Life Lessons From Iron Man 2?

May 18, 2010

I recently watched Iron Man 2 and while I didn’t think it was as good as the original, I did enjoy it for what it was: eye candy, with a much-appreciated conservative bent to it.

However, reading this harpy’s review from the inane drones at Ms. Magazine (yes, it’s still being published…surprised me, too) makes me want to see the movie again. And again. And again. And buy it on Pay-Per-View, DVD and Blu-Ray. And download the soundtrack. And buy presents for the director and screenwriters. And send cash to Robert Downey, Jr.

It must be extraordinarily difficult to be this humorless. I can’t wait for her deep thoughts on The A-Team.

H/T: Big Hollywood.


Pelosi: Follow Your Bliss, We’ll Pick Up The Tab

May 18, 2010

If there is a more idiotic statement by a politician this year than this gem from Nancy Pelosi, I’m not sure what it could possibly be. Sure, Eric Holder’s frantic dance around the words “radical Islam” are way, way up there, and almost anything Janet Napolitano says has to be considered to be in contention, but this one is a beaut.

We see it [Obamacare] as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.

So here we have the Speaker Of The House telling people, and not for the first time, that if they want to quit their jobs and become rock stars that they should do it because the government will pick up the tab for their inevitable overdoses and stints in rehab.

I’ve always wanted to be a rock star. I’ve spent countless hours listening to music and imagining myself up there on the stage, jamming with Jimi, harmonizing with McCartney, swapping verses with Jagger. The only thing that’s been holding me back, aside from a profound lack of talent, was the fact that my health care is tied to my job. But now I feel like I can finally do it…I can finally tell my boss to take this job and shove it, because Nancy’s gonna pay for my doctor visits and I’m now free at last to play Giants Stadium.

Of course, I still have a mortgage to pay, and car payments to make, and these things might prove difficult while I’m practicing for the big gig. But I’m sure Nancy has a program for that, too. I need the time to settle down and write some tunes, so I’m afraid we’ll have to get those taxpaying chumps to chip in for the mortgage and car. Think of it as a rent party, and I’ll supply the music! You can’t put a price on the toe-tapping melodies I’ll be writing while you suckers pay for me.

Perhaps Nancy didn’t actually mean what she said. Even she’s not stupid enough to imagine that the economy of this country can flourish if we all quit our jobs in order to write epic poems. But once again we have a small glimpse into the Progressive mindset.

The concept goes back probably to the dawn of time and it’s expressed in a multitude of ways. Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, critiqued the “exaggerated notion” of “the blessedness of doing as one likes.” Acid guru Timothy Leary exhorted the youth of a nation of to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” of society. The hippies tried to built a society on the premise of “If it feels good, do it.” Mythologist Joseph Campbell smiled benignly at Bill Moyers and dropped the malignant line, “Follow your bliss.” Every day people will say the seemingly innocuous “Follow your heart” or “Listen to what your heart says.” Oprah Winfrey built a media empire telling people to follow their hearts.

The belief is that somehow what your heart wants you to do is purer, and a source for greater happiness. The truth is just the opposite. In the real world, your heart tells you to do what feels good. Your head, on the other hand, tells you to do what is good. While doing what is good usually feels good in the long run, we live in an age of instant gratification and far too many people have no desire to wait for the long run to play itself out. They want to feel good right now, and one of the lures of liberalism is that it promises that what you do will make you feel good. It’s not called “bleeding heart” liberalism by accident.

Liberalism promises you the moral high ground. Liberalism tells you that you are a better person than conservatives because you care. Liberalism offers a way to express concern and help others, but almost never looks at the end result. Liberalism is concerned with doing what feels good to the liberal. Long-term results are unimportant when measured against the demands of the here and now. Many of the liberal policies that have acted as a cancer on our rights, freedoms, and prosperity, from welfare to Obamacare, were conceived with good intentions, but the hideous blind spot of failing to look further down the road has led to untold damage to our nation.

The old Jewish proverb from Maimonides that if “you give a man a fish he will eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish he will eat for a lifetime” is turned on its head by contemporary liberalism. Liberals feel good about themselves when they hand out fish, and their solution to ongoing problems is to hand out ever increasing amounts of fish. The more fish they hand out, the more they feel that they are helping, the more they feel that they care, and the better they feel about themselves. This is the entire concept behind the welfare state.

When you consider this, you start to understand why Nancy Pelosi believes that it’s perfectly okay to leave your job to focus on your dreams. It feels good, so do it. Any potential consequences are unimportant, secondary to the greater good of feeling positive about yourself. It’s why liberals think it’s important to teach “self-esteem” in schools.

It is this moral blind spot of many liberals combined with the libido dominandi of liberalism’s more despotic cousin, Leftism, that has led America down the path we are currently traveling. I believe that America can pull itself off the track we’re on. I believe there’s almost nothing Obama and Pelosi can do that can’t be undone, but it will be a difficult job and there will be no small amount of pain. Liberals believe that the pain is not worth it; better to continue going down this road, and mask the pain with more government handouts and taxpayer-subsidized goodies. “Here, have another fish.”

But then, liberals aren’t really all that interested in where this road ends, as long as they get to continue to drive.


Andrew Klavan Explains It All For You

May 7, 2010

Nice and concise.

H/T: National Review.


