reason – Page 2

#rsrh Tim Cavanaugh laughs at Obama. WHO HE ENDORSED.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers. On the one hand, this post is from September; on the other hand, I fully agree that it still applies. And on the gripping hand, Cavanaugh really should not have to keep having this explained to him…

I’m so pleased that the fellow from Reason.com is enjoying watching Barack Obama get kicked around:

Still, Obama’s fast fade is satisfying to see. After the sordid backstairs intrigue that brought us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act over the objections of most Americans; after the automotive bailout and Cash for Clunkers and the unbelievably negligent expenditure of $787 billion in failed stimulus; after the expansion of the war on drugs and the illegal war in Libya; after his stubborn refusal to change course after the Democrats got clobbered in the mid-term elections, this couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. It’s always good for America when a presidency runs out of steam, and Obama’s gift is to have had that happen after only three years.

I had a longer screed penned, but it all boiled down to “Being a functional adult, I didn’t care for Tim Cavanaugh’s reasons for voting for Obama in 2008: so I don’t particularly care for Cavanaugh’s laughter at a situation in 2011 that he himself helped to create.” So I deleted all of that. Shame, really: it included a bit about Libertarians, keepers, and coming in out of the rain…

Moe Lane

Reason’s DC Taxi Sharecropping video. #tcot #p2

My friend and colleague Caleb Howe already has this up at RedState, but stuff like this irritates the living life out of me:

Short version: (Democratic) DC Council members are putting together a taxi medallion law that will force out independent owner-operator cabbies in DC, in favor of connected cab companies… who will, of course, eagerly rent medallions (at a high markup) to the former independents. Hence, sharecropping: which, as anyone who has read history can tell you, is feudalism without the charm*.

(pause)

Ever get the feeling that the Democratic party leadership kind of misses that entire patron/client thing? – Because they keep coming up with stuff that would bring those days back. Old times, they are not forgotten, indeed.

Moe Lane

*Actually, no, feudalism does have its charms. If you happen to live in a system where its understood that loyalty and responsibility flow both up and down the chain.

#rsrh QotD, This Is Rhetorical, Right? edition.

Reason’s A. Barton Hinkle, addressing the odd way that Hard Left protests are categorized as mostly peaceful, even when they’re not – and how Right-protests are intimated as being prone to violence, even when they’re not.

None of us should be so foolish as to think violence and incendiary rhetoric are the exclusive province of one side only. They’re part of human nature, which everyone shares. So you have to wonder why press reports so insistently call one side “largely peaceful,” even when it’s not, while insinuating, with zero evidence, that the other side is about two seconds away from a killing spree.

Because the media likes having the Right as a boogieman, of course – which means that the Hard Left benefits in the short run. Which also means that the Right knows darn well that they have no margin for error when it comes to bad PR, and the Hard Left knows that it can get away with quite a lot. Which finally means that in the long run the Right can actually get things done, while the Hard Left is forever doomed to watching other people create new realities*, without the Hard Left’s input.

Moe Lane

Via Instapundit.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, This Is Rhetorical, Right? edition.

#rsrh QotD, Rhetorical Question? edition.

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh (H/T: Instapundit), on the entire ‘Let’s revisit the Seventies!’ malaise thing – and its solution:

…belated interest in the 1980s at least suggests Americans are interested in innovation rather than repetition as a way out of the current jam. The first time around, stagflation was defeated by a combination of tight monetary policy, deregulation, market competition, and supply-side tax policy. What will it take to get America moving this time?

Is this a trick question? Making sure that the current head of the executive branch – who is, after all, the guy who hired all of the congenital screw-ups that are currently trying to rev the economy while the car’s in neutral and the parking brake’s engaged – doesn’t get re-elected sounds like an obvious first step. It should have been obvious even to Reason.com, although I concede that from their point of view the choice between the GOP and the Democrats isn’t as clear as it is to me (and, apparently, the Dow). Trust me: I’m not happy between ‘bad’ and ‘worse’ – although these days it’s more of a choice between ‘They CAN be taught!’ and ‘Living definition of insanity’…

Moe Lane

Reason discusses Reality Non-Unicorn.

Mind you, Matt Welch reveals himself to be a rampaging optimist in his last sentence:

In the truer-believing regions of the progressive political world, the broad agenda of carbon price hikes, centralized health care, greater regulation, increased taxes, and government-mandated diversity in boardrooms are not just sound and moral policy. They are inherently popular, if only the usual obstacles to justice and reform can be neutralized or removed. Back when he was still considered a plausible stand-in for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (enough to win 2.7 percent of the presidential vote in 2000, much of it from progressives disgruntled at New Democrat policies), Ralph Nader insisted on a daily basis that his agenda was essentially “majoritarian.”

Such fantasies can serve as a salve when you live on the margins of the policy debate. And as long as you remain on the sidelines, the underlying proposals tend to go largely unchallenged. But now that progressive economic thought has its first real foothold in Washington since the 1970s, many long-marginalized ideas are being dusted off for real-world testing, from taxing stock transactions to “getting people out of their cars.” If we’re lucky, those debates will take place before the ideas are cemented into law. Better yet, maybe the growing unpopularity of central planning will dissuade the enthusiasts from inflicting their experiments on the rest of us in the first place.

Bolding mine, and no: that’s not going to happen. A scapegoat will be found. Remember: we are talking about a group that is currently claiming with a straight face that having a 59/41 split in the Senate, a 255/178 split in the House, and the Presidency is not sufficiently overwhelming to let them accomplish their goals. Losing the House will not act as a laudable shock to their system; losing the House and the Senate will not do it, either. Losing both Houses of Congress in 2010 and the Presidency in 2012 won’t do it. God could descend from Heaven in all His glory (with Thorstein Veblen and William Jennings Bryan in attendance) and carrying a signed note from Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling progressives that they are being muddle-headed – and it won’t dissuade them from their belief structure.

