(Click title above.)From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder :
“Milo is a satire of the modern businessman, and beyond that is the living representation of capitalism, as he has no allegiance to any country, person or principle unless it pays him.”
NATION BUILDING: Regarding nation building in Iraq: The argument is that we cannot stop now, because, having gone past the point of no return, any scale-down now would simply flood over all alternatives.
PROFITEERING: Regarding tax cuts that failed to address disparities in access to economic power: The argument is that we now cannot address income disparities because our economy can no longer afford it.
ENERGY POLICY: Regarding tax hikes on fuel in order to incentive development of alternative energy sources: The argument is that our economy now cannot afford sudden jolts.
AMERICAN JOBS: Regarding the continuing draining of American jobs: The argument is that American consumers now cannot afford to pay for high priced American jobs.
AMERICAN BORDERS: Regarding defending the physical integrity of U.S. borders: The argument is that Americans now will no longer do many of the jobs for which America must have cheap, illegal labor.
HEALTH CARE: Regarding single provider universal health care: The argument is that we now no longer can afford it.
SOCIAL SECURITY: Has the writing on the wall yet become clear?
THUMB 22: The current administration has mastered Milo Minderbinder’s “catch 22,” extending it to keep ordinary Americans under the thumb-control of their global-economy masters. America becomes just a myth. Globally, freedom and dignity become just words, for nothing left to do. Call the extension “Thumb 22.”
MACHINE POLITICS: To be fair, Thumb 22 is even more of a tool for Democrats. After all, who is more keen to promote counterproductive poverty pimping and to erase American borders in order to ensure political power derivative of a flood of poor, easily deluded, easily recruited, newly thumbed tools than the Democrat party political machine?
POLLY ANNA INTENTIONS: Who is more quick to forgive bad results when derived from seemingly good intentions than liberals? Who is quickest to forget the history of Jimmy Carter’s windfall profits tax on oil profits?
PITCHFORKS: Red Ass Moderates must summon the pitchforks!
5 comments:
See http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/06/top_10_reasons_to_blame_democr_1.html
Knowing how corrupt they themselves often are, liberals find it easy to project their deficiencies onto superiors. Yet, to turn the household over to their rule is often to surrender adult supervision to fit throwing toddlers. Best would be if adults simply behaved responsibly. Unfortunately, the toddleresque remains very much a part of each of us. Thus do we wrestle through our mud.
Yet, a still quiet voice urges the worth of at least trying to show what adult supervision should look like. For that, I remain an optimist, since, as Churchill taught, there is little point in being anything else.
From http://www.davidcogswell.com/Reviews/IronHeel.html :
On December 3, 1888, President Grover Cleveland delivered his annual address to Congress. Apparently Cleveland had taken notice of the Santa Clara County Supreme Court headnote, its politics, and its consequences, for he said in his speech to the nation, delivered before a joint session of Congress: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/books/19kaku.html?th&emc=th :
The Business of Politics, the Politics of Business
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 18, 2008
Quote Snippets:
In his incisive 2004 best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank argued that red-state America is made up of two groups — business and blue-collar interests, which “should be at each other’s throats” — but that conservative leaders, dedicated to their own big-business agenda, consistently persuade “citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal” to vote against their economic interests by rallying them around explosive values issues like abortion, flag burning and affirmative action. This, he contended, is “how conservatives won the heart of America.”
....
Instead of carefully dissecting the many failures and missteps of the Bush administration (from its handling of the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina) and its penchant for favoring political loyalty over expertise, Mr. Frank tries to extrapolate its many stumbles into an object lesson about the wickedness of conservative governments in general.
Its leaders, he contends, “laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis.”
Anything that stands in the way of Mr. Frank’s generalizations is ignored or shrugged off. He gives no credence to conservatives like the economist Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, who have criticized the current Bush administration for racking up huge deficits, circumventing the traditional policy-making process and disdaining the advice of experts. He ignores the success of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City in using a business-based approach to managing the city and rebuilding it in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. And he chastises former President Bill Clinton for having tried to reduce federal bureaucracy and red tape, characterizing these efforts as an attack on the civil service.
As a result, Mr. Frank comes across in these pages as a sort of parody of the liberal right-wingers love to hate — as someone in love with big government for the sake of big government and opposed to all manner of capitalism and entrepreneurial initiative. At the same time, his strident, impatient tone undermines the possibility of a sober, nonpartisan discussion about matters like the Bush administration’s awarding of no-bid Iraq reconstruction contracts, its bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina, its politicization of the Justice Department and its adherence to tax cuts in wartime that have led to huge deficits.
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As Mr. Frank sees it, incompetence and corruption are fuel for conservatism: that is, if public officials are inept or venal, people will get fed up with government and turn instead to private enterprise.
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Mr. Frank asserts that “democracy cannot work when wealth is distributed as lopsidedly” as it is today, and that conservative Washington “has defunded the constituencies of the liberal state while constructing an imbalance that will tilt our politics rightward for years, a plutocracy that will stand regardless of who wins the next few elections.” “Dramatic economic inequality of the kind conservatism has engineered,” he concludes, “inevitably brings political inequality with it. The rich vote at higher rates than others, they contribute greater amounts to candidates, and, should they choose, they are able to afford today’s expensive campaigns for public office.”
Poison pill: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/14027.html
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