time To Shine? I do. I understand that reproductions of that headline are the walls of every NRA Confederate flag waving club in South Florida.
If you can use the word “welsh” with impunity would it not put you on the slippery slope to “sneaky Japs” of “drunken Irish”? How about “cowardly French” or “Eye-Tie Gangsters”? Would “greasy Mexicans” or “smelly Pakis” be allowed? Would “cheap Jew” or its buzz word cousin, “hook nosed diamond merchant” be acceptable? Would “African-Americans not overwhelmed by ambition” be inside the Pale?
But I digress.
You say that Lincoln imposed an income tax on America 150 years ago. You imply that we have had one since. Not so, not so. On February 3, 1913 the 16th Amendment, the one permitting an income tax, was ratified. It ended a 58 year income tax holiday.
Since you introduced Lincoln to the conversation it is only fair to mention a few other things he did.
#1 – His goal was to preserve the Union. He was perfectly willing, at the beginning of his first term, to allow slavery to continue if it kept the Union together.
#2 – He suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
#3 – He arrested a Congressman for sedition and exiled him to Canada.
#4 – The Emancipation Proclamation was a masterstroke. He freed the slaves where he couldn’t. He kept then in bondage where he could have freed them. He set the nation on a noble cause while keeping an anchor to windward. He followed one of Napoleon’s maxims to a tee. “If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna”
#5 – I may be having a senior moment here. I can’t remember whether it was June or July, 1864 that the Union Army had 50,000 casualties. Maybe it was both. And we thought the phrase “pay any price and bear any burden” was original when we heard it one hundred years later.
#6 - Your snarky suggestion that Republicans are stuck in a time warp fails to disclose the inconvenient fact that during the Civil War the Democratic Party and its official mouthpiece, the New York Times, favored a negotiated settlement with the South. No matter how you spin that it meant that both of them were OK with slavery. “Baboon” was one of the more interesting terms used by the Democrats in the 1864 election to call Lincoln. Do you think Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz would place that term in her eclectically chosen “bile and vitriol” list?
#7 – He approved Grant’s decision to turn Sherman loose in the late fall of 1864. That means he allowed the implementation of America’s first “surge”. It was so successful that Pershing, Patton, and Petraeus copied it. Did you support the 2007 “surge”?
About the debt ceiling…
The last time Bush 43 proposed a raise in the debt ceiling every Democratic Senator – each and every one of them with no exceptions – voted against it. I am not sure what the difference 5 years makes but you either you cover your marker or you don’t. Is it possible to “welsh” retroactively?
The President has said that if the debt ceiling is not raised by Tuesday he won’t be able to pay any bills by Wednesday. I am shocked, shocked that 2 and ½ years into his administration no one has yet mastered the budgeting process. Do you think we could get some money back from those not quite shovel ready “shovel ready projects”? In 2009 his administration was filled either with grifters, crooks, and masters of the famous five finger discount, or it was filled with incompetents and incompetency not seen since the glory days of Jimmy Carter. Do you remember when you couldn’t find two West Wingers in a row who could find their ass using both hands? I do. The worst possible nightmare would have been if both possibilities are true. The evidence would support that interpretation.
In hindsight, 2009 will prove to be the highlight of his administration. All things considered, he has done exactly what a man who had done nothing in his adult life would do. Maybe he spent too much time with his non-Black grandmother whom he described as “an average White woman”. Maybe the combination of Saul Alinsky and Reverend Wright proved to be a Sophist too far. Maybe he thought being a community organizer was something useful, something of which to be proud. It is indeed passing strange that the community he was organizing against sent him to the Illinois legislature and then the United States Senate. I guess we’re lucky the job in the Vatican was filled.
Weren’t we told that the Social Security system was chockablock filled with assets? Why are we dependent on Wong, an increasingly hostile Mandarin Shylock, to pay current operating expenses? Where did almost 80 years of American workingmen’s dollars go? This makes Bernie Madoff look like a penny chiseler.
The President, and may I say that he is the best President we have, wants to raise the debt ceiling so it does not interfere with the November, 2012 election. You cite the great Reagan and how he is close to political canonization. As a Roman Catholic I would be opposed to that. Mt. Rushmore is a suitable alternative. You say he raised the debt ceiling 18 times. That means he had to go to Congress every 6 months. Using that formula we would revisit the question in January, 2012 and June, 2012.