Fortunately, it’s not them that we have to convince. Just the centrist voters who are swiftly coming to understand that what they signed up for is not what they’re getting…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Although the Nobel thing has pretty much crested by now…

…this Reason article (“Praise Our Nobel Laureate, You Churlish Anti-American:” H/T: Instapundit) is still worth linking to, for two reasons. The first is this paragraph:

[NPR correspondent Don] Gonyea argues that because he is receiving the award for not being George W. Bush, and for changing American foreign policy by continuing super peaceful Predator drone attacks on the Taliban and pouring more troops into Afghanistan, this might “remind swing voters” that “he has done a lot for the United States around the world.” Well. Having Norwegian lefties reminding fence-sitting Americans that Obama makes Europeans swoon will probably be as effective as encouraging readers of The Guardian to write condescending letters to voters in Ohio, informing them that most people who pay a television license and subscribe to The New Statesman think George W. Bush is a mentally retarded Nazi.

The second reason is for revisiting the Guardian’s infamous Operation Clark County – which was easily one of the top five Left own-goals of the 2004 election. For those who weren’t paying attention then: the paper tried to micro-target a swing district in Ohio by having their readers send pro-Kerry letters to random voters in that county. And how did that go? Continue reading Although the Nobel thing has pretty much crested by now…

Quote of the Day, Matt Welch edition.

I’m really looking forward to the day when tech CEOs feel comfortable in saying “Damn RIGHT, I helped kill newspapers! I’m running a business here!” – Matt Welch.

He goes on to suggest a certain amount of shock therapy, which just happens to resemble high school bullying. Speaking as somebody who suffered from it once*, it does have a certain motivational power to it. It does also breed a certain desire for blood-soaked revenge, so caution seems… best.

Via R.S. McCain, who has an Unfortunate Picture.

Moe Lane

*Once. It turns out that diving off of a bleacher your freshman year to tackle somebody does wonders for ensuring a reasonably tranquil high school existence. My only regret is – well, my only two regrets are the lack of a video camera and that I was unable to convincingly froth at the mouth.

Well, I wasn’t looking for popularity. I was looking to do my time and be left the Hell alone.

Prison metaphor deliberate.

Crossposted to RedState.

Line of the day, Reason Hit & Run edition.

‘…the soft sophistry of low absolutism.’ – Matt Welch, in the process of eviscerating Ezra Klein for, among other things, holding up as a model the state-run newspaper industry of a minor European country with no meaningful defense budget and a GDP comparable to that of North Carolina’s. (Via Jim Treacher‘s Twitter.)

I’d comment further, except that I’m doing a quick check for the thens, so forths, after alls, insofars, and especially of courses that apparently cause Matt to get that funky Hulk-pupil effect going. I haven’t decided yet whether to banish them from my language, or save them up for the next Reason shindig…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

“The Brown Scare.” Catchy.

(Via Instapundit) One minor problem with it as a title, though. When it came to the “Red Scare” (which is what Jesse Walker is referencing in his article at Reason Hit & Run), hysteria aside there actually was an organized Soviet Communist effort to destabilize the West. I know that Jesse knows this, but it needs to be addressed, given that the point of his article is that there isn’t actually anything similar behind the Holocaust Museum attack. But that’s just a quibble:

Why did the DHS report come under such fire? It wasn’t because far-right cranks are incapable of committing crimes. It’s because the paper blew the threat of right-wing terror out of proportion, just as the Clinton administration did in the ’90s; because it treated “extremism” itself as a potential threat, while offering a definition of extremist so broad it seemed it include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power; and because it fretted about the danger of “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities.” (Note that neither the killing in Kansas last month nor the shooting in Washington yesterday was committed by an Iraq or Afghanistan vet.) The effect isn’t to make right-wing terror attacks less likely. It’s to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the right, just as the most substantial effect of a red scare was to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the left. The fact that communist spies really existed didn’t justify Joseph McCarthy’s antics, and the fact that armed extremists really exist doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security’s report.

Continue reading “The Brown Scare.” Catchy.

Take pity on the Tea Party-hating Left?

(Via Glenn Reynolds) Matt Kibbe at Reason is too full of the milk of human kindness when it comes to the Online Left’s reaction to the Tea Party phenomenon.

The remarkable ends to which lefty bloggers, Nobel Laureates, bit-part actresses, and even a senior White House official all went to discredit the massive grassroots revolt perfectly matches Elizabeth Kübler-Ross‘ famous work on how to deal with grief, death, and loss.

Take Janeane Garofalo. Many tea party attendees were understandably offended when she compared them to members of the Ku Klux Klan. “It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all,” she told Keith Olbermann. “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”

I know what you’re probably thinking about Ms. Garofalo, and it’s not kind. I thought it too. But look beneath the surface, and at least try to imagine her pain. As Kübler-Ross explains, first comes denial, then comes anger. Hope and Change, for Janeane, was dying. And she couldn’t believe it.

So we must pity them for their hysterical and panicked reaction to an actual, real populist movement? Pity them for their reflexive, unthinking retreat to emotional immaturity and crude sexual attacks? Pity them for their looming fear that their Great Lie – that they speak for the People – is well on its way to being exploded once and for all?

To quote Eric Flint (on an unrelated matter): Better still, let us not pity them at all.

Moe Lane

PS: I say this not to criticize Matt Kibbe, whose Freedomworks has been at the forefront of this issue. But it is a sad truth that the Online Left hates and fears us, and everything that we do; and until they abandon those ways themselves, there will be no peace.

PPS:

Hope to see you there.

Crossposted to RedState.