Comprehending Reform

May 5, 2010

A quick Google search this morning of the phrase “comprehensive immigration reform” turned up more than half a million hits. A similar search for “comprehensive health care reform” showed well over a million hits. The term “comprehensive (blank) reform” is pervasive on the news and in Washington. It seems that no issue can be tackled without some sort of reform that is geared towards fundamentally changing the entire system.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

It’s time we strike down the notion of comprehensive reform. The recent health care debacle is proof that the notion of comprehensive reform is foolish and arrogant. “We need to pass the bill,” said Nancy Pelosi, “to see what’s in it.” When politicians start blathering on about the need for comprehensive reform we end up with bills that are thousands of pages long, not written by legislators, not read by legislators, and not understood by legislators. These same bills are not read or understood by the American citizen, either.

But the fact that Congress didn’t write, read, or understand the health care bill didn’t stop it from becoming the health care law. And now we see the real cost of it all: increased spending, increased deficits, increased premiums, less access for senior citizens. The “comprehensive” cure has made the problem so much worse, sparking cries for a total repeal.

But repealing health care will be difficult. Why? Because the Democrats in Congress are so busy patting themselves on the back for their comprehensive fix that they can’t (or won’t) see that their best intentions have only made matters worse.

The idea of “comprehensive reform” is supremely arrogant. It assumes that Congress is so well-informed on the issue at hand that they can see every problem, project any and all future problems, and then correct all of these problems in a single, bold stroke. But in the end the reality is that a bunch of half-informed political hacks are trying to repair a leaky lifeboat by firing a bazooka at the leak. Behold the omniscient, all-powerful Congress and their God-like powers!

What we need is to change the game plan. Instead of relying on Hail Mary passes that almost never work, we should be using the short pass. Instead of trying to fix all the problems at the same time under an avalanche of rules and regulations, we should address each of the problems with a separate bill. There is no need to try to fix everything at the same time. Each law that Congress passes is, in effect, an experiment. We can theorize, but never really know the long-term effects of these bills. What we should be doing is passing a small bill, that is easily read and understood. Then let’s see what the effects of that bill are. Is it working? Great! Now let’s address another problem with an equally small bill and see if that works.

This is a much slower way to solve a problem, but it’s a better way of making sure that the solution doesn’t create a host of new problems. Instead of a 2000+ page comprehensive health care reform bill that nobody understood, we should have passed a simple bill expanding Health Savings Accounts, followed it with an equally simple bill allowing consumers to buy insurance across state lines and personalize their own policies, and then another simple bill for tort reform, etc. By making the bills smaller, you are making them more transparent. Only masochists will go online to read thousands of pages of legal mumbo jumbo, but if the bill was only a hundred pages long and written in a manner that is clearly understood…well, I can’t help but think that more citizens might be inclined to really see what their elected officials are up to. This would also make it more difficult for Congress to attach sweetheart deals to the bills because those deals would no longer be lost in the tar pit of modern legislation. Good for America, bad for a lot of incumbents.


The Terror Blame Game

May 4, 2010

I haven’t written anything about the attempted bombing in Times Square because I’ve been waiting for more information. The story hits close to home because my niece was standing at that exact location less than an hour before the car bomb was discovered. The mind reels to think that 45 minutes and a competent bomber are all that separated me from grieving over a lost loved one.

When the incident was first reported, I had the suspicion that this was probably a lone wolf, maybe even the Bicycle Bomber who left a bomb at the Army Recruiting station in Times Square a few years back. None of this seemed to be the kind of big statement al-Qaeda favors: no airplanes, no synchronized bombs, no mass transit. But I kept my suspicions to myself because I wanted to learn more, and while I suspected something closer to home I never doubted for a second that there was a great chance this was Islamic terrorism.

It’s too bad that others didn’t hold their tongues. Within hours, the blame game for the incident had begun and most of the talk concentrated on the idea of a homegrown terrorist. Probably a dastardly conservative.

New York Mayor-for-Life Michael Bloomberg suggested to Katie Couric that the person responsible “doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The leftwing blog Crooks and Liars openly wondered whether the would-be bomber was a fan of Glenn Beck and was downright disappointed that this scenario didn’t pan out. Janet Napolitano, the Director of Homeland Security, appeared on the Sunday morning news shows and stressed that this was a “one-off” and “amateurish.” MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer was really “frustrated” that the bomber was Islamic because Islamic terror provides a smokescreen to all those mad conservative bombers. A CNN anchor brushes right up against pinning the blame for this on the “heartache” of foreclosure.

We saw a similar pattern with the Fort Hood shootings, when any ties to Islamic radicalism were downplayed. We saw it again on Christmas of last year, when the Underwear Bomber was whisked away and read his rights while Napolitano assured everyone that “the system worked.”

The system didn’t work, Janet. We got lucky on Christmas, and we got lucky in Times Square. So unbelievably lucky.

The system in which Napolitano puts so much faith seems determined to find mad bombers at Tea Parties, watching Glenn Beck, and listening to Rush Limbaugh. They are so out of touch that they seem to genuinely believe that people who are in favor of limited, smaller government are radicals. It is as if the very notion of strict adherence to the Constitution is somehow a leading indicator of psychopathic behavior.

Meanwhile almost every time the Left gets together for a party we end up with smashed windows, violence, and tear gas.

But my intention here is not to smear liberals as being lovers of violence or anything of the sort. The violence at these