Tipping Point
For a very long time the editorial cartoonists avoided going after Obama because most of them do caricatures and they wanted to avoid stereotyping. They avoided many missteps that were made, or attributed them to other people.
Well, those days are definitely over. Mark Fiore has a new animated video that tears BO a new one. Almost the entire collection of cartoons for the week of December 6 at McClatchy spindle, fold and shred him. David Rees has Get Your War On running again in New York magazine.
Web sites like Protest Obama have sprung up, and established sites like Democracy for America are running calls for No Deal on the Obama-Republican tax cut plan.
I ran some numbers on this deal, and turns out that under the deal more than 40% of the households at the bottom will have their taxes increase under this plan. Obama keeps bringing up “the average family”.
Remember: whenever you hear “average” in a discussion of money in politics, the person using it is lying about something. Honest people use “median”, which is the point in the middle, with half the group above and half below. If Bill Gates is in a room with a dozen people from a homeless shelter, the average net worth in that room is in the billions, but the median net worth is near zero. Words make a difference.
11 comments
Sad to say, the Fiore one made me sigh, rather than laugh. Obama dissapoints in so many ways… WASF. Sigh!
Badtux the Gloomy Penguin
Curiously, Fiore had the same effect on yours truly! I generally love a good dose of Satire, but that was sadly too close to reality (though of course it was metaphorical), and I’m not even American!
HuffPo posted a series of satirical MAD Magazine covers back in Jan ’09. At the time I thought they were a bit harsh… Now I think they were fairly tame & prophetic!
Obama Mad Magazine Cover: Spoofs President’s First 100 Days
Oh well…
Obama has conned people into supporting him by allowing them to believe he had some progressive ideas, but it is obvious that he is a supply-sider from the git-go and couldn’t care less about liberal and/or progressive ideas. He approaches every problem by asking himself “What would Ronnie do?”, and then he does it.
There was another blog I read occasionally called ‘TFS Magnum’ that’s been around since about ’05 I think.
She decided it all wasn’t worth it and stopped posting in Oct. (except for a brief post in Nov. Sadly, her father was dying. RIP man!)
This all Seems Mostly Pointless
“Jane’s Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane”.
If nothing else, Obama has succeeded in causing some sane bloggers to give up in disgust. Can’t say I blame them. *shrug*
Something else that’s curious, but completely understandable, is that many on the left have become quite bitter and even vicious. It’s understandable because many have realized that all the *hope* and promises Obama made were superficial and empty. They realize they were completely conned by a worse snake-oil con artist than Bushmoron ever was. That’s what hurts the most.
There are a lot of supposedly “serious and important progressive bloggers” who not only supported Obama, but savaged anyone who raised any doubts about him. There who a lot of people who were accused of being racists because they opposed Obama.
The “serious and important bloggers” don’t have the honesty to admit their error and apologize to those who were correct. There is a strange mental quirk in the American psyche that seems to equate being wrong, but for the “best of reasons”, as better than being right. That’s why the people who were wrong about the economy, are still asked for their opinions on the economy, while the people who were right are rarely asked anything.
I hate to break it these people, but refusing to admit you are wrong means that intelligent people will put two bad marks against your name, but if you admit your error, most will just forget about it.
I was once asked, many years ago, a question that I have only truly been able to answer in the last decade or so, after a half-lifetime of experience.
Is it better to be wrong for the right reasons, or to be right for the wrong reasons?
I finally figured out that it’s better to be wrong for the right reasons (well, I’ve kinda always known it, but I finally worked out the *why*). My reasoning is that trying to do the right things for the right reasons is the best option for so many reasons (including morally, ethically & justly) but you will occasionally get it wrong (again, for a whole lot of reasons, such as not having all the facts, taking on something to complex and difficult, forces outside your control, etc). Sometimes, with the best will in the World, bad stuff happens.
However, people who may occasionally do some good, but for all the wrong reasons, have nothing to feel good about. Sometimes, good stuff happens, even with the worst intentions. 🙂 But most of the time, the people in this (sadly) large group will cause a lot of pain and suffering. There are also sadly many people who believe “The end justifies the means”, which I can state categorically is *NEVER* true!
I’d much rather get it wrong occasionally trying to do right, than get it right occasionally, trying to do wrong. Simple as that.
That was my maternal Grandfather who asked me that (and it tortured me for many years!) 😉 He was a sod, truly! 😉 (But I am truly grateful. I’d hate to think what kind of bastard I’d be now if not for him and my Mom). I did guess the answer, kind of instinctually I guess, but couldn’t explain why at the time. And both sadly passed away before I could.
