Posts Tagged ‘Rush Limbaugh’

The State Funeral Rush Limbaugh Deserves

Thursday, February 18th, 2021

A Man, a Legend, a Way of Life

I was a young veteran with a family. Times were tough in the economy, and troops were deployed and deploying to the vast desert of the Arabian peninsula. I was working a temporary contract job on Fort Hood, Texas, in support of the troops training to augment that deployment. Saddam Hussein had been delivered an ultimatum: Withdraw from Kuwait or be expelled forcibly. Everybody was monitoring the news, and in the field supporting the troops with spare gear and equipment in a rented truck, I tuned that truck’s radio(that had only the AM band) to find the latest information. There was this guy on the radio playing parody songs and talking politics, and one of those songs was a take on “Barbara Ann” the lyrics having been re-written into Bomb Iraq. It was entertaining and informative, and I’d never heard anything like it. Rush Limbaugh was leading the nation to support our troops, to buoy morale of the American people, and Democrats were busy telling America that the war, if it came, would result in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

The Democrats saw this as a revival of the discord of Vietnam. Rush Limbaugh saw it differently: He believed American might would steamroll Hussein and his forces. The media was, as ever, taking(or advancing) the Democrats’ narrative. The war began, and for a month, the reports of airstrikes rolled on, the reports of Iraqi fighter jets fleeing to Iran mounted, and when the ground war commenced, it was over almost before one could catch up with the news. It was a stunning victory, and in those days I learned something that was contrary to what the media propaganda had told me: America was great, and this guy on the radio, Rush Limbaugh, had been exactly right. For this alone, for his boundless confidence in the American servicemembers, Rush Limbaugh deserved a great honor. In all the years since, in his tireless support of America, he not only earned our respect, but has earned an honor the official government will never bestow. Rush Limbaugh deserves a state funeral on par with an American President, because in so many ways, and for so many people, in all the days spanning the period from the end of the Reagan Presidency to the inauguration of Donald Trump, Limbaugh had been conservative America’s presidency-in-exile, giving voice to a vast swath of America that was in a constant state of siege and disparagement by the Washington DC elite.

I had been raised in a union Democrat home, but through my years in the Army, I had begun to question the orthodoxy. Rush used humor as a means to entertain the audience while delivering serious information. As Rush would say in various forms over the years, the critical heart of humor is truth: There must be universal truth in a thing for it to be funny to the audience, or they won’t “get it.” In those days, Rush had various impromptu “updates” of various sorts and topics, with various songs and parodies as the introductory themes. This was delicious humor, and to listen to somebody on the radio skewering the sacred cows of the leftist mob was particularly entertaining. As a young guy at the time, it was all quite appealing to me. Rush was ever the defender of America, and when Japanese Parliament Speaker Yoshio Sakurauchi in January 1992 called America’s workers “lazy,” Rush had a single-sentence answer, posed as a question:

“We build a damn fine bomb, don’t we?”

The left shrieked. The political class in Washington DC gnashed its collective teeth. How dare Limbaugh say such a thing? Rush had intimated that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were the hallmark of American creativity and productiveness, but more broadly, that the “lazy” American worker Yoshio Sakurauchi had criticized had kicked Japan’s Imperial ass all over the Pacific after the cowardly sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. Rush was right again, and he defended America’s history and unique culture as the greatest in human history. Rush believed in American exceptionalism, and he was its unabashed advocate for all the years he was on the radio. This should have earned Rush a state funeral, because more than any other American, he believed in America and sung her praises, recognizing her warts, but knowing that America is great because at its heart, “the people who make the country work” are the salt of the Earth, and the people who go about making it great by the aggregation of their tens of millions of individual efforts.

In truth, we could go through most of the events of the last thirty years and show how Rush Limbaugh had been the voice of a nation, who offered a counter-argument to the mainstream media, and had served as a proxy for the President we would have elected had we been a more sane, rational country. The problem has always been the advancing elements of the hard left, and Rush was ever there to warn us about their latest tricks, traps, and subterfuges. He really was on the cutting edge of societal evolution, and he held up the nation when we needed a voice of calm and sanity.

He single-handedly saved the AM band on radio, He created the genre that is talk radio. Certainly, there had been talkshows on the radio before, but it was mostly a bunch of drivel or interview-based shows. Rush built it. Now we enjoy hundreds of talk-shows, the AM band is far bigger in terms of daily listenership, and the statistics are quite clear: Rush made our modern world, and before these combined-platform news and information shows began to proliferate, there was Rush 24/7. He set so many trends, and showed the way forward in an industry that had been dying.

Steve Bannon said that Rush had been a bridge from Reagan to Trump. This is self-evident, but there’s more to it than this. He understood something I had missed. I think many of us missed it on the conservative side. In 2016, many conservatives gravitated to the candidacy of Ted Cruz. I had become a bit annoyed by Rush, because it was clear to me that he favored Trump. Like many conservatives, I didn’t understand why. Cruz seemed to be a genuine conservative, and while Rush didn’t demean Cruz, Rush went as far as to say that he(Rush himself) had never really been a “movement conservative.” That seemed to fly in the face of what Rush had been telling us for the decades we’d been listening. To a degree, I felt a little betrayed.

In the end, I grudgingly voted for Trump like so many conservatives who might have preferred a more doctrinaire conservative candidate. It wasn’t until some time after Trump’s inauguration that I finally realized what Rush had meant, and what he’d been telling us. Ted Cruz, for all his conservative positions, is just another politician, just one more creature of Washington DC. Yes, he’s better than most, but in the main, he’s revolved around DC and the DC set for much of his career. He certainly has better instincts for the grass roots of the conservatives, but I think that owes to the fact that Cruz is amazingly smart. What Ted Cruz isn’t is what America needed more desperately: Somebody who could win.

What Rush saw in Trump now, belatedly, makes perfect sense once you recognize the real, central issue, which I’d missed at the time: There’s no point having a putatively conservative candidate who is part of the UniParty oligopoly that has failed us repeatedly since 1988. In Trump, Rush saw an outsider who loves his country, warts and all, and who may not be a doctrinaire conservative, but because he comes from a place of common sense, would govern functionally as a conservative. More importantly, Trump had nothing personal to gain from the Presidency, except perhaps satisfaction in saving and restoring America. For the entirety of his presidency, Donald Trump donated his entire presidential salary. All of it. His presidency should rightly be viewed as a colossal gift to the American people. If not for the media, we’d have known this.

Rush was right. Always two steps ahead of the media and the political intelligentsia, Rush intuitively understood his role in American politics and culture. Every day, millions hung on his words. Every day, millions tuned into his show, and he formed an anchor for most talk stations’ lineups, but also for America. Rush loved life. Rush brought a whole back-bench of under-studies to America. He elevated them. He elevated us all. When I look back over the thirty years since I first heard his voice, I realize just how much Rush gave to us all. Every day, year after year, he kept me abreast of most of the things that mattered. He told conservative America how to fight. He offered entertainment and wisdom. He gave valuable insights from a value base so fundamental to what America is, and has been. Whether I live another week or decade, I will miss Rush for all days of my life, like a friend or an older brother. “What would Rush say?” He made us all smarter, and he made America immeasurably greater. Of all the politicians who’ve enjoyed the honors of official Washington DC in passing, none of them, save perhaps Ronald Reagan, had meant as much to our country as Rush Limbaugh. If there were true justice, all flags across this nation would for a week be at half-mast, and the parades in honor of Rush would speak to the triumph of a great life and great man who lived and fought with all his love for a nation that had scarcely deserved him.

 

 

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Posted in Featured, MAGA, News, Talk Radio | Comments Closed

Is the Real Cultural War Against Men?

Saturday, December 1st, 2012

The Surrender of Adam

One story that garnered some media attention this week was a commentary written by Suzanne Venker at FoxNews.  In the article entitled War on Men, Venker contends that the real war in our culture has been waged against men.  Her conclusions are based on the observation that fewer and fewer men seem to have any interest in marriage, while interest among women is on the rise, but there exists a widespread lament about an alleged dearth of good men.  In the end, Venker concluded that women may bear the blame for this situation, but that conclusion garnered outrage and mockery from the typical leftist outlets.  At the same time, Limbaugh discussed the matter at length, but his conclusions were clearly different than those of the shrill left.  What’s the truth?  Is there a “war” on men?  Is it being waged by women who are unknowingly setting themselves up for failure?  I believe Venker is onto something, but I also think her article didn’t fully explore the ramifications, never mind all the conspirators.  If real, this war has had a silent collaborator or two, and I think rather than casting most of the blame on women, she should have identified all of the  culprits.

