Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
A thousand words in the War on Terror...


posted by Greg Swann at 3:34 PM

 
"The candidate of people like us..."

by Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie

"I'm John Kerry and I approved this message."

You'll never guess who said that.

"People have asked me," the Candidate intoned, "Senator, why haven't you shared with the American people your secret plan to win the peace in Iraq?"

Beside the video camera, Manny Kant--the marketing maven who sneaks me into these things--murmured, "Good, good. Keep it coming."

"The truth is, I'm not the only one with secret plans. As you know, President Bush has a secret plan to reinstate the draft. Including young women. And their cats.

"The Bush administration has a secret plan to tax medicare--with tricky loopholes available only to the super-rich.

"Republican voters wonder why they should support John Kerry and John Edwards in this election. I'll tell you why. Because George W. Bush has a secret plan to shut down the Republican Party.

"And so the answer to that question is very simple. Why won't I share my secret plan to win the peace in Iraq? Because the Bush White House has a secret plan to outlaw all secret plans!"

And with that the Candidate just stood there, staring meaningfully into the camera, his face at once harsh and goofy and supplicating, like Eddie Haskell without the chutzpah.

"Is that it?" Manny asked.

"Isn't that enough? I thought I was kind of long."

"Okay, okay, we'll do something with it."

"I mean, don't you have cutaways and voiceovers and stuff like that?"

"We'll do something with it."

"Was my voice all right?"

"Stentorian, as always, Senator."

"And my face...?"

"...I'm going to go with... lugubrious."

"And my demeanor?"

"Your demeanor?"

"My mein. My manner. My... style, so to speak."

"Lachrymose. Lachrymose without parallel."

The Candidate scowled. Which took some doing; I don't think he has a full set of face muscles. "Do you think I don't know what those words mean?"

"I don't think that has anything to do with television," Manny muttered.

"I thought we'd do one with me fooling around with a football."

"I don't think that's such a good idea."

"No, I do this every day. You know, on the press bus. They take pictures of me throwing a football or a baseball, to let the people know I'm just a regular guy."

"Senator, with all due respect, you don't know the first thing about throwing a ball."

"What difference does that make?"

Manny Kant looked at the floor for a long time before he spoke. "The pictures work against you, that's what makes the difference."

The Candidate started to speak, by Manny held up his hand.

"No, hear me out. They take pictures of you pretending to play football, and it seems like it's all in good fun. But the average American doesn't see a regular guy having a good time after lunch. What he sees is a rich jerk pandering to him, when you don't even know how to hold the ball.

"No, wait, there's more. The boys on the press bus love those pictures, because they prove you're one of them. The press is in the tank for you, everybody knows that. But nobody knows the real reason why. It's because you're their boy, the closest they've come to getting one of their own into the White House. More like them than Clinton, than Carter, more like them than Gore, even.

"Don't you see? You get to high school or college and you realize that you're lousy at sports. Your head starts to swim in Algebra class, and by Trigonometry you've washed out of math. You're good with words, so good you could never survive with the dullards in the education department. What does that leave you? You can't be the rah-rah hero jock, you're too awkward. Not medicine, not science, not engineering--no aptitude for math. What's left? Law school, the social sciences--or journalism.

"You're their boy, Senator, the high water mark of mediocrity. It's not going too far to say that the history of the world since the dusk of the Enlightenment has been driven by men like you and your allies in the press--bitter, rancorous, resentful mediocrities undermining greatness for the crime of being beyond your uncoordinated grasp."

I expected the Candidate to be raging by now, but all he did was yawn.

"But wait," said Manny. "Here's someone you can beat. Here's someone you can all beat. A decent enough athlete, but nothing to write headlines about. A drunken frat-boy lout most of the time. And to top it all off, he's incapable of elocution, even, much less eloquence. If the sports gods and the math gods leave you feeling weak and small and pathetic, here's someone even more pathetic than you.

"But then you wake up one day and suddenly this wastrel Prince Hal has become regal King Harry at Agincourt, better at your own job than you could ever be, better than all but a handful in all of human history."

The Candidate scratched at his static forehead. "Are you trying to impress me with your education? Because I'll have you know that I studied in France."

"What I'm trying to do, Senator, is help you understand how to connect with your base."

The Candidate sat in silence for a long time. When he straightened himself up, Manny gave a nod to the cameraman.

"My opponent says that I will impose higher taxes on the rich, to take what they have simply for the sake of taking it," the Candidate confided to the camera.

"He says I'll hamstring the medical profession until doctors quit in disgust.

"My opponent insists that I will throw away our hard-won victory in Iraq for no better reason than that he won it and I didn't.