Once I did fully understand the *why*, it has made me uncompromising and steadfast. Before I understood the *why*, I would sometimes be tempted to consider the alternative. 🙂
Maybe if more people understood that, the World would be a better place. 😉
The basic problem is: who gets to say what the “right reasons” are?
“Stopping terrorism” is an excuse, not a reason. “Patriotism” is an excuse, not a reason.
The problem with the US is that most of the “reasons” are created after the fact to justify the disaster, not even mentioned when the decisions are made, or in the case of Iraq, changed every time the last reason was shown to be totally without basis in fact.
Nobody is perfect, and everyone screws up, but the test is “do you admit you made a mistake”.
We have people in the US who swear they found WMDs in Iraq.
Actually, you seem to be discussing intentions more than reasons. Reasons can be tested, but intentions can’t. Generally, we judge intentions by knowing people for a while. For example, I have a friend who almost burned down her condo by throwing flour on a grease fire. She did it because she knew that you were supposed to use some kind of white powder that you would have in your kitchen. She intended to put the fire out, and she had a white powder in her kitchen that would have helped to do that, baking soda, but she made a mistake. The thing is, she didn’t hide the fact she screwed up, actually she did a recreation of the incident for all an sundry any time kitchen fires were mentioned. She used it a learning experience.
The Obama supporters don’t seem to have learned anything, are are more interested in their egos, that in being involved moving the US forward.
If a person doesn’t know the difference between what’s *right* and what’s *wrong*, then there is little hope for them, and others around them. Most of these people have been indoctrinated since birth with a wrong idea of ‘right and wrong’. Words, and their meaning, are easily twisted. These people are not *rational* beings, they are *rationalizers*. There is a big difference. A rational person when faced with reality and truth will try to understand it and to work with it, to deal with it. The others will try to make people believe that the reality is not what it is. Every event, no matter how small or how large, cannot be changed. The past cannot be changes, that’s as true for the past 1 millisecond before, or a million years before. The only thing we can change is our understanding or interpretation of that event. We can extrapolate the future from past events to some degree of certainty depending upon the distance in the future. The further forward, and the *bigger* the event, the much more difficult it is to predict. We can predict events for oneself (and only oneself) further than we can predict for others or a large group. And even then, since we cannot control every single possible influence, even 1 second from now, there is always a chance we will be wrong. And so, we must also look at any possible influence to our prediction, and work out consequences, and possible alternatives. This is not something we can simply do whenever we feel like it, it’s something we do every waking moment, whether we know it or not. Some people rely on *instinct*. But instinct can only take us so far, and instinct can get it wrong. Instinct can be used as a guide, but we must make conscious rational decisions based on all the data available. people who rely on faith and hope, will also be more likely to make wrong choices. It’s all too hard to work out what to do, so just believe that the Universe, or some divine being will do what needs to be done. History proves this is incorrect and foolish. Faith should work *with* rational thinking, not instead of it.
*shrug* I could write a book on this, and many have been written. 🙂
The bottom line is, a person who does not know the difference between what is right, and what is wrong, is a dangerous individual. Sadly, many of them have the ability to convince others. Because it’s always easier to let others think for you. Then, if it all goes wrong, it “wasn’t my fault!” It’s always easy to find someone to blame, especially for something that could have been avoided with a little (or a lot) or rational though, and consideration of the consequences. This is the great rationalization at work. People who rationalize are doomed to fail. Sadly, they will take everyone they impact with them.
Sadly, they will take everyone they impact with them.
Which is why I have a bad feeling I’m on a downbound train… and I ain’t talkin’ Bruce Springsteen, either.
— Badtux the Gloomy Penguin
All we have gotten this century from political leaders is rationalizations for why they screwed everything up. Condoleezza Rice’s classic phrase : “”I don’t think anybody could have predicted that …” is an encapsulation of the mind set of these people. Of course people predicted it. The Congressional Research Service, novelists, the military planners – all kinds of people saw and wrote about the possibility of using a civilian aircraft as a weapon. A light aircraft was used in this manner in an attempt to attack the Clinton White House.
Obama keeps making egregious errors regarding history, especially the history of the Depression and the FDR administration. That is unforgivable. That period in history is the closest to the situation we face today, and the people in charge don’t seem to actually know what happened.
I don’t think the Obama people, or any of the idiots in the Village actually understand what is happening. If you can’t accurately define the problem, you will damn sure never find the solution.