It is true to say that the character of women has fundamentally changed, and much of that was driven by the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s.  Women have entered the workplace in unprecedented numbers, and they are now a majority of employees across the nation.  Women now dominate  numerically the college campus, and in many respects, women have managed to displace men entirely.  According to Venker, much of this owes to anger with men, a feeling engendered and supported by our education establishment, much of which is dominated by women.  Writes Venker:

“In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.”

This may not be entirely true, but there is at least a nugget of truth in it.  There is a clear hostility toward men being engendered by the culture, and I think it is safe to say that any number of men might secretly agree with this sentiment, but while Venker seems to focus on the pedestal from which men were knocked, she spends a good deal less attention on the pedestal being abandoned by women. She finally arrives at a statement that some will find offensive, but nevertheless contains a good bit of information about one of the collaborators in this war:

“It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.”

Here is where Venker both reveals an effect, but slips and falls on the cause.  Spending a good deal of time researching relationships and the culture, Venker should have realized that there is some truth to that old admonishment that “men are only after one thing.”  In the main, and in the short-run thinking of men, that’s probably more often true than not, so that when women climbed down off their once-lofty pedestal in favor of the lower pedestal men had always occupied, it wasn’t true that they were kicking men off, but that men went willingly, at least initially.  The truth is that men hadn’t been kicked off the pedestal so much as bribed off of it. Of course, this is not all the story, but it provides some insight.  When Venker says “no responsibilities whatsoever,” she is mostly correct when viewed from the short-run perspective of men, however those responsibilities would need to be fulfilled by somebody, and therein we shall find the chief collaborator.

While men were busy stepping down from the lower pedestal to which feminism had enticed women, after spending some time on that lowly perch, women were finding it wasn’t all they were promised it would be.  Venker’s point has merit, but the question is: “Why would women so easily leap from the higher perch?”  The roots of this phenomenon may be fundamental to our nature, and has been understood about the nature of people since the beginning of time.  How close does this parallel what the Judeo-Christian ethos regards as the moment of the original sin?  Genesis 3:6 relates:

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

This would have made it seem as though Adam had been a bystander, but as 1 Timothy 2:14 records:

“Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

 

This line of thinking then begs the question: “Who played the role of the serpent?”  This is the identity of the other collaborator in the “War on men,”, and its name is government. If there is a war on men, there is no institution that has benefited more from the battle.  If it is to be alleged that while Eve was beguiled by the serpent, and thus caused herself to be cast out of the garden, so it is true that men had been complicit inasmuch as they partook also of the fruit, raising no objection, but knowing the fruit would have a bitter aftertaste. Just as the serpent knew to make his case to women, so too have statists. In our modern culture, the aftertaste of this temptation is to be measured in the wreckage of families, both those dissolved and those never fully constituted, and its evidence is seen in the fundamental breakdown of our society that continues at breakneck speed.  It is true that men have shirked responsibility, but the worst of it is not in their roles as fathers, so much as in their role as men altogether.   You see, men didn’t fight for their pedestal because they assumed that if they yielded it, they would partake of the fruit too, and like Adam, foolishly believed they would avoid the consequences.

Now we arrive in a world in which Venker describes women as angry and resentful of men, but I can imagine Eve being resentful of Adam too, as they were cast out of the garden.  “If you had known better, why didn’t you stop me?”  Adam might respond in coy pragmatism: “How was I to stop you?”  His unstated truth had been: “I didn’t want to…”

All of this demonstrates a strong cultural decline that evades description in modern platitudes.  Instead, what drives all of this is a pervasive immorality based on the notion that one can have anything one wants instantly, without consequence or responsibility, and without regard to the costs.  The provider of this temptation has been big government, and those who advance its cause.  Men sought the immediate benefits of the sexual revolution without concerning themselves with some murky consequence in some distant future.  That future has arrived, and if men now find they are bearing the cost, as Venker explains, women are bearing a terrible consequence:

“It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.

“So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.”

I disagree with Venker inasmuch as I believe the worst victims of this entire problem are children.  Men are largely absent from the lives of their children, and they’re being raised in a world that diminishes roughly half of them explicitly, but all of them in fact.  We are now more than two generations into this culture of instant gratification, and yet few seem to have been gratified in the long run.

Just as there was a rush by many on the left to screech at Venker, so I expect there will be those who take a similar stance toward me, who will accuse me of some misogyny or other “primitive thinking.”  Apart from the fact that I don’t care who doesn’t like it, the simple fact is that we can measure the tragedy that has arisen in an America transformed by post-modern feminism, and it’s ugly.  I don’t blame women even as much as Venker, because I believe men were tempted by short-run “benefits” just as surely as Adam stood by as Eve was beguiled.  Venker concludes that women can correct all of this, but I disagree:

“Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.”

“If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.”

Men cannot permit themselves to be complicit bystanders, who partake of the fruit but point back at women as the blame. Men have let their own standards slide, and until they raise them a good deal, and for longer than the short-run, it’s going to continue because women will have no cause to change.  Imagine a world in which men are the ones who say “no.” Preposterous? Perhaps, but if our society is to survive, never mind return to a past “golden age,” somebody is going to have to say it, and what Venker’s article reveals is that slowly, men have begun to shift in that direction. Today, they’re saying “no” to marriage in unprecedented numbers. Where Venker sees this as a result of a war on men, I see it as a result of their moral capitulation. Far too many men have adopted the shoddy notion encapsulated in that well-worn misogynist retort: “Why buy the cow if the milk is for free?”  The real question laid before men is now:  Is it so free as you once thought?  On that basis, women are right to ask if the contempt so many women now feel for men is so entirely undeserved as Venker’s piece suggests. If, as the Bible explains, men were to be the moral leaders, one might ask where they had been.  After all, it wasn’t Eve alone who fell into temptation. If the war on men began with the serpent’s whispers in the Garden of Eden, we ought to ask why Adam surrendered so easily.

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Posted in Culture, Ethics, Featured, Media, News, Politics, War | 2 Comments »

Will The Real “Prostitute” Stand Up?

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

The Right Proposition?

Listening to the Democrats, you would think Rush Limbaugh had committed a war crime.   His use of the terms “prostitute” and “slut” that he offered as possible descriptors of leftist agitator Sandra Fluke, and for which he subsequently apologized has been the rallying cry of every lefty feminist in sight, but Democrats generally as they seek to make as many miles on this as they can.  The problem is that contrary to the shrill refrain, it’s not having quite the effect the Democrats had hoped, and what seems to be happening is that there has been a backlash against sponsors who withdrew advertising from Limbaugh’s show.  This flies in the face of all we’ve been told about this episode by the mainstream media, but it also offers a little insight as to who the American people see as the real prostitute, as the double-standard in the media has become apparent with such leftists as Bill Maher getting a pass from certain politicians and political groups.

National Organization for Women(NOW) President Terry O’Neill was asked whether she thought the Obama SuperPAC that received a million dollars from the so-called ‘comic’ Bill Maher ought to return the money on the basis of what he has said about a number of prominent conservative women, including Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.  Her answer is only surprising to those who are naive about the motives of the NOW gang.  Watch the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCYAP3JCIEk]

Ms. O’Neill expresses a smarmy contempt for the question, noting that she wants Barack Obama elected, thus rejecting the idea that the money ought to be returned to Maher.  I would never make the mistake of telling you that O’Neill is a “prostitute” or a “slut,” but it is interesting to see how her support of women is conditional and quite obviously for sale.

This brings me to the real object of my question.  You see, while President Obama doesn’t technically control the SuperPAC that accepted Bill Maher’s million dollars, he does exercise at least theoretical moral authority.  He could urge the money be returned if he was as serious as his invoking of his own daughters in a discussion of the Fluke-Limbaugh situation implies, but that’s if you believe his feigned moral outrage.  Here you have the pinnacle of hypocrisy.  Obama waxes philosophically on the shame of what Rush Limbaugh said prospectively of Sandra Fluke, and yet he permits a SuperPAC operating in his name to accept money from a misogynist like Bill Maher?

The fact is that the things Bill Maher has said about conservative women are far worse than Rush Limbaugh’s proposed words, and honestly, if we can see media castigate Rick Santorum because Foster Freiss made his remark about “an aspirin between the knees,”  surely this President, who poses as the savior of women, and who has the President of NOW selling out the organization’s stated principles on his behalf could stand firm against misogyny.

