The Smallest Minority

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Title: Smackdown Part 3: Hierarchies And Revolutions
Excerpt: Kevin Baker of The Smallest Minority has posted a "compendium" essay, which rounds up many statements of concern about the political direction of the Republic, including this one from your Curmudgeon. It's a definitive aggregation of anx...
Blog name: Eternity Road

I have to say that I am incredibly impressed with your blog. Insightful, pushing the limits of "acceptable" debate, intelligent as hell. I have a new must-read. And, between you and "The Gun Guy" (he who shall not be named), a new yearning to teach my new wife and step-son to shoot. They are willing, thank G-d.

Tex

Thanks for the kind words.

And I suggest you work them up to bigger calibers. The sooner the better.

Excellent post. I wish I could get my sister to read this. She just graduated from college with a degree in psycology and suffers from a severe case of BDS. We can't even discuss her liberal views because she just shuts down and says this is how I "feel" without looking at empirical evidence. It is just so frustrating when someone you care about won't look at facts and figures and buys the kool-aid sold by the left and the MSM. What to do, what to do?

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Title: Many Miles Away
Excerpt: That our syllabus is persuasive -- even dispositive -- may be readily seen in that there are droves of people great and small deserting the Democrat party ... For every Whittaker Chambers or David Horowitz... there must be thousands of ... your frien...
Blog name: BabyTrollBlog

Kevin;

Strange to read my own words excerpted and pared down as you have done. I'm struck by the "Did I write that?" thing.

A dark picture overall, though. ::sigh:: We hates it, we does. Wanna keep seeking alternatives.

M

So do I, Mark. So do I. But it appears that the madness is upon us.

Kevin, I know you're a fan of Bill Whittle's writing; did you read "Sanctuary," which was posted some months back? God only knows what's going to come to pass in this country in the coming years, but I can't help but find hope in the closing words of this particular Whittle masterpiece...
"...there is hope for us. We can change. I can change, and I am as stubborn a cuss as they come. And there is hope here, on these pages. Not my pages -- I’m but a speck of flotsam in an electronic ocean. But these pages, these ghostly pages pulled from the ether down highways of colored light. These pages may be able to save us.
"Because now, for the first time in human history, a small person can talk to millions. The defeatism and cynicism of our betters is no longer the only voice we hear. Now, for the first time, we common people, we citizens, can speak directly to each other about life within the Sanctuary, and those unseen people, those builders and maintainers of decency and civilization have at their command a tool with which to make their voices heard. We can patrol and repair these crumbling walls from within and man the gates ourselves.
"There are millions of us. Millions. And we do not have to go gently into that good night."

Yes, Erik, I read everything that Bill writes. In my earlier piece I mentioned him: "Many, many of us still believe we're free. Bill Whittle believes it. You can feel it in the often aching eloquence of his Silent America essays."

The questions are:

"Is it enough?"

"Is it in time?"

and

"Are there enough of us?"

And the answers? I don't know. Do you?

"And the answers? I don't know. Do you?"

I can honestly say I don't; I am a college student, but I have lived long enough to say that I do not have all the answers. Sometimes I wonder if there are enough people who believe in America and all she has stood for in her history to fight for her. Perhaps if we had more Bill Whittles and Gun Guys, it would be enough. Perhaps we do, I do not know...but we do need to speak up and make ourselves heard. A Ben Franklin quote comes to mind: "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." If we did, could we eventually salvage America? Of course we could. We have faith and courage, while all they have is vitriol and cynicism. Perhaps Bill Whittle's optimism doth rub off on me; he's had a huge influence on me as a writer, and on the way I look at the country and the world. Will we end up going, as the Geek writes, "Stark Raving...Insane"? Only time will tell. But we must keep the faith in ourselves and what our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to -- or it shall surely perish.

Congratulations, Kevin.  Your bullshit detector has failed, and you've become the victim of spin.

What's being spun?  It's that the raving margins of the left are any more important - or any less crazy - than they've been in the last two decades.  Nothing has changed there.  What has changed is the way that the right-wing spinmeisters like Rove have been able to persuade millions that anyone who doesn't agree with the Bush agenda 110% is part of the raving loony left.