Put the question to the electorate. Put it right into the election cycle. I know that this is anathema to modern American Liberals but what’s wrong with that?
If nothing else the debt debate proves that Shakespeare was right. “…borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry”.
Did you hear the one about the old Black man and the old Jew?
The police see an old Black man and an old Jew wrestling in the street….
Kevin Smith
PS – I cannot lay my finger upon the word summon anywhere in the Constitution Do you think James Madison, wherever he might be, is smiling?
Michael Putney The Miami Herald
July 28, 2011
Michael Putney
The Miami Herald
RE: Burke/Fox? Webster/Hayne? McCarthy/Symington? – And now some comments on Debbie the Put Upon and the good Colonel
Mr. Putney,
“…and for any speech or debate in either House,
they shall not be questioned in any other place.”
The Constitution [of the United States
Article 1, Section 6, Sub Section 1
The obvious exception is that the same Constitution recognizes the right of anybody, even journalists, to say whatever they want about members of Congress. What normally would rate a 911 call and a police investigation about a violent felony is given a pass under the guise of political speech. Thus, when a guest on Bill Maher’s TV show says that he would “like to f**k Michelle Bachman angrily”, there is little recourse save for a sense of outrage that the “Trousered Apes” are in the ascendancy.
Would it be unfair of me to suggest that if someone had said the same thing about Debbie Debbie the dudgeon of modern American Liberals would have been unmatched? I can say with absolute metaphysical certitude – a phrase to which I shall return – that Hell hath no fury like that of a modern American Liberal ink stained wretch provided the victim fits the paradigmatic template. Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin need not apply.
January last Little Debbie told us that “bile and vitriol were tearing us apart”. You may recall that she blamed the Koch Brothers, the tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, the NRA, the “vast Right-Wing conspiracy, all the usual suspects, for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords. The gun man, a wing nut with snakes for brains, was like putty in their hands. Maybe you, a big time media mogul, could me a copy of her speech defending her colleague. I seem to have lost mine. My last 2 letters to her office have been returned marked as “not known – unable to forward”. I am sure she, as a big time public defender of rights, will be very mad when she finds out that I have been ostracized.
Are we to assume that a threat of rape is to be taken seriously only if the potential victim believes that the road to prosperity begins with a tax increase? If the potential victim does not swear allegiance to glory of 4th and 5th trimester abortions she’s on her own. She probably deserved it anyway, right?
Would I risk the wrath of the true believers, harridans all, if I were to suggest that Darling Debbie’s diatribe about the good Colonel “cracking under pressure” is, being charitable, ass backwards?
He is a man who knows you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
He is a man who has felt time compress and expand in a heartbeat.
He is a man who “has seen the elephant”.
The thought that a Medusa wanabee could cause him to “crack under pressure” is believable only if you believe that “shovel ready” meant “shovel ready”.
Debbie’s CV lists two degrees in Political Science. That would presuppose knowledge of the agora, the forum, Runnymede, the Glorious Revolution, Philadelphia in 1787, the tennis court in Paris, inter alia. Of these things her public statements suggest that she has none. It would be akin to her saying that she loves the cello but has never heard of Bach. Czarina Debbie, proclaimed for the splendor of her wardrobe, is dressed in tatters.
Among the Muses Clio is my favorite. History suggests that Colonel West should expect a visit from men with badges and guns.
On September 18, 2001 Debbie sent two men, “men with badges and guns”, to my house because of something I wrote.. Agent Thomas [good cop] and Agent Mineva [bad cop] wore badges and carried guns issued by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The scary “chilling effect” and the dreaded “slippery slope” meant nothing to Agent Mineva when he suggested that I stop writing to or about her. In fact, he “suggested” that I stop writing to all public officials. And this is from a vixen who supports manatee suffrage and would endorse Dr. Mengele because of his progressive views on abortion should he present himself to the voters of Broward County!
I mentioned metaphysics because this virago mentioned Rhetoric Since she knows neither I suggest yet again that she may not be as degreed as she says she is. When she says Rhetoric she means Sophistry.
She’s some broad. A cross between Lucrezia Borgia and Leona Helmsley. Alas, she lacks the charm of either.