What this demonstrates is that Barack Obama is a political prostitute, and that his principles and haughty talk about misogyny all goes out the window for a measly million dollars.  He’s just announced his price, if you ask me, and he might as well stand on a DC street corner asking for the support of lobbyists in much the same way.  Unfortunately for us, he has no need of a street corner because he has turned the Oval Office into the political brothel-of-state, where he routinely sells out all of his lofty notions about the “interests of the people” and “change” along with whatever else he’s selling on any given day.  The lobbyists had no problem finding him when it came time for the negotiations on the health-care bill, or the financial reform act.  They merely made deposits at the bank of the DNC and his favorite campaign SuperPacs, and for chump-change, he willingly put out.

Rush Limbaugh needn’t have proposed that Sandra Fluke might be a “prostitute” or a “slut.”  He really only needed to point out that the nation’s head madame is a he, and that he plies his trade at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Those who were confused shouldn’t be now, because Barack Obama has made it clear: He’s for sale, and the bidding starts at one million dollars, setting the price at which he will overlook anything, no matter how vile.

 

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Campaigns, Media, News, Politics, Video | 6 Comments »

Gloria Allred Wants to Prosecute Rush Limbaugh

Saturday, March 10th, 2012
long evening dress

Allred on the Warpath Again

Gloria Allred isn’t going to be satisfied until Rush Limbaugh is drawn and quartered in the public square.  The celebrity attorney who helped bring Herman Cain’s campaign to a screeching halt now has her sights set on the radio talk-show host over the words he used with regard to Sandra Fluke.  I’m still waiting for her to produce the sworn statements she promised back during the Herman Cain smears, and while she takes up this new war, I am still curious what happened to the last one.  It seems to have fizzled, and like so many things in which Allred is involved, there is a big press roll-out and maybe a further press conference or two, but we never seem to learn anything substantial about the claims or the claimants she brings to the press. In this case, somebody has tipped her to an ancient Florida statute providing for the prosecution of those who make statements about women under certain criteria.  She is touting this old law as a weapon she will try to use against Limbaugh.

The Florida statute in question is a law on defamation and it reaches back to an earlier era:

836.04 Defamation.—Whoever speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083. History.—s. 1, ch. 3460, 1883; RS 2419; GS 3260; RGS 5091; CGL 7193; s. 990, ch. 71-136.

Right from the start, assuming this law is applicable in this case, the standard set forth requires falsehood and malice.  This would be a difficult standard, because it would require that the prosecution demonstrate that what Limbaugh had said was false, and that he did so with malice.  Just as when Steny Hoyer(D-MD,) suggested that Fluke ought to sue Limbaugh, Levin noted the fact that it would require discovery that would likely be difficult for her to endure.

As a criminal matter, the state would be in the unenviable position of having to demonstrate Ms. Fluke had been chaste in order to show the falsehood.  A “chastity” is a pretty severe standard when measuring the meaning of that word.  The word has but one meaning, so it would be difficult to rule in any way but one if in fact Ms. Fluke isn’t chaste.  This could have the added effect of demonstrating publicly that Limbaugh had been right all along, and the court would risk possibly being forced to rule or observe that Ms. Fluke isn’t chaste.  When you add in the difficulty in showing Malice on Limbaugh’s part, this could prove more problematic for Fluke than for Limbaugh.

I suspect that like in so many other cases, Allred may not be worried about the effects on her intended client, but merely her ability to make a media splash.  It wouldn’t be the first time Allred caused a client more harm than good.

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Posted in Crime, Featured, Idiot Lawyers, Media, News, Politics | 4 Comments »

Carbonite Pays a Price for Dropping Limbaugh

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

(Click to enlarge)

The Daily Caller is reporting that Carbonite has taken a significant stock price hit since CEO David Friend came out on Saturday to dump advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s show.  Call it bad luck, or call it “El Rushbo’s Revenge,” but whatever you call it, it’s a well-deserved smack-down for cowardice by a sponsor.  Of course, as it has turned out, Sandra Fluke is a hardcore leftist activist, and more and more, this is looking like a plot into which Limbaugh stepped, perhaps as the unintended target.

From the Daily Caller article:

However, it hasn’t done much to contribute to his company’s stock price. Since the market opened on Monday through its close today, Carbonite stock (NASDAQ:CARB) has plummeted nearly 12 percent, outpacing the drop of the NASDAQ index in that same time period by nine-and-a-half points. It was also one of the biggest decliners on the NASDAQ on Tuesday.

Some will consider this justice, but frankly, I think it should serve as a lesson.  Even publicly traded companies ought to be careful about dumping ads from the most popular talk-show in the land, and certainly not in the angry tone that David Friend used in his statement Saturday.  I think that the fact that he did so while acknowledging that Limbaugh had already apologized probably explains it.  Nobody likes to see that sort of ridiculous, overbearing reaction. It gives the impression of putting on a show.

 

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Posted in Business, Media, News, Politics | 6 Comments »

Sandra Fluke’s Curious Activism and More Curious Recommendations

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Dumb Luck for the Left?

Isn’t it odd that the Democrats have been pushing this contraception theme as the means by which to derail the heated issue over the Obamacare mandate on religious institutions as a breech of their religious freedoms, and just as Rush Limbaugh stepped into the well-laid snare, the trap was sprung with a ferocity that no talk-show host should warrant, who should rise to the top but Sandra Fluke, 30 year-old Georgetown University law-school student and radical feminist advocate to catch Limbaugh off guard.  I think Rush is a target of opportunity, because I believe they were hoping Rick Santorum would get caught up in all of this.  Having failed to ensnare any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, but having managed to catch the big radio voice they would most like to destroy, they seized upon the opportunity to attack Limbaugh for his imprudent use of the words “prostitute” and “slut.”

Fluke isn’t the innocent she’s been portrayed as having been.  She’s been presented as a bit of a patsy, and a well-meaning young woman, and all of that, but the truth is that Fluke has been a radical activist for years.  In fact, her entire rationale for enrolling at Georgetown University was to try to force this fight.  She’s not some poor, helpless student who was set upon by big mean Rush Limbaugh.  By all reports, she’s a coldly-calculating left-wing conniver who is actively pursuing the goal to compel colleges and other religious institutions to cover not only contraception, but also gender reassignment surgery for transgendered people.  That’s right, Ms. Fluke is hardly some wide-eyed victim of the evil right-wing and other alleged woman-haters. Here’s an excerpt of the article at TheCollegePolitico:

The title of the article, which can be purchased in full here, is Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review. I have posted a transcript of the section I will be quoting from here. In a subsection of the article entitled “Employment Discrimination in Provision of Employment Benefits” starting on page 635 of the review Sandra Fluke and her co-editor describe two forms of discrimination in benefits they believe LGBTQ individuals face in the work place:

Discrimination typically takes two forms: first, direct discrimination limiting access to benefits specifically needed by LGBTQ persons, and secondly, the unavailability of family-related benefits to LGBTQ families.

Their “prime example” of the first form of discrimination? Not covering sex change operations:

A prime example of direct discrimination is denying insurance coverage for medical needs of transgender persons physically transitioning to the other gender.

This so called “prime example” of discrimination is expounded on in a subsection titled “Gender Reassignment Medical Services” starting on page 636:

Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.

To be clear, the argument here is that employers are engaging in discrimination against their employees who want them to pay for their sex changes because their “heterosexist” health insurance policies don’t believe sex changes are medically necessary.

Additionally Sandra Fluke and her co-editor have an answer for why exactly these “heterosexist” insurance policies, and the courts that side with them, deem sex changes as medically unnecessary:

In Mario v. P & C Food Markets, Inc., an employee who was denied such coverage brought claims under the federal Employee Retirement Income Security (ERISA) and Title VII. The court rejected the ERISA claim, finding the plaintiff’s mastectomy and hormone therapy were not medically necessary. The court’s ruling was based upon controversy within the medical community regarding that treatment plan. Much of that controversy has been linked to ignorance and bias against transgender persons, and the American Medical Association has declared the lack of coverage to be discrimination.

You see, all opposition to the determination that sex changes are medically necessary, and therefor must be covered by private employer provided health insurance, is based on “ignorance and bias against transgender persons”.