"He says I will invite terrorist acts far worse than those we saw on September the Eleventh.

"My opponent argues that my entire career has been devoted to chipping away at America's greatness in every way I could.

"But in the world of George W. Bush, there is no room for people like me. People like you. People like us.

"I'm John Kerry and I approved this message because I am the candidate of people like us."

Manny Kant looked at me, not at the Candidate. He knows I know, he knows I've always known. I don't know if he brings me along out of guilty shame or a perverse pride.

"That's good," he said. "That's just the right tone. Let's try it again from the top."
posted by Greg Swann at 1:55 AM

 
More stupid than anyone...

I love stupid-criminal stories. They're in the news all the time, and it never ceases to amaze me how very stupid stupid-criminals can be. I share this stuff with my son, because stupid-criminal stories are rife with pedantic opportunities. But they matter to me, too, as a persistent validation of the moral core of Janioism. Hollywood screenwriters and the pretend friends of liberty who feed on tax dollars at state-funded universities insist that there can be suave, sophisticated, super-intelligent masterminds of crime, but the evidece of reality, shunned by both types of puerile fantasists, abounds. Here's a fun stupid-criminal story from Sky News:

Hampshire Police teamed up with Channel 5 to set up a fake game show fronted by Neil and Christine Hamilton.

They wrote to 150 wanted criminals who had evaded arrest, inviting them to appear on the Great Big Giveaway Show.

Upon arriving at the fake TV studio in Portsmouth the guests were greeted by the Hamiltons and told they had won a cash prize.

They were then led into a room where they had their make-up done and were told to wait until they were wanted for the TV show.

When they were called, applause was played on a tape as they walked through a cloud of dry ice into the arms of waiting police officers who arrested them.

The sting was conducted by undercover reporter Donal MacIntyre for a Channel 5 series later this year.

What makes this particular stupid-criminal story interesting is that, it turns out, the stupid-criminals are not the stupidest people in the story:

However, human rights group Liberty [ahem] claimed the police tactics were "distasteful", and said crime should not be turned into a TV game show.

A spokesman said: "We don't object to the principle of the police working with the media but it leaves us with a slight sense of unease when such a serious matter is being turned into showbiz."

"Distasteful." "A slight sense of unease." More stupid than anyone...
posted by Greg Swann at 9:48 AM

 
Kerry's 'realism'...

Tony Blankley in the Washington Times:

The essence of Mr. Kerry's claim for the presidency is that: Whether or not he supported the war, whether or not he thinks it was a mistake, whether or not he thinks we are better off with Saddam out of power and in our prison, he, John Kerry, being much smarter than Mr. Bush and having his policies grounded in reality rather than fantasy is better able to win the Iraqi war and protect Americans from terrorism.

The first, and most advertised, part of Mr. Kerry's four-part plan to win the war in Iraq is to hold a summit among Arab and European leaders -- which would lead to a true internationalization of our effort. I think it is fair to assume that Mr. Kerry would not exclude the French or the Arab League from that summit.

And at that summit, according to the French prime minister and foreign minister (as quoted above), formal representation would be granted to the terrorists currently beheading Americans and murdering even Iraqi children by the dozens at a time: What the French prime minister heroically calls "la resistance." Let it be recalled that the French "resistance" (to which the French prime minister makes unambiguous equivalence of our enemies in Iraq ) opposed Nazi occupation of France during World War II.

So, French policy is to morally equate America's presence in Iraq to Hitler's Nazi occupation of France. This is the foundation of Mr. Kerry's plan to win the war in Iraq. A notional President Kerry would find himself seated at the summit table negotiating peace terms with the literal cutthroats of our fellow citizens. This, Mr. Kerry calls realism, while he characterizes President Bush's determination to defeat the cutthroats of the world as "fantasy."

But it would be unrealistic to think that such a summit, with the terrorist enemy formally seated as a negotiating partner, would call for the military defeat of the terrorists -- certainly not with their friends the French and the Arab League nations vociferously supporting the enemy.

Whenever one is told to be realistic, it inevitably means one is not going to get what one wants. Mr. Bush wants defeat of the terrorists and their fellow insurgents and a peaceful, pluralistic Iraq.

In France, in 1940, the men and women who dreamed of liberation and eventually formed "la resistance" were not being realistic. The realist was the austere, aristocrat Marshall Petain, who negotiated a collaborator's peace with Hitler and called it Vichy. Five years later, his followers were shot in the village squares by patriotic Frenchmen. There is a lot of Petain in Mr. Kerry.

John Kerry may have won the debate, but he would lose the war.

posted by Greg Swann at 6:15 AM

SplendorQuests