Kevin Smith
Michael Putney
The Miami Herald
RE: Burke/Fox? Webster/Hayne? McCarthy/Symington? – And now some comments on Debbie the Put Upon and the good Colonel
Mr. Putney,
“…and for any speech or debate in either House,
they shall not be questioned in any other place.”
The Constitution [of the United States
Article 1, Section 6, Sub Section 1
The obvious exception is that the same Constitution recognizes the right of anybody, even journalists, to say whatever they want about members of Congress. What normally would rate a 911 call and a police investigation about a violent felony is given a pass under the guise of political speech. Thus, when a guest on Bill Maher’s TV show says that he would “like to f**k Michelle Bachman angrily”, there is little recourse save for a sense of outrage that the “Trousered Apes” are in the ascendancy.
Would it be unfair of me to suggest that if someone had said the same thing about Debbie Debbie the dudgeon of modern American Liberals would have been unmatched? I can say with absolute metaphysical certitude – a phrase to which I shall return – that Hell hath no fury like that of a modern American Liberal ink stained wretch provided the victim fits the paradigmatic template. Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin need not apply.
January last Little Debbie told us that “bile and vitriol were tearing us apart”. You may recall that she blamed the Koch Brothers, the tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, the NRA, the “vast Right-Wing conspiracy, all the usual suspects, for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords. The gun man, a wing nut with snakes for brains, was like putty in their hands. Maybe you, a big time media mogul, could me a copy of her speech defending her colleague. I seem to have lost mine. My last 2 letters to her office have been returned marked as “not known – unable to forward”. I am sure she, as a big time public defender of rights, will be very mad when she finds out that I have been ostracized.
Are we to assume that a threat of rape is to be taken seriously only if the potential victim believes that the road to prosperity begins with a tax increase? If the potential victim does not swear allegiance to glory of 4th and 5th trimester abortions she’s on her own. She probably deserved it anyway, right?
Would I risk the wrath of the true believers, harridans all, if I were to suggest that Darling Debbie’s diatribe about the good Colonel “cracking under pressure” is, being charitable, ass backwards?
He is a man who knows you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
He is a man who has felt time compress and expand in a heartbeat.
He is a man who “has seen the elephant”.
The thought that a Medusa wanabee could cause him to “crack under pressure” is believable only if you believe that “shovel ready” meant “shovel ready”.
Debbie’s CV lists two degrees in Political Science. That would presuppose knowledge of the agora, the forum, Runnymede, the Glorious Revolution, Philadelphia in 1787, the tennis court in Paris, inter alia. Of these things her public statements suggest that she has none. It would be akin to her saying that she loves the cello but has never heard of Bach. Czarina Debbie, proclaimed for the splendor of her wardrobe, is dressed in tatters.
Among the Muses Clio is my favorite. History suggests that Colonel West should expect a visit from men with badges and guns.
On September 18, 2001 Debbie sent two men, “men with badges and guns”, to my house because of something I wrote.. Agent Thomas [good cop] and Agent Mineva [bad cop] wore badges and carried guns issued by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The scary “chilling effect” and the dreaded “slippery slope” meant nothing to Agent Mineva when he suggested that I stop writing to or about her. In fact, he “suggested” that I stop writing to all public officials. And this is from a vixen who supports manatee suffrage and would endorse Dr. Mengele because of his progressive views on abortion should he present himself to the voters of Broward County!
I mentioned metaphysics because this virago mentioned Rhetoric Since she knows neither I suggest yet again that she may not be as degreed as she says she is. When she says Rhetoric she means Sophistry.
She’s some broad. A cross between Lucrezia Borgia and Leona Helmsley. Alas, she lacks the charm of either.
Kevin Smith
Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald
July 20, 2011
Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: OOOPS! Some comments on your “Drat the rotter” analysis in today’s Miami Herald of the damage done by K. Rupert Murdoch to your sacred profession.
Mr. Pitts,
Since I am not a journalist I rather think I am not bound by the code – ill defined, flexible, and gossamer like – that ties, binds, and defines the ink stained wretches who try to make us, if not better people, certainly more informed. I suppose if I were I would be required to disclose that in a different world in the last century K. Rupert Murdoch was a partner of mine. He owned 2.857% of Bowling Green Associates, a limited partnership of which I was General Partner. Therefore I won’t.