This gets more absurd, as she appeared Monday on The View with the gaggle of gawking leftists(minus Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who is probably moderately conservative at best.)  Fluke rejected Limbaugh’s apology, as read in part by Barbara Walters, and when asked about Rush Limbaugh, launched into another thing and made a website recommendation.  Guess which one?  (It’s at around the 1:03 mark in the video)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIg18I1bAD0]

Barbara Walters went out of her way to mention that this isn’t about tax-payer money, and this is somewhat true, but in fact, it’s much worse than this: It’s about compelling religious institutions to pay for coverages that are contrary to their deeply held religious views.  As bad as it would be if Fluke were merely demanding public money, what she’s actually demanding is that the First Amendment rights of religious institutions be over-ridden by her demands.  She’s worse than a welfare moocher for contraception:  She’s a full-on tyrant who doesn’t give a damn for the rights of people and institutions that will be compelled at gunpoint to provide this coverage.  In my view, this doesn’t make the case for Fluke, but merely damns her all the more.

Her recommendation of Media Matters as a source for information is troubling, because what this reveals is a hardcore radical-left activist and advocate bent on an agenda.  The longer this goes on, the more thoroughly I’ve become convinced that it’s a lefty set-up al the way, and that unsuspecting Rush Limbaugh ran headlong into it merely means this was engineered at the highest levels.  As it turns out of course, the testimony happened with Minority Leader(and former Speaker) Nancy Pelosi presiding, while Obama’s administration was pushing this desperately as they were beginning to lose ground in the polls due to the controversy over their violation of the protections of the free exercise of religion.

Now comes word that a push is ongoing in the Senate to get Rush Limbaugh off the radio altogether, and the White House has posted a link to a petition to get Limbaugh off of Armed Forces Radio, while political hack Steny Hoyer(D-MD,) runs around talking up the possibility of Fluke filing suit against Limbaugh.  I doubt such a suit would ever occur, because as Mark Levin pointed out on his show Monday evening, this would open up the matter of discovery, and soon we would find out all the details of Ms. Fluke’s personal life. I can imagine attorneys asking things like:

“Have you ever participated in the events known widely as “slut-walks?”

Of course, nobody knows the full details about Ms. Fluke’s life, never mind whether she’s ever participated in such an event, but that is the way she and the White House would probably like to keep it, because it would cause great harm to this little storm they have swirling around Rush Limbaugh, and it’s for this reason that I doubt she’d file suit.  By testifying before Congress, she’s entered into the realm of public persons by her own volition.  The standards there would be much higher, and she’d be hard-pressed to show that Limbaugh’s questions, little more than opinions, were anything more than any of the millions of other opinions issuing forth about public personae each and every day in media. In short, she’d probably lose, and for her trouble, would be placed into the position of having to air her own laundry, however clean or dirty it might be.

One thing is certain about Fluke: She’s not the poor little school-girl the media has made her out to be, and while Limbaugh probably shouldn’t have used the words he did, it’s clear to me that the left is using this to gin up another false narrative, and more, they’re continuing to push the notion that some alleged entitlement to contraception trumps religious liberties.  It’s a lie, it’s a sham, and if they expect me to forget this, they’re wrong.  Oh, and don’t expect me to abandon Limbaugh to the leftist hyenas. I’m not like those weak-kneed Republicans last seen running for the tall grass.  Not a chance.

Here’s some more interesting background on Fluke.

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Idiot Lawyers, Idiotic Politicians, Leftist Cabal, Media, News, Politics, Video | 21 Comments »

I Need a Back-Up Solution But I Know Who I Won’t Be Using

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

Still Taking a Beating

This is simply pathetic.  Carbonite has announced it is pulling all of its advertising from Rush Limbaugh, even though he has already apologized.  After “re-evaluating” over the last 24-48 hours, Carbonite decided it has had enough. Well, so have I.  I don’t care what they sell, or how good it may be.  I will never purchase or use their products and services, but I have held that opinion for some time based on some product  research.  I read this statement, and even if it wasn’t written in the tone of a simpering whiner, I would still be left with the impression that Carbonite CEO David Friend is gutless, based on his decision:

“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

Mr. Friend has two daughter around thirty? I’ll accept that.  Did either of them testify before Congress recently demanding that somebody else bear the exorbitant costs of their contraception expenses, thereby airing the details of their intimate lives? No?  Then what do Mr. Friend’s daughters have to do with any of this?

“Courageous?”  What is courageous here?  She testified before Congress. She didn’t scale any fortifications or charge any machine-gun nests.  I grant that speaking before large audiences can be daunting, but this young woman is a professional activist. I don’t know by what measure “courage” was required.  “Well-intended?”  In what respect was this well-intended?  I don’t think there were any good intentions in any of this Pelosi-prompted circus.  I think it was all a put-up job aimed at creating the kind of thing that has happened in its wake.  I don’t know how well-intended a thirty-year-old law-school student is who is advancing an agenda that attacks the religious liberties of all Americans.  Is that “well-intended?” I don’t think so.

“Contribute to a more civilized public discourse?”  More civilized than what, exactly?  Limbaugh didn’t run up to Georgetown and spit in this woman’s eye, or beat her up, or do her any physical harm.  He used two pejoratives to describe her based on her own testimony.  What is more uncivilized than going to government to ask them to aim their guns at religious institutions and coercing them to pay for one’s contraception?  Uncivilized?  This is the spew of a servile dolt.

Mr. Friend and his products and services now go on my permanent black list.  If I need a server or a workstation backed-up, I will use a stone tablet and chisel before I resort to Carbonite.  This is an obscene statement, and it deserves the scorn of any thinking person who can look at it in details rather than in the vague impression of indignation it seeks to create.  Who does this guy think his customer base is?  Fortunately, there are viable alternatives to Carbonite.  Mozy comes to mind.

I think this guy is about to learn that loyalty goes with the talk-show host, and not an easily substituted product or service. I understand that Rush apologized, but frankly, Friend’s piling-on with this statement looks like an attempt at ingratiating himself with a segment of the market.  If I dropped every friend who ever said one annoying or “inappropriate” word, I’d be in short supply of friends.  I know Friend has a business to run, and businesses try to stay well away from any undue burdens of controversy, but to compare his own daughters to Ms. Fluke in this context seems a little overwrought. I myself have a daughter somewhat younger than Ms. Fluke and I doubt he would care to hear her opinion on the matter.

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Posted in Media, News, Politics | 9 Comments »

Two Sponsors Ditch Limbaugh – I Will Not Buy Cowards’ Products

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

Does He Need to Worry?

In an irony one could scarcely script, two companies responding to complaints from Twitter users decided to pull commercial advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show due to his comments on Wednesday regarding Sandra Fluke.  Sleep Train Mattress Centers and Sleep Number Beds have pulled their support.  Perfect.  While Sandra Fluke demands that government be inserted into the bedroom, the bedroom is being pulled from under Rush Limbaugh.  At the same time, Politico is also reporting that Pro Flowers is reconsidering its ad campaign on Limbaugh’s show.  All we need now is the wine and dine advertisers, and it will be a complete set.  I think Rush ought to begin running his old parody ad for Bungee Condoms in their place in the rotation.

What all of this reveals is what happens when you’re stuck with what Tammy Bruce calls the “Gestapos” who will apply commercial pressure to silence a radio personality.  Well, in the case of these sponsors, at least the two bed manufacturers, they’re dead to me.  The irony is that I am shopping for a bed, so now I know with whom I won’t be doing business.  All of this is nonsense, because what Limbaugh said is only outrageous before you consider that Sandra Fluke is an activist for radical feminist objectives, and that those same feminists have been trying to reduce the impact of the word “slut” to carry a less negative connotation by organizing what they call “slut-walks.”

Still, these advertisers really annoy me.  I would never have heard of their products without Limbaugh, and now I’ll be obliged to buy my next bed from somebody else.  I’m actually glad they chickened-out now, because later, I might have been sleeping on one of their products and be forced to  dump it at substantial loss.   Nevertheless, it is not advertisers who are the biggest wimps in all of this, as Dana Loesch at BigJournalism reveals.   A number of high-ranking or well-known Republicans are running from this story, and it demonstrates what cowards they really are.  These people who so easily tuck tails and run are not going to win anything in 2012, and the fact that this includes Speaker John Boehner simply proves the point.

Kudos to Dana Loesch for carrying on despite the pain!

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Posted in Activism, audio, Media, News, Politics | 26 Comments »

Sandra Fluke’s Irrational Demand

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Limbaugh to Fluke: Have Some Aspirin

Sandra Fluke is a law student at Georgetown University.  Fluke believes it is the duty of insurers to pay for her contraception.  Of course, what she really means is that she’s another disgusting little socialist who wants others to carry her burdens.   She says she testified in order to shine light on the plight of women who aren’t getting contraceptive coverage through the university.  I have a problem with the mandates under Obamacare, and the one that will require religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage through health-care insurance policies they provide to employees is at the center of this issue.  On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh commented on Fluke’s testimony, asking what kind of woman demands payment for her to have sex.