Meanwhile, the president who was barely elected by slim majorities (and who perhaps owes his margin in 2004 to

[goddamn it, I did NOT click OK!] ... owes his margin in 2004 to untrustworthy voting machines which are a tyrant's wet dream) is cranking US policy over to insane extremes.  I don't just mean insanity like the blatantly prejudiced panel on stem cell research, or the loon he appointed as his first Attorney General (the statuary drapist), I mean the way he sold out US energy policy to the oil companies and our Wahhabist enemies... and refused to reconsider even after 9/11 gave him a huge whack upside the head.

The consequences of his malfeasance have piddly SOUTH KOREA whipping out butts in important areas of bio-research.  When those advances come out, they are going to be making mints off us.  And it's not just S. Korea, it's the rest of the world taking what used to be the U.S.'s bread and butter.  When we're importing all the top biotech advances instead of exporting them, as well as all our energy and all our cheap stuff, what's left for this country to do?

Bush's buddies will be sitting pretty, though.  He'll be fine.  His family will be fine.  It's folks like me who won't have anything except maybe a service business trying to keep a roof over my head selling better ways to economize to an increasingly impovershed public.

(continued)

So if the electronic voting machines hadn't been hacked we'd have ended up with Kerry?

And this would have been better... how?

Don't froth at the mouth so much E-P. My patience is wearing.

(I hate when I forget to close a tag.)


The left had plenty to do with this.  The debasement of American education over the last 40 years was mostly their doing; the fads of things like "child-centered" education and "whole-language" reading have been their babies.  But along comes Bush who wants to sell out biology education to the raving right wing.  Truth doesn't matter, integrity doesn't matter, it's just one more thing that he can use to win tactical battles.  What's his strategy?  Near as I can tell, he doesn't have one.  He keeps getting blind-sided by the obvious, and the idea of controlling pork so that the essentials get done is utterly foreign to his whole crew.

The utter fiscal incompetence of this regime is awe-inspiring.  When did the Republicans become the party of "never saw a spending bill they didn't like"?  The only difference is who benefits; the oil companies and some plutocrats instead of unions and various ethnic, labor or social special interests.

The guy at the Democrating Underground is saying what many millions of people now think, albeit maybe not in such extreme words.  But give this another three years of illegal aliens taking the jobs that their kids need to pay for college, and H1B's taking theirs, and all the other policies which are cutting away their safety net while transferring $billions to various cronies and supporters.... I wish I had somewhere to go to be away from the backlash, because it's gonna be awfully ugly.

Far uglier than it could have been or should have been.  There have been a few things Bush has done right, but man... Michael Brown?  His crony from the Texas Bar Assn?  His refusal to even threaten a veto on a single pork-stuffed spending bill?

This period of one-party rule led by Bush may be the downfall of this country.  Gimme back my gridlock... if it isn't too late.

"So if the electronic voting machines hadn't been hacked we'd have ended up with Kerry?"

We'd have ended up with a result everyone would have had to accept as not being stolen.

If you destroy the trustworthiness of the electoral process, you destroy the last vestiges of civic involvement.  You go straight to dictatorship over an apathetic public or violent revolution.  That guy at DU?  He's headed that way.

We need honesty in government.  We need checks and balances to keep the pols at least partly honest.  What I've seen over the last 4 years is all the checks and balances being taken apart, and this nation will suffer horribly for it.

"If you destroy the trustworthiness of the electoral process, you destroy the last vestiges of civic involvement."

So...

The repeated, documented incidences of Democratic ballot-stuffing (120% of the inner-city vote!) hasn't "destroyed the trustworthiness of the electoral process"?

I think you need to go back and re-read the piece, E-P. I think you saw something that wasn't there.

And if the downfall occurs during the Bush administration, it will be due to decades of preparatory work by both sides.

And who knows? Perhaps it's time. I know I'm tired of this shit.

The proper response is to put the people involved in prison, not emulate them.

Grrr. Haloscan ate my comment.

Yer just going to have to make it up in your head now Kev, and pretend I posted it. Nyah. ;]

One more try...

