Every day brings another major news story telling of improving economic conditions. Well, I guess there’s no where to go from here but up might be one answer. Another answer is baloney. Take a good look at the compilation graph above. this is U.S. employment graphed versus months from the start of every recession since WWII. Do you notice any standing out. O.K., I’ll admit that’s a cheap shot. So I’ll dig a little deeper.
When will we learn the lesson that the more the Federal Government spends in an attempt to pull us out of a recession the longer and more severe the recession becomes. This has been discussed by every credible economist not named Paul krugman, (Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, to name a few,) many times over the last century. Politicians in general though like to ignore the advice completely, and even claim that they were advised the exact opposite for two reasons. One, the opposite advice allows them the appearance of doing something. Politically speaking, it matters little to a President if the recession lasts 18 months rather than 12, so long as it is over before the next election, and the general sentiment is that it was the President’s policies which pulled us through the tough times. Two, it allows for a lot of politically motivated reckless spending. President’s benefit politically from being allowed to turn the federal spigots on with nary a peep from any opposition with a say so.
The current recession has done at least one thing for those paying attention. During Bush’s 8 years in office we read nothing in the media but stories relating to how bad the economy was. In 2004, I can remember a co-worker telling me that he was going to vote for Kerry because, “we got to do something about this economy man.” Indeed, I can still hear Kerry droning on about it being the worst record on jobs since the great depression. Putting aside for the moment that the unemployment rate was below 4%, and every other demonstrable indication was that the economy was booming at the time, we still go those stories, daily. Once the election was over, the news being reported changed. Today, real unemployment remains above 15%, and we are treated to stories of an economic boom. The unemployment numbers are purposefully massaged in order to give the appearance that Washington’s lead is working. This recovery has taken far longer than any other since WWII, and in fact has been far more shallow than any other as well.
The economy will recover eventually. It always does. The difference is the strength of the recovery. In 2012 Obama and his merry band of idiots will take credit for whatever economic recovery there is. He will tell people that it would have been so much worse had his policies not been inflicted on the rest of us. At that time, refer to the graph above, and realize who’s recession stands out amongst every other. This is the only possible result of Obama’s domestic agenda. Remember this graph two years from now. As a resource, this graph is getting it’s own page on the blog. Keep it in mind when you read the daily news stories about how Obama laid his hands on the U.S. economy and saved us from certain doom.
One more thought, there are plenty of my fellow conservatives wringing hands at the prospect of President Obama’s absence from actually attending the functions of his job. I am somewhat torn on this one. While we need actual leadership in our President, we aren’t going to get that from Obama whether he sits behind his desk or not. With him playing golf, basketball, and partying in Brazil he truly will do less damage that way. I say, encourage Obama to play at least 18 holes a day for the next 1 and 3/4 of a year.
When I was in my high school years, I traveled to Washington D.C. with some group. I am not even at this point in my life able to remember who. It may have been with a class, or a 4 H group, or with my BBYO group. I seem to vaguely remember trips to Washington with all of the above. On one such trip, we visited the capitol building. One of the chambers was in session, so we were allowed to watch the Congress Critters go at it from the balcony. Jimmy Carter was President. The debate on the floor was aid to Egypt. We were going to fork over 5 of some iteration of illions of dollars every year to help a nation that was, and still is dripping in oil, and who had attacked Israel several times recently. this seemed to me at the time to be some kind of a sick joke. Years later I learned it was Jimmy Carter’s bright idea to bribe the Egyptians into a truce with Israel. (It is still my contention to this day that Israel got screwed by that deal. It left Israel with a huge problem in the Gaza Strip, as Egypt refused to allow the inhabitants to leave, though at the time all of them not only had Egyptian Citizenship, but also were mostly born in Egypt and had extended families there.) As with all Arab leaders who sign treaties with Israel, Anwar Sadat was killed by his own people.