While Rush was making a play on words, it’s still the fact that at the root of this, there is an undeniable truth.  First, let’s hear from Rush Limbaugh on Thursday:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Mm4CbeNtU]

Yes, Rush is his usual, combative self, but let’s examine the thought behind the sentiment: Rush is saying that Ms. Fluke ought to pay for her own contraception, because otherwise, what she is doing is to make her sex life, and the sex lives of her fellow students a matter for public review.  You can’t demand the public subsidize your “reproductive health” and not expect some sort of public denunciations or judgments.  You simply can’t.  The complaint that Fluke expresses is that this isn’t fair, because male students don’t face a similar burden.  Don’t they?  If they don’t, whose fault is that?  I do not understand the illogical claim of some, and Fluke is one of them, that they simultaneously don’t want government in their bedrooms, but do want them to fully furnish it for them.  I don’t want to hear about the relatively small number of women who actually need contraceptive pills for some therapeutic purpose, because just like in the abortion argument, and the questions regarding exceptions for rape and incest, the exception must not be the aim of the rule.

The answer here is clear:  Keep your contraception private, and it will remain private.  Contraception for that purpose is not healthcare.  It’s contraception.  I don’t care about Fluke’s sexual habits or those of other Georgetown students, but when you sign up to attend a religiously-founded institution, you shouldn’t expect coverage that conflicts with that institution’s firmly-held beliefs.  Instead, Fluke is demanding that Obamacare be enforced on Catholic universities.  I come back to the warning  of Cardinal George, of which I wrote yesterday:  If I were the Catholic church, and this law isn’t overturned, I would shut down every hospital, school, and university under that umbrella and take a bulldozer to them, or I would continue as before and refuse to pay the fines.  Either way, I would not surrender or wilt before the government on this issue.

In short, if it were up to me, Fluke would be looking for a new venue to finish her studies.  The moment people believe that they possess a right to impose costs on others, or force them to suspend their adherence to their own beliefs, a line has been crossed.  Fluke has no right to an education, and no right to contraception at the expense of others, either in cash, or in terms of quashing their beliefs.  This is one more reason why the law known as Obamacare must be overturned.  Limbaugh offered to buy her all the aspirin she needs, but I think we should let nature run its course.  She has no right to expect nature to be suspended on her behalf, and yet that is the actual aim of her testimony.  In the end, what Fluke demands is a government gun aimed at religious institutions to compel them to provide the coverage she wants.  That’s socialism, and in the end, this is really the heart of the matter.

 

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Posted in Conservatism, Education, Healthcare, Law, Media, News, Politics | 5 Comments »

Limbaugh: Establishment Republicans Scared to Death

Monday, February 20th, 2012

Cultural Conservative v. Moderate

Romney is looking weak in Michigan.  Rush Limbaugh opened his show on President’s Day with a monologue on the GOP panic over the rise of Rick Santorum and the diminution of the “inevitable nominee” Mitt Romney.  What Limbaugh has identified is a trend we’ve been watching for some time, whereby the GOP insiders are doing everything they can to put Romney over the top.  It’s true to say that Romney is in trouble, but he’s clawing his way back a bit in Michigan, as the media continues to hammer on Rick Santorum, suggesting that he’s too conservative.  It’s not clear that Rick Santorum is really so conservative as they pretend, and it shows the problem the establishment has with its man Mitt:  While they try to convince us that Romney is conservative, they detest cultural conservatism.

The juxtaposition is laughable.  On the one hand, the GOP establishment tells us Mitt is a conservative, Romney himself saying he was “severely conservative,” but the conservative wing of the Republican electorate knows better, simply by examining his record. Romneycare is merely the most egregious example of Romney’s flat-out liberalism, but it’s far from the only one. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum is too conservative on social issues, although the fact that he is really doesn’t make him a well-rounded conservative because he stood with a number of big-spending plans, like the Medicare prescription drug program implemented by President Bush.  If nothing else, what this should provide to you is a template for which leg of the conservative stool the GOP establishment would like to be sawed-off.

Abortion? They don’t want to talk about it.  Matters of faith or conscience?  They’re simply not interested.  Questions of moral concern?  They won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.  They run shrieking into the night rather than confront such issues, and the reason is simple:  When it comes to these issues, important to a vast swath of the GOP electorate, they only pay lip-service but never deliver.  These are the people who know they cannot nominate a pro-abortion candidate, so they trot out candidates who will claim they are personally pro-life, while their voting or governing history indicates something different.  I will never forget how at the end of their respective presidencies, the two former Bush first ladies each in their turn came out to speak their minds on abortion, parting company from their respective husbands.

This is significant, because what it should demonstrate to you is how these RINOs are culturally distinct from the conservatives whose votes they know they need.  This is particularly true with respect to Christian conservatives who live out their professed faith as best they can.  The GOP establishment considers them rubes and bumpkins, and pawns in their struggle to maintain power.  This is the deadly secret of the GOP establishment, and it’s the basis of their secret fear: They hope you will not notice that theirs is a philosophy that avoids the discussion of cultural conservatism because they see it as divisive.  They’re right:  These issues are divisive, but what they divide is the establishment from the greater body politic that is conservatism.

This is the meaning of their view of a “big tent.”  They think the big tent should take anybody, and accommodate its rules, traditions, and values to any who wish to join in, but the problem with that is the mush that is made of those things by this procedure.  More, as cultural conservatives begin to realize that their views are no longer respected, they begin to slip away out under the tent flaps, unwilling to be associated with the amoral circus to which they are then witnesses.  As Rush Limbaugh said today, to the establishment Republicans, a guy like Santorum, a devout Catholic, is some kind of “three-eyed monster.” This is undeniably true, and it’s why you shouldn’t be surprised, if you’re a conservative Christian, that they view you in much the same way.

To them, your faith and your adherence to it are evidence that you’re faulty, and that you should be ignored, but they’ll pander to you just enough that you’ll vote for them if it comes to it.  This is what they’re hoping is true with Mitt Romney, and that in the end, they can scare you away from real conservatives.  To them, religious convictions should be abandoned at the exits of your church.  They want Christian votes, but that’s as close to them as they’re willing to stand. Their push for Romney is more evidence of this bias, because Romney’s record on cultural issues has been flaky at best.  If Romney fails to close the deal in Michigan, they may look to somebody altogether new, who has a somewhat more “acceptable” view to Christian conservatives.  If so, it’s likely to be another Bush family friend, if not Jeb Bush himself, as they hope to freeze out cultural conservatives.  Their approach is basically in opposition to mainstream conservatism, the goal of which is and ought to be to get the most conservative nominee possible who can win.  The GOP establishment wishes to get the least conservative nominee they can make to pass muster with Christian and cultural conservatives in the GOP, because they wrongly surmise that this is the path to electoral victory in the general election.  They’re wrong.

 

 

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Posted in Conservatism, Culture, Election 2012, GOP Candidates, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, Religion, Rick Santorum | 7 Comments »

Drudge Distort: What Will Be the Reaction to the War on Gingrich?

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

The State of Dis-Union

Matt Drudge is making a lot of hay over Gingrich’s alleged anti-Reagan speech, that we know know wasn’t, and he’s clearly sympathetic to Mitt Romney, but why is it that conservatives are reacting badly against this?  The answer is simpler than most will admit, and it comes down to just two things.  First, the conservative base and Tea Party folk in the GOP are beginning to doubt media altogether, and they’re seeing through the obvious anti-Gingrich bias, but more importantly, I believe it comes down to this more than any other thing:  They are sick to death of the media and the GOP establishment selecting the Republican nominee.  I think this explains everything you need to know why conservatives and Tea Party folk look at these exaggerated, out-of-context headlines and stories, and just say “No.”