"Strange to read my own words excerpted and pared down as you have done. I'm struck by the 'Did I write that?' thing." - Mark Alger

Yup. Indeedy. Disconcerting, in some ways. ;]

Even more disconcerting to find [via an unrelated Technorati search] two people excerpting and quoting an essay I wrote over a year ago, and expected to have sink into the bit-ethers. ;)

I get the unsettling feeling that, like doens of other net-wackos before me, I may have penned something that will outlive me on the web. :) I wonder if Kibo or Legume have ever been smacked between the eyes like that?

Somewhat dismaying to reread that... and to realise that over a year later, there's very little in that essay I would change were I capable of writing in the heat of inspiration like that today. If anything, the divisions and balkanization have gotten worse, not better.

So our predictive timing was off, Kev. Wah. I still think this wil end in blood and gunpowder. And I still find it chilling that there is a part of me way down deep that looks at that thought... and its ears grow hairy points and it does not find that dismaying. "Can't sing, can't dance, may as well blow shit the fuck up." :)

One has to wonder if the blood and bone attractiveness of that little voice in all of us.. is one of the things that makes this inevitable?

One has to wonder if the blood and bone attractiveness of that little voice in all of us.. is one of the things that makes this inevitable?

Thus the lemming reference...

The proper response is to put the people involved in prison, not emulate them.

Except the people doing it are the lawmakers or their proxies.

Fat chance.

You just put your finger on the reason why one-party rule is destroying this country.

If you have different groups of lawmakers and attorneys general and such keeping each other honest, it works.  If the checks and balances are broken (like now), watch out.

I wanna see Tom Delay do time.

Taking bets on that?

Hmmm....one-party rule is the problem?

I've thought for quite some time that a big part of the problem was the very EXISTENCE of ANY political parties. Frankly, I believe at this part that both the Republican and Democrat parties are so fixated upon their party agendas as to be entirely removed from common sense or what's truly to the nation's benefit.

In my opinion, though, the Republicans are taking a far slower approach to cultural suicide.

Effectively, as someone else (Thomas Sowell, perhaps?) said, "Democrats are the only reason for voting Republican...."

We treat Liberty and (our vision of) America as though they are synonymous, and each is a necessary condition for the other. After reading Davidson and Rees-Mogg's The Sovereign Individual, I'm not so sure any more...and I've always been, even when I was a leftist, a patriot of the "On the eighteenth of April in 'seventy-five" school. We may indeed have to abandon manifest destiny in order to secure the blessings of Liberty, and let the collectivists go into their own misery.

You know, I dont remember these paeans to two party government when the Democrats controlled Congress for forty years and Republicans had to be nasty just to get noticed.

The Republicans held the White House for a lot of that time.  The veto pen is a powerful thing, if the prez has the spine to use it.

I was going to make expansive comment on this post over @ my place, but time seems to be getting away from me, so I will be brief here.

On my pessimistic days, I share Kevin's gloomy assessment, but on optimistic days, I look at the many rays of hope and health, and my outlook is somewhat different.

The Republic is well suited to deal with the more obvious excesses of men in power, but it is poorly suited to deal with the insidiousness of widespread mendacity and degeneracy of its people.

The Republic will survive the Patriot act, politician's hands in the till, and Kelo. It will not survive (yet another) generation of people addicted to the public teat, a stranger to liberty and self reliance, and whose thought runs no deeper than the propaganda fed it.

Accordingly, I deem the schemes of the collectivoLeftists that promote this degenerate state of the people to be the far greater danger.

And the collectivoLeftists run the news media and education systems - thus guaranteeing yet another generation of people addicted to the public teat, strangers to liberty and self-reliance, and whose thoughts run no deeper than the propaganda fed it.

Thus, my pessimism.

A crucial premise for my arguments for civil disobedience, Kevin, is that there is enough of something left of an American conscience -- everything at the bottom of it and everything it implies -- to which to appeal with sharply-put statements of and acts for individualism. Taking the thing in a context with your point on education, I would put it that events will require something fairly dramatic in order to teach "yet another generation" just how wrong they really are. There are moral principles to establish all over again before the disaster is complete. Or, at least, I should hope so. But they will require fairly drastic application in order to burn all the way through about a hundred years of intellectual and practical fog.

This will only become more imperative as things continue sliding toward chaos, which is really the right word here.