I have heard much over the years about supposed aid to Israel. The hard core leftists bleat on about how our policies towards Israel are the cause of terrorist acts against the United States. I have heard from this crowd how Israel could not survive without our intervention and our money. I have listened to the asinine argument that the standard of living of the only democracy in the region comes not from the free enterprise system they have set up for themselves, but they are living on the backs of American taxpayers. I have heard the complete baloney argument stated repeatedly that we need to take care of our own problems here at home, rather than supporting the Jews in the Middle East, and that the only reason we do it is because of the powerful Zionist Lobby. Of course, in all of this nonsense, Israel is singled out. Now, on to eviscerating this idiocy.
We need to distinguish between trade and aid. In trade, both sides of the exchange benefit. Wealth is created for both trade partners. Israel buys a lot of fighter jets from the United States. Israel benefits because she is forever surrounded by lunatics who believe that their God of darkness, wishes them to kill all nonbelievers on the planet. They also are not able to stomach a group of nonbelievers living in the middle of their caliphate. They believe that one day even the rocks will begin to talk and tell them that Jews are hiding behind us, so that they may kill all the Jews. The weapons help them avoid that fate. We benefit in the U.S. because the people who manufacture the jets employ people and pay them a very good wage. We also get paid a lot of money for these planes. Israel sells us technology. Cell phones were developed based on Israeli technology, as was Google, NCR, several medications including the Polio vaccination, and literally thousands of other every day products we use, and do not think about. What is dishonest about the hardcore leftist argument is that they are claiming that trade with Israel constitutes aid. In their minds of course, this is only true for Israel. Trade with China is considered trade. When we pump a ton of money into the bat shit crazy Wahhabi controlled Saudi Arabia, it is considered trade, for Oil. What we give to Egypt every year, that is pure foreign Welfare, we get nothing for it, but a dishonest ceasefire. (The Egyptians have been fighting a proxy war with Israel for years via the tunnels into the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian inhabitants there.) Egypt is not the only recipient of the Federal Largess. For our purposes here though, they are the most related to Israel. I have seen several official looking charts, tables, and graphs, which show aid to Israel, and all of them are propaganda and baloney. If you dig behind the numbers, you find that in every instance the Israeli part of the exchange is purposefully ignored. Yes, we buy Israeli debt, much the same way China buys ours. This is also part of financial trade. Israel has been a very credit worthy investment, as they have never missed a payment.
Which brings us to Friday. On Friday, Senator Rand Paul proposed cutting off all foreign aid. I will repeat that, he proposed cutting off all foreign aid. What was reported in the news however, was that he proposed cutting off all aid to Israel. Why the media would report it this way is far more heinous than any supposed anti-semitism of the Paul family. (Rand is also not his father.) Why would the media tell this blatant lie, and do so in such a way as to indict a U.S. Senator, just starting his national political career. Before we get into that, watch the interview with Wolf Blitzer, the one which sparked the nontroversy:
Did you notice that Wolf cherry picked Israel from the statement and when asked, Paul repeated that he would cut off everybody. As an asside, Israel would not be affected in the slightest here. Why, you may ask. Simply put, Israel does not receive aid, they participate in trade. Israel pays back every penny loaned. They invest in our debt. Israel sells us their goods, and she buys ours. This is also not an argument about whether Paul is correct in his thinking, (you would have to have the argument about libertarians, and that is another animal entirely.) This essay is about the dishonest reporting of the media. The goal is twofold here. First, there is the attempt to display and enforce the notion that Israel is benefitting from the public teat. By stating that Israel receives public assistance as a matter of framing the debate, it establishes as fact something which is patently false. CNN gets to look like the good guy by pretending to defend Israel against charges which CNN can pretend are true, and anyhow not their fault for bringing it up, as they can merely state they were just reporting it. An honest reporter would have looked into the situation with Israel and every nation which in fact receives foreign aid. I am particularly angry with Wolf Blitzer here, as he is in fact Jewish. I realize he is merely the live version of Ron Burgandy, mindlessly reading the teleprompter with nary a thought to what he is doing, but the word Israel should have stirred some semblance of a thought in his head. Sadly, it did not. The other goal was to take a newly elected Republican politician, (Paul is an easy target as his dad has a lot of issues on this score,) and paint him as a bigoted anti-semite. Imagine if the headline had read, Paul proposes cutting of all aid to Bolivia. This would not have any where near the same impact, but would have the virtue of being true, maintain the same context, and actually be correct. Bolivia actually receives aid in the context of what we think of when foreign aid is mentioned.