If you wish to know how dishonest Matt Drudge has been on this story, up in the top-left of his site all morning Thursday were three stories agitating against Gingrich’s alleged anti-Reagan sentiments, but the third of these, from 1988, has already been debunked. Why didn’t Drudge take this down?  No, he waited until it was thoroughly debunked, but the damage of the lie was done. He left it up in exactly the same way he allowed his anti-Newt stories of last Wednesday and Thursday to remain up most of the day, despite the fact that it had been revealed most were over-hyped re-hashings of old stories.  Drudge has relocated this a bit, but this is how it appeared just more than an hour ago:

NEWT FLASHBACK 1983: REAGAN RESPONSIBLE FOR NATIONAL ‘DECAY’…
NEWT 1986: ‘The Reagan administration has failed, is failing…
NEWT 1988: ‘If Bush runs as continuation of Reaganism he will lose’…
VIDEO…

How do I know this is dishonest?  The link to the video is a Youtube link to a highly edited clip, taken out of context, and therefore made to look as though Gingrich was anti-Reagan.  When you watch the whole video selection, in its complete context, the lie becomes obvious.  Drudge is doing this purposefully, and if he will lie to you in this instance, there is no doubt he will lie to you in others.  I don’t really care what his motive is, or why he’s doing it.  This moved his recent activities from “suspicious” in my view, to reprehensible.  Thanks to Dan Riehl for exposing the truth, and providing a link to the original, full-length C-SPAN video, with the interesting portion beginning around 2:30.

Limbaugh talked about this extensively on his show today, saying the following, among other things:

“It was everything you wish was happening today, is all I can tell you. It was everything you wish the entire Republican Party was doing today. It was led by Newt Gingrich, and what was he doing? He was defending Reagan. Now, all of this stuff that hit Drudge and everywhere else last night about Newt telling everybody the country goes to hell if they continue Reaganism and that Newt insulted Reagan and that the Reagan administration failed and Iran-Contra… I never heard any of that. I started doing this particular program in Sacramento in 1984, and I was just as immersed in national politics then as I am now, and I could honestly tell you this.”

There’s a reason Rush can’t remember it the way Drudge is broadcasting it:  It didn’t happen the way Drudge’s site would lead you to believe, and this is simply a desperately disgusting attempt to do to Gingrich what has been done to others with the distortions.  A year ago, if you had told me Drudge did things this way, I would have scoffed at it, but now…

I’m clearly coming to see Drudge in a different light.

I realize that many people have many reasons to be unhappy with Gingrich on one issue or another, and I’m inclined to be annoyed with him too, but this has gone too far, in my view, and I’m not inclined to suffer it any longer.  If Drudge is going to be a media participant in this smear-fest, let him, but I won’t be adding much to his page-view statistics any longer.

The simple truth is that American conservatives and Tea Party folk are tired of the media and the GOP establishment leading them around by the noses.  It’s not that people are so infatuated with Gingrich so much as it is that they are disgusted by these tactics, and they’re simply disenchanted with the GOP establishment controlling the outcome of our primary system.

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Posted in Conservatism, Election 2012, Media, Mitt Romney, News, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Tea Party | 15 Comments »

A Flawed Understanding of Capitalism

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Who's The Real Capitalist?

In listening to the argument between those who say Romney’s actions at Bain represent the so-called “excesses” of capitalism, and those who argue Romney had been nothing but a capitalist, and that there’s nothing wrong here, I find both sides of the dispute to be guilty of playing on bad definitions, poorly informed public sentiments, and worst of all, pure political hyperbole that may advance this candidate or that one for a short period of time, but will not accrue to the benefit on the right side of the aisle.  Rather than all this bomb-throwing, I’d prefer to sort this out, step by step, and weigh out the results as it is, rather than how any particular party wants it to be.  It’s time to untangle this so we can move on.

The parties representing the various points of view in this discussion to which I will confine my remarks are these:  Gingrich, Romney, and the media(left, right, and stooge.)  The first I will address is the view advanced by Newt Gingrich that Mitt Romney’s profits at Bain were excessive in light of closing down companies to do so.  First of all, let’s be honest enough to admit that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with profit from selling one’s labor, one’s property, or one’s investments.  This argument is so thoroughly flawed that as Limbaugh suggested Tuesday, it is more akin to the argument of Elizabeth Warren than a Republican seeking the nomination for President.  In justice, however, let us admit also that with 98% of all SuperPac advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire being used to assail Newt Gingrich, he was probably a little bit angry and lashing out.  I expect this wasn’t Gingrich’s strongest argument, and if  he had to do it again, I suspect he might change his approach.

In reviewing media defenses of Gingrich, I have read arguments that are roughly like this:  “Well, capitalism is all well and good, but you still have to temper it with morality.”  I want those purveyors of this opinion to pay closest attention to me, as I tell them that they’re shoveling manure.  Capitalism reflects a system of morality, and if you don’t share it, fine, but do not pretend that it means something else.  Do not take “capitalism” and twist the label to fit what is merely modified socialism.  There is nothing wrong with profits, whether large or small, nor any size in between, provided only this:  Those making profits do so by their own efforts and with their own wealth and property.  That’s the morality of capitalism.  It’s a morality I endorse entirely, and unreservedly.  Do not offer to me that capitalism must be “tempered” by something.  To temper a thing is to alter its fundamental structure.  In this case, “temper” is merely happy talk for “rigging the outcomes we prefer in spite of the market.”

You might claim “but to tear down a company in order to liquidate it and thereby turn a profit, when they didn’t build it is to be a vulture.”  True, but in capitalism as in nature, vultures perform a vital role, and while we may not regard the vulture with much sympathy, the truth is that he’s cleaning  up messes and putting to use that which would otherwise go to waste.  Then there are those who argue that if Bain hadn’t liquidated such companies as Smith Corona, they might still be in existence, and that their employees might still have jobs.  Let’s get something straight, right here, and right now:  There is no entitlement to a job.  There is no guarantee of work.  When a person accepts a job working for others, he is taking a risk that is subject to all the same vagaries of the market as those who invest in it.  This notion that capital must be the risk-taker, while labor must never shoulder the burdens of risk is absurd.  As long as a person works for others, that employee is accepting as one of the inherent risks of such an arrangement that the job could end for any reason, tomorrow. To make the petulantly childish argument that employment should be without risk is a tired attempt to subvert capitalism with collectivist ethics, and I will be no party to that.

On the other side of this ledger, we have Mitt Romney who argues that what Bain Capital did was perfectly legal, ethical, and within the description of capitalism.  When it comes to this “vulture” function others have derided, he’s correct, and even in his statement that he likes to be able to fire people, he is committing no breach.  The truth is that I like to be able to fire people, and if you’ve ever worked in an environment wherein getting rid of incompetent employees is institutionally difficult, you’d understand why.  Nothing saps the strength of any company more than the incompetent, the slackers, or those simply not up to the job for which they were hired.  With all of this in mind then, let us make clear where Romney falls off the tracks and plummets into the abyss, if this isn’t it.

Romney’s problems with capitalism are birthed less of his actions while at Bain than while in the Governor’s office in Massachusetts.  Romney-care, the completely socialist Massachusetts program that is the logical forerunner of Obamacare, is as anti-capitalist as it gets, complete with an insurance mandate.  This may be the shortest argument in this article, but it’s the most important:  Any health-care mandate, and any redistributionism is flatly anti-capitalistic.  Romney can parade around with his faulty excuses for this program on the basis of federalism, but it doesn’t wash.   This program forces people to buy insurance, and that is a tyrannical, anti-free market, anti-capitalist assault on the rights of individuals.

Another problem with Romney is that he implemented other socialistic programs while Governor, including “Welfare Wheels.”  It’s impossible for Romney to claim that Romney-care was a one-off or some sort of aberration in an otherwise capitalistic record.  More, he favored TARP, and this by itself is as anti-capitalistic as can be described, and I really don’t understand how the defenders of Romney on this issue can avoid addressing this, because it has been one of the staggering expenses absorbed by tax-payers, and if Romney’s support of TARP is any indication of how he will govern as President, he is a walking disaster for all Americans, and for capitalism in general.  There’s also some indication that while at Bain Capital, he was one of several beneficiaries of a bail-out when the parent company, Bain Company, sought and received forgiveness of some $10million in debt from the FDIC.

One of the things that demonstrates the point is a statement Romney made during a CBS interview on Wednesday, via TheHill:

“In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler – closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and thousands of workers – he did it to try to save the business.”

Romney is now holding forth Obama’s GM bail-out as an example?  This isn’t the view of a capitalist, and I want you to understand that when Romney holds forth this view, he’s become a statist. The truth may be closer to this, and it’s what Mark Levin said in the first hour of his show last night:  Mitt Romney may be less a capitalist, and more of a corporatist.