Why limit your dudgeon to those “fabricators and plagiarizers”, AKA journalists, who have besmirched your profession in recent years? Any listing of terrible rotten liars who have doubled as American journalists must include Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent of the New York Times.
I suppose the statute has run on the New York Times supporting slavery by calling for a negotiated settlement with the South and opposing Lincoln’s reelection. Also, calling him a “baboon” falls well within the accepted limits of political speech.
What Duranty did falls into a quite different category.
Duranty was a bought and paid for agent of the Soviet Union.
His laudatory reportage was used by the Roosevelt administration to buttress their drive to recognize the USSR. He ignored the murder by starvation of between 6,000,000 to 10,000,000 Kulaks by Stalin. He reported rather the opposite. It was almost as if teenage obesity had become a problem in Odessa. Hitler noticed that the West did nothing. He became a better record keeper.
The journalists you mention – Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Chris Cecil – committed egregious acts that fell into the category “malum prohibitum”. Duranty, much beloved by the early 1930s version of modern American Liberals, is the poster boy, the paradigmatic template, of “malum per se”.
Your examples either stole from the petty cash box or cribbed some answers. Duranty’s “fabrications” led to the bloodiest 15 years in all of History.
His monstrous crime is exponentially expanded by the refusal, the 8 decade long refusal, of the New York Times either to abjure him or his award.
You say that you are “unbearably credulous”.
I don’t know whether to say “You’re young. You’ll get over it” or “Aren’t you too old to be so surprised?”
In your “How could this have happened” homily you seem to have bent some of the rules yourself.
You write “News Corp has seen its value crumble”. Au contraire. The stock price is above what it was when the scandal came public. If you want to see an example of “crumbling value” I suggest you look at the stock price record of McClatchy. It has lost 90% of its value. It still may be overpriced. All it would have taken was a quick trip to a stock quote engine. Punch in the symbols NWSA and MNI. Read them. Isn’t that what reporters are supposed to do?
The other rule is the one that infuses journalists with an overabundance of a chronic illness known as “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. That, with narcissism morphing into solipsism, allows you to proclaim that the crimes have been committed against you.
They haven’t.
You speak of your profession as a “noble craft”. If it is it is because of the people in it, not because of what they do.
“Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part. There, all honor lies.”
Kevin Smith
Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: OOOPS! Some comments on your “Drat the rotter” analysis in today’s Miami Herald of the damage done by K. Rupert Murdoch to your sacred profession.
Mr. Pitts,
Since I am not a journalist I rather think I am not bound by the code – ill defined, flexible, and gossamer like – that ties, binds, and defines the ink stained wretches who try to make us, if not better people, certainly more informed. I suppose if I were I would be required to disclose that in a different world in the last century K. Rupert Murdoch was a partner of mine. He owned 2.857% of Bowling Green Associates, a limited partnership of which I was General Partner. Therefore I won’t.
Why limit your dudgeon to those “fabricators and plagiarizers”, AKA journalists, who have besmirched your profession in recent years? Any listing of terrible rotten liars who have doubled as American journalists must include Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent of the New York Times.
I suppose the statute has run on the New York Times supporting slavery by calling for a negotiated settlement with the South and opposing Lincoln’s reelection. Also, calling him a “baboon” falls well within the accepted limits of political speech.
What Duranty did falls into a quite different category.
Duranty was a bought and paid for agent of the Soviet Union.
His laudatory reportage was used by the Roosevelt administration to buttress their drive to recognize the USSR. He ignored the murder by starvation of between 6,000,000 to 10,000,000 Kulaks by Stalin. He reported rather the opposite. It was almost as if teenage obesity had become a problem in Odessa. Hitler noticed that the West did nothing. He became a better record keeper.
The journalists you mention – Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Chris Cecil – committed egregious acts that fell into the category “malum prohibitum”. Duranty, much beloved by the early 1930s version of modern American Liberals, is the poster boy, the paradigmatic template, of “malum per se”.
Your examples either stole from the petty cash box or cribbed some answers. Duranty’s “fabrications” led to the bloodiest 15 years in all of History.
His monstrous crime is exponentially expanded by the refusal, the 8 decade long refusal, of the New York Times either to abjure him or his award.
You say that you are “unbearably credulous”.
I don’t know whether to say “You’re young. You’ll get over it” or “Aren’t you too old to be so surprised?”