For whatever reason, the media has given up on objectivity long ago. This is a wedge issue created to make conservatives dislike one another. Introducing charges of Racism and Anti-Semitism is nothing new. They can not defeat our ideas in the national debate, so they resort to what is nothing more than an adhominem attack. I am not going to state whether I agree with Paul’s budget cutting ideas. Some of them are spot on, some of them are not. Remember that both Pauls are libertarians who run as Republicans because they know that libertarians do not win elections. I also know that this hit piece was designed to attack Paul personally while not in any way attempting to attack his position. We will see a lot more of this dishonest reporting in the future. I can guarantee you that most of it will come from the left.
To my liberal friends, fight us in the arena of ideas. Leave the strawmen and adhominem attacks at home.
I awoke this morning to a new meme coming from the drive by media. That meme angered me even more than the previous 4 days. I know that it’s hard to believe, but the talking heads on the telly managed to sink even lower. First, let me tell you up front what I wish to hear from the left right now. I, and every other conservative in the country deserves your most humble apology. Anything short of that makes you a hypocrite. That being said, let’s get on with the outrage.
The new meme was that we all need to slow down the destructive rhetoric, and quit trying to politicize the tragic shooting which occurred on Saturday. What good, sound, wonderful, and completely dishonest advice to hear from the political left. Nobody on the Conservative side ever tried to politicize this tragedy. We responded, by defending ourselves against allegations which attempted to name us all accessories to murder. We showed our outrage at the notion that we should be silenced. We scoffed that somehow, our belief in limited government, people having a say in determining their own destinies, people being allowed to rise to their own level of success, people being permitted to make their own choices in life, would lead to a madman going on a killing spree and targeting those on the political left, all due to what we say on the radio, write in blogs, or say on T.V. I suppose that the new meme is in place of an apology, but it ain’t good enough, not for me.
Let’s look at several aspects of this nonsense. We’ll start with the past. First, there have been zero, let me repeat that, zero acts of violence recorded to date at any Tea Party Rallies or demonstrations which have been perpetrated by the Conservative attendants. There have been several incidents of SEIU and Acorn members assaulting the Tea Parties to be sure. At an anti Obamacare Rally in St. Louis for example, a member of the Tea Party had his finger bitten off and was beaten senseless by SEIU members. Why, you may ask. As it turns out they were angry that a black man would dare be a conservative, and felt an attitude adjustment was in order. I am waiting for the MSNBC coverage of this to happen. I am still waiting for the reports of how the anti-conservative rhetoric of the left may lead to violence. The last two years have brought us demonstrations on the private property of U.S. citizens by angry mobs of Acorn members, and nary a peep from the drive by media about vitriol from the left being dangerous. Bush = Hitler signs were all over the Democrat National Conventions of 2004 and 2008, no commentary on that though. Now, I realize that examples of the, “heated rhetoric,” or the more ambiguously defined hateful language can be found on both sides, but look in the mirror, those of you on the left, before you point the dirty end of the stick at us. Here is an excellent look at that mirror for you. It is probably the best cataloged view of the left’s hateful vitriol from 2000 until the present. It was compiled by Michelle Malkin, who is not only a better writer than myself, but much better at researching these things as well. Fitting that I would point to Malkin’s work here, since Keith Olberman referred to her as a, “mashed up bag of ugly meat with lipstick.” Nice huh? Her crime it seems, is being a non-white female conservative. Special hatred is reserved for people who the left considers part of their pet groups that have the temerity to stray from the fold.
On to the present. On Saturday, a tragedy occurred. My heart goes out to the victims and their families. My prayers go out also. Within minutes of the shooting, I found out from the drive by media that it was all the Tea Parties fault. Sarah Palin was implicated as well, because she had a map showing congressional districts she felt were ripe for victory by Tea Party Candidates. Her map showed the districts with rifle target views on the map. I heard that Rush Limbaugh was to blame, along with the asinine claim again that Rush’s show was to blame for the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995. Sheriff Barney Fife of Pima County Arizona went on the tube to claim that he had evidence, (which by the way he didn’t,) that the assailant was a Tea Party Conservative who did this as a politically motivated act. (More will follow on Sheriff Fife later.) this mantra was repeated loudly, and without deviation from most of my liberal friends. It never occurred to them that they were attempting to implicate over half of the country, and over half of their friends in this heinous crime. They called us names when we defended ourselves against these baseless charges. Not every, or even most conservatives are violent, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, bigoted evil monsters. In fact, most of us wish to help the same people who need to be helped as the liberals do. Most of us wish to see everybody share in the wealth of the world, have the lives available for people that they want to lead, and do all of the same good that you liberals wish for. We just feel that the best way to achieve that type of society where everyone is in the best possible position to be happy is to adhere to the free market open society that we currently have. As the facts came in, it became evident that Loughner was no conservative. He is a committed, and psychotic communist. Undaunted by the facts, it was until Monday morning that the meme of evil conservative involvement began to wane. As more facts came out, it became obvious that Loughner was indeed planning this since 2007 at least. We knew by Monday, that Gabby Giffords’ only crime was to be a pretty public figure who caught the attention of a paranoid schizophrenic. Now let’s talk about Sheriff Fife. As it turns out, he was not unaware of Loughner. Since 2006, the people of Pima County have been making 911 calls to the Sheriff’s dept. about Loughner. People were afraid that Loughner would do, just what he did. Fife’s answer was to assure the citizens of the county under his protection that the mental health services had things under control with poor, crazy, Jared. So, after the entire meme fell apart, we got this:
So, let me get this straight, we are supposed to just take the charges that we are murderers, and then just turn the other cheek. Well I say no. My answer to everyone who repeated this charge, feigned anger at the right, or said one word about the hate speech from conservatives, hypocrisy is your name. You made this charge with not one scintilla of evidence that it was true. For you, hate speech and vitriol is defined as anything said by those you do not agree with. This makes you intolerant, which is what you accuse us of being.
Now let’s move on to the future. Heated rhetoric is an ambiguous definition at best. It’s determination is decided mostly by who is on your side, and who is on the other side of a debate. Beyond that, it is a needed part of our vigorous political debate. Our First Amendment Rights include free speech, saying whatever is on our mind. There is a divide of ideology in our country right now. We are split almost exactly 50/50 on the direction we wish to take. Argue with us in the arena of ideas. This is why campaigns and elections take place. Attempting to keep us from speaking our minds shows that you are afraid of that debate. This is one of the things we disagree about with you. This heated rhetoric as you call it happens to be us advocating for what we believe in. Our two sides disagree, and nothing will be served by ending the debate. Finding common ground is just another way of saying, “you guys should just give up your core beliefs and let us have our way.” I am sorry to tell you, that is not going to happen. I promise to be respectful and even cordial while stating my arguments, but make them I shall. I will never be silent to mollify the political left, especially if they try to characterize my positions as, “hate speech.”
Special Hat tip to Rain of Lead for the Malkin Link. It truly is a great piece of work.
During an interview with former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush on CBS’s Sunday Morning, correspondent Jim Axelrod wondered: “In terms of how you understand how you are perceived is there a liberal bias in the media?” Mrs. Bush quickly replied: “Yes. He doesn’t have to answer, but I will.”
Axelrod seemed surprised by her response: “Why do you jump in so quickly?” Mrs. Bush laughed and backed off slightly: “No, I’m only kidding. I really don’t know.” However, she observed: “I will say that I really do see for most Americans a great feeling of affection for George that you don’t read about. Yes, I think there’s sort a conventional wisdom that’s put out by the press.” Axelrod was still skeptical: “And that conventional wisdom tilts left?” Mrs. Bush replied: “Yes.”
Tilts left? More like – hang on before you fall off the face of the Earth, left.
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