Understanding this vital distinction is to enlighten the difference at stake in this nomination fight.  Capitalism is a distinctly classically liberal ideology inasmuch as it requires a strict observance of individual liberties, and almost complete sovereignty for actors within the free market.  Corporatism is illiberal, meaning it relies on coercion of individuals on behalf of corporate entities.  In that sense, it can be accurately stated that corporatism is a non-monarchical development of feudalism.  In corporatism, dynasties are favored, and the ruling class may not exercise direct power, but instead command economic decisions through their influence over the state.  In effect, it’s another manifestation of what you know as “crony capitalism,” a concept recently revived by Sarah Palin and other critics, who have accurately pointed out how thoroughly corrupting such a system can be.  What is critical to know about corporatism is that in order to operate, there must be a strong and thorough collusion with state authority and intervention into the market.  It often co-exists with socialism, and in fact, this has been the operative condition of the United States since approximately the time of Teddy Roosevelt.

Progressives of both parties are those who have sought to unite the worst features of corporatism with the worst actions of socialism.  This is the true nature of Mitt Romney, and of his general governing demeanor.  This is why I cannot support him, in point of fact, but it is also why such critics of Romney as Gingrich and Perry have a difficult time engaging in credible criticisms of him: In various ways, they too have been guilty of the same basic flaws, to degrees greater or lesser.  The media that is defending Romney is a part of the corporatist front, and it’s clear when you view Fox News that in the main, that is the nature of their advocacy.  Many have noted in the last several months that Fox News seems less and less conservative, while becoming increasingly friendly to establishment Republicans.  Bill O’Reilly is the perfect example, but the continuous presence of Karl Rove is another.  Rove is merely a political strategist and public relations master for the progressive, corporatist front.

The truth is that we must defeat not merely socialism, but also corporatism, and the problem is that while Gingrich runs around making arguments from the point of view of a socialist, he does so in grotesquely erroneous  identification of Romney’s worst actions as those of a capitalist.   Gingrich dare not assail Romney as a corporatist, of course, because Newt has had his dalliances with corporatism too.  Clearly, Perry and Santorum also avoid this, and for precisely the same reason.

So it is that at the moment, in the GOP you have a battle among progressive corporatists and a single libertarian, but no true capitalists.

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Posted in Capitalism, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, News, Newt Gingrich, Politics | 18 Comments »

Palin Notes Obama’s Disdain for Rule of Law

Friday, January 6th, 2012

Saying What Must Be Said

Sarah Palin has faced extensive government corruption before, and what confronts us now is a President who has decided to rule by fiat.  On Wednesday, Obama made several “recess appointments,” but there’s just one problem with that:  The Congress isn’t in recess.  There are those who dismiss this as a matter of “technicality,” but to do so is to dismiss all law, since it’s all just a “technicality.”  Presidents have often availed themselves of the procedure of making recess appointments, but one of the tactics available to Congress to stop that maneuver is to maintain a pro-forma session, meaning that in legal fact, the Congress is in session even if its not actively voting on legislation.  This is the situation at present, and the fact that Obama ignored this and made these appointments anyway simply brands the whole thing with the flagrant stamp of illegality.  Sarah Palin took note of this on Thursday, and wasted no time in commenting on this issue via Facebook and Twitter on Thursday:

Cordray (an attorney) must know we’re ruled by laws, not men. The President can’t make a recess appointment during a pro-forma session of Congress even if he”can’t wait.”

Palin posted this remark with a link to Rush Limbaugh’s site:

The Lawless Obama Regime – The Rush Limbaugh Show

and Mark Levin’s:

Mark Levin: ‘We Have a Constitutional Crisis’ | CNSnews.com

Meanwhile, the media continues to ignore the story, while talk radio is buzzing with the word “dictator.”  They’re correct. Obama had no business even trying this move, but as we know by now, Obama is not governed by the rule of law but only his Marxist reflexes.  Our country is being dragged to the brink of disaster by Barack Obama, and in this case, the answer should be that John Boehner must call the House into session and begin impeachment proceedings.  Obama apparently fancies himself a dictator, and as Palin points out, this is a matter of the most fundamental character of our Republic. As Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin both point out quite aptly, if Obama is permitted to get away with this, we have a dictator.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Congress, Law, Media, News, Politics, Sarah Palin | 7 Comments »

Report: Sarah Palin Says “It’s Not Too Late”

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Could She? Might She?

In an interview set to air on FBN, Sarah Palin reportedly told “Follow The Money” that “it’s not too late for “folks” to jump in,” and asked about the future, she said “Who knows what will happen in the future?”  This is sure to start a firestorm among the Palin-hating left that sees through blood-shot eyes at the mention of her name.  The very idea is anathema to leftists, and while it’s likely to be a hopeful sign to her legion of supporters, it’s hard to out-guess the “Momma Grizzly.”  I expect that many Palinistas will take heart at the notion, as so many of them have struggled since her October 5th announcement that she would not seek the nomination of the GOP “at this time,” as some would remember to point out.  To many, the field in the GOP primary consists of too many compromised characters, in one way or another, and more frequently, candidates who seem incapable of energizing the party’s conservative base and Tea Party folk.   To a great number of them, Sarah Palin has been the only viable option all along, and even the slightest hint that she’d reconsider is flying through social media like wildfire. I think it would be good for this race, but dare I hold out any such hope?

The smart money says no, but even Newt Gingrich is covering his bases, saying that she’s very popular, and if she jumped in, could certainly shake things up.  Rush Limbaugh today suggested that in addition to Stephen Moore’s suggestion that Jeb Bush could be a write-in candidate, the same is true of Palin.  Listen to a clip from Limbaugh’s Monday show(The relevant part starts at about 3:35):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW5fMHphdTQ]

In the end of this clip, Rush concludes:

“Palin Is Only Five Letters That Would Be Easy To Write In, P-A-L-I-N”

I disagree with Limbaugh and Moore about Jeb Bush, but not about Palin. I think Palin actually answers a number of questions that pose a serious dilemma for conservatives.  It’s hard to imagine at present how Palin could enter at this late date, but it’s not impossible since the early states, by moving their primaries up, have effectively waived half of their delegates to the national convention.

A write-in?  I don’t know how that would work in Iowa, if at all, but honestly, if there’s a single politician in America who could get that kind of support, it would probably have to be Sarah Palin.  I certainly don’t wish to get anybody’s hopes up, least of all mine, but she certainly would be the candidate to put a whole new face on this contest, and likely sweep it away with her.  Most Republican voters currently support somebody other than their first choice.  Could Palin be that candidate?  To borrow her phrase, “Who knows what will happen in the future?”

In just minutes, the Fox Business show “Follow the Money” will be on, and we’ll get to see the broadcast of the interview.  I’ll update this post with video as soon as it becomes available.

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Posted in Breaking News, Election 2012, GOP Candidates, Media, News, Politics, Sarah Palin, Tea Party | 4 Comments »

New Rush Parody: Ron Paul

Friday, December 16th, 2011

This is hilarious, because like all good humor, it finds its roots in the truth.  Rush was on the warpath about Ron Paul Friday, and frankly, he has it right: Ron Paul simply is too disconnected from reality on the matters of foreign policy and national defense.  Paul seemed on the verge of coming completely unglued in an exchange with Michele Bachman during Thursday night’s debate on FNC, and Michele Bachmann surely got the better of Paul.  Here’s Rush Limbaugh’s parody, from Dailyrushbo.com:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs7gePYamYo]

For the record, what follows is the exchange between Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul during the debate Thursday:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBxfBt96JU]

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Posted in Election 2012, GOP Candidates, Michele Bachmann, News, Politics, Ron Paul | 4 Comments »

Pro-Romney Crowd Goes After Limbaugh, Others for “Flip-Flopping”

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

A Hobson's Choice?

I’m sick to death of the Establishment GOP and all the other Romney shills in the media pretending not to know what they’re doing as they level a disgusting mischaracterization at Limbaugh, Levin, and others on the charge of “Flip-Flopping.”  Worse, they’re aligning with liberals in the media to push Romney.  Consider Mediaite’s attack on Limbaugh.  Here’s the essence of their argument, and yes, they’re serious:  Since people chose Romney over McCain in order to try to stop McCain in 2008, therefore, these people are “Flip-Floppers” because they now say Romney is no conservative.  Excuse me while I call… “Baloney!”   I’ve seen it posted on several sites over the last few days, and frankly, it’s garbage.  As Levin described it Wednesday, he had a “Hobson’s choice” in the matter, and he chose accordingly.  Frankly, Levin is right:  The only choice was to oppose McCain, and that meant supporting Romney at the time, in his view.  That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement.  Nevertheless, this is the premise on which the criticism of Limbaugh, Levin, and others is based, and it’s intended to mislead readers in the out-of-context history they provide.