In your “How could this have happened” homily you seem to have bent some of the rules yourself.
You write “News Corp has seen its value crumble”. Au contraire. The stock price is above what it was when the scandal came public. If you want to see an example of “crumbling value” I suggest you look at the stock price record of McClatchy. It has lost 90% of its value. It still may be overpriced. All it would have taken was a quick trip to a stock quote engine. Punch in the symbols NWSA and MNI. Read them. Isn’t that what reporters are supposed to do?
The other rule is the one that infuses journalists with an overabundance of a chronic illness known as “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. That, with narcissism morphing into solipsism, allows you to proclaim that the crimes have been committed against you.
They haven’t.
You speak of your profession as a “noble craft”. If it is it is because of the people in it, not because of what they do.
“Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part. There, all honor lies.”
Kevin Smith
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
July 14, 2011
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
Democratic National Committee
430 Capitol Street, NE
Washington, DC 20003
RE: Tu quoque
Dearest Daring Darling Debbie,
If it’s OK for Jon Stewart or whatever his name is, was, or will be to say that Michelle Bachman’s husband is homosexual is it OK for me to ask if you and Lord Barack are doing the horizontal Mandingo Mambo?
Every time I see you skipping down the stairs of Air Force One with a big “Yes, I will, Yes” gleam in your eye being followed by the Big Boy pole vaulting down same stairs after you I and a lot more Americans think maybe you weren’t up in the wild blue yonder talking about ObamaCare Death Panels or Debt Ceiling deadlines.
When he says he wants to ”get” you in a foxhole do you think he wants a “short arm” inspection?
James Carville, another really great modern American Liberal sophist, once said of Paula Jones, “If you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park no telling what you’ll catch”.
I guess that all the stimuli don’t have to be “shovel ready”.
Since nothing I have said falls under the “bile” or “vitriol” that you warned us about in January I presume I am safe from your hob-nailed Federal storm troopers. As we approach the 10th anniversary of you dispatching the Florida Gezstapo after me for something I wrote – 10 years? Isn’t it amazing how time flies when you’re enjoying yourself? – who knows what surprises are in store?
May I suggest that if the debt ceiling deadline is missed that to lessen the disproportionate burden on women and minorities all members of Congress give up their paychecks?
Who needs a salary when your F-16 escort fires off some rockets to bring the Mile High Club to the new business section of the meeting?
Kevin Smith
PS – I hear that the Marine Band is working up some new arrangements of some golden oldies. “Come on Baby, Light my Fire” and “All We Are Saying is Give Piece a Chance” will be launched, so to speak, shortly.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
Democratic National Committee
430 Capitol Street, NE
Washington, DC 20003
RE: Tu quoque
Dearest Daring Darling Debbie,
If it’s OK for Jon Stewart or whatever his name is, was, or will be to say that Michelle Bachman’s husband is homosexual is it OK for me to ask if you and Lord Barack are doing the horizontal Mandingo Mambo?
Every time I see you skipping down the stairs of Air Force One with a big “Yes, I will, Yes” gleam in your eye being followed by the Big Boy pole vaulting down same stairs after you I and a lot more Americans think maybe you weren’t up in the wild blue yonder talking about ObamaCare Death Panels or Debt Ceiling deadlines.
When he says he wants to ”get” you in a foxhole do you think he wants a “short arm” inspection?
James Carville, another really great modern American Liberal sophist, once said of Paula Jones, “If you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park no telling what you’ll catch”.
I guess that all the stimuli don’t have to be “shovel ready”.
Since nothing I have said falls under the “bile” or “vitriol” that you warned us about in January I presume I am safe from your hob-nailed Federal storm troopers. As we approach the 10th anniversary of you dispatching the Florida Gezstapo after me for something I wrote – 10 years? Isn’t it amazing how time flies when you’re enjoying yourself? – who knows what surprises are in store?
May I suggest that if the debt ceiling deadline is missed that to lessen the disproportionate burden on women and minorities all members of Congress give up their paychecks?
Who needs a salary when your F-16 escort fires off some rockets to bring the Mile High Club to the new business section of the meeting?
Kevin Smith
PS – I hear that the Marine Band is working up some new arrangements of some golden oldies. “Come on Baby, Light my Fire” and “All We Are Saying is Give Piece a Chance” will be launched, so to speak, shortly.
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