This is idiotic.  The story by Mediaite seems to insist that one cannot choose between the lesser of two evils, and later, when new choices of lesser evil are added, that one must stick with one’s original choice to the bitter end.  This also assumes that Rush had the full story on Romney in 2008.  It assumes that he was as familiar with Romney as he has since become.  One might argue that Rush was simply endorsing Romney because he liked McCain even less, but what of it?  I find this media tactic despicable, but what is still more disgusting is how many people fall for this obviously fraudulent attack on Limbaugh.  One wonders if such people aren’t inclined to see Limbaugh in a negative light from the outset.

Let’s be honest: Given the choice of McCain and Romney, yes, I’d be inclined to pick Romney.  Now, expand my choices by Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Gary Johnson, and yes, I’m going to re-think my previous choice.  To be perfectly honest, if tomorrow Sarah Palin decided to change  her mind and run, I’d be back back-peddling from any support I might have given any of the rest of these.  NO PROBLEM.  The simple fact is that if you have limited choices, you may choose the best that remains at the time, but not be overly happy about it.  That’s the truth of Limbaugh’s “endorsement” of Romney in 2008.

At the same time, it may also be true that you subsequently learn things about your previous choice that make you rethink your judgment of their qualifications.  In any other context, liberals and moderates would call this “the ability to learn and grow and become more pragmatic.”  In this case, however, it’s being used as an attempt to discredit Limbaugh and anybody else who ever said a nice thing about Romney, but now finds him lacking.  In 2008, I knew none of the details of Romneycare I now do.  I hadn’t even heard of the flap over his hiring a landscaping company that used illegal aliens.  I certainly hadn’t heard of the controversy over his “Welfare Wheels” program.  Had I known that, I wouldn’t have been any more inclined to support Romney in the timeframe immediately before Super Tuesday in 2008.  The truth is, there was a good deal about Romney that we didn’t know then.

To suggest that one can’t change one’s mind upon discovery of new evidence is lunacy.  I’m a voter, and I have a responsibility to take great pains in making my choices because the country and its future demand it of me.   This is also why I disagree slightly with Mark Levin about the choice conservatives faced at that time in 2008:  If anything, the choice between Romney and McCain had been a Morton’s Fork because both were equally bad.  The truth may be in what I consider a false dilemma.  We have one more option beyond all of these:  The assault against Limbaugh is only possible because Limbaugh fell for a false dilemma.  He decided at that point in 2008 to support somebody who was not a conservative, and while he may not have known better at the time, his generosity in his description of Romney in order to attempt the defeat of McCain is now being thrown in his face.

This is why you ought to be scrupulously deliberate in your choices this coming year. Don’t find yourself in the position of having to later say that somebody you now choose is not really conservative.  The only way to do that is to be sure that you choose an actual conservative, or if none are available, to withhold your vote and your reputation, and with it, conservatism’s.  The jury is still out as to whether any of these Republican candidates will pass muster.  For my part, I am still weighing.  I know Romney, Huntsman, and Paul are out of consideration for me.  Their records and positions demand that I must never support any of these.  I am having great difficulties with Mr. Perry, and lesser degrees of difficulty with the others.  What I won’t be told by some leftist or establishment hack in 2016 is that I had endorsed somebody as a conservative who later turned out not to be anything of the sort.

If Rush Limbaugh had a fault in all of this, it is merely that he was too generous in his praise in order to attempt to defeat McCain. You can bet I won’t be making that mistake, and I’ll bet Rush won’t be doing so again either.

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Posted in GOP Candidates, GOP Establishment, Media, News, Politics | 10 Comments »

What Limbaugh Missed About Perry and Gardasil

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Hurting His Accuracy Rating?

It’s not often that Rush Limbaugh fails to recognize the salient point in a political story, but in the first hour of Tuesday’s broadcast, he missed it completely.  I hate to take Rush to task, because his errors are vastly outnumbered by the times he’s ahead of the media curve, but in his defense of Rick Perry on the Gardasil flap, I believe Rush got it wrong. It may well come down to a lack of perspective.  As a Texan parent of a minor daughter when the Gardasil issue surfaced, I can tell you that from my perspective, the issue can be understood in a different light.  This wasn’t his only error about Rick Perry, but my focus is on this one for a critical reason:  While Perry has admitted his order on the HPV vaccine may have been a mistake in the way it was implemented, he hasn’t retracted the underlying problem:  A real conservative untainted by crony capitalism would never have implemented this at all.   Rush tells us this is a distraction from the fiscal issues.  I submit to you that Perry’s Gardasil mandate is a fiscal issue, and a matter of his core conservatism.  Rather than a distraction, it cuts to the heart of what remains broken in our politics, and why we must hold candidates’ feet to the fire.

First, let’s consider this from the point of view of a conservative parent.  What Michele Bachmann was implying about “innocent daughters” is very much the point.  It isn’t a matter of criminal guilt or innocence, as the bizarre Mark Davis seemed to suggest today, but the matter of a different sort of innocence most conservative parents would like to see preserved in our daughters until adulthood and marriage.  What Bachmann was clumsily trying to imply while stating it in gentler terms is that the innocence of these girls was very much on the line.  When I heard the announcement of Rick Perry’s intended policy, I went ballistic, and began placing calls to every Texas politician who I could contact.  There were many busy phone lines, so I left voice-mails or called back as need be, but the other parents I spoke with were incensed because the implication of Perry’s policy was that our 6th-grade(or older) daughters must be promiscuous, or at least have inattentive parents.  After all, HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. For our daughters to be “at risk,” they would first need to be sexually active.  The implication of this policy caused many Texas parents to express outrage on this basis alone.

Perry ought to have known better, so why didn’t he?  Michele Bachmann may have offered the answer in the discussion during Monday’s debate: Crony-capitalism.  While Perry scoffed at the notion that he’s for sale for a mere five-thousand dollars, it’s important to recognize that there was much more at stake than the direct contributions from Merck to Perry, and that’s all the small amount addresses.  It doesn’t do anything about the insider-trading and all the other potential instances of corruption that grow from one of these crony-capitalist adventures.  In talking about Perry’s response, Rush missed this.  I wish he’d apply the same investigative standard to Perry that he once applied to another southern governor. In 1992, Rush spared no digging in finding the connections and the back-channels through which the Clinton machine operated its crony-capitalism operation.  Rick Perry, and indeed every candidate for President, needs this sort of thorough examination.

Rush maintained that all of this is really just a distraction intended to throw the Republican party off-track from discussions of fiscal issues and Obamacare.  I thoroughly disagree, because crony capitalism is a problem that affects fiscal issues, and is an entrenched part of the Obamacare debate.  For instance, explain Obama’s situation with respect to crony capitalism in the “Green Jobs” scam.  Is this not a fiscal problem, with billions of dollars of tax-payer money being diverted to these dubious boondoggles?  If this isn’t a fiscal problem, what is it?  When dollars are diverted to some program or initiative, these are tax-payer dollars.  Yes, it’s a cultural issue, but the simple fact is that fiscal issues encompass virtually everything, so that there is very little distinction between budgetary and  moral issues.

At the same time, to pretend that the Gardasil issue is a distraction from Obamacare is another canard.  Gardasil is one small instance of what Obamacare will ultimately be, though the reach of the latter spans the macroeconomic landscape.  Rush has pointed out repeatedly how the pharmaceutical companies have been a part of formulating Obamacare to their advantage, and if that’s wrong(and it clearly is,) then it must also be wrong for Perry to use Gardasil for similar purposes at the state level.   Perhaps more importantly, what the Gardasil decision by Perry demonstrates is a reflex to statist answers to problems.  Such a tendency always results in fiscal blow-back, as can be witnessed in some of the programs concocted under the last Texas republican to have become President.

Rush is a great commentator, and I don’t criticize him often because I’ve derived so much enjoyment from his show over the years, but every once in a long while, Limbaugh clearly blows it, and his failure to understand how bad Perry’s Gardasil order really had been is one of those rare occasions.  Eventually, Rush will discover his error, and he’ll likely re-think it when he considers other perspectives.  I understand.  I really do.  Rush desperately wants the Republicans to win back the White House and reverse Obamacare, but it won’t be done unless we’re willing to examine our own candidates under the same microscope.  You can bet the media will begin doing so from the moment we choose a nominee.  Let us do this difficult, sometimes disappointing work ourselves.  Republicans deserve the best candidate to be found within their ranks .  We won’t find the best by sweeping our own candidates’ flaws under the rug on the dubious pretense of political distractions.  Neither should Rush.

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Posted in Election 2012, GOP Candidates, Media, Politics | 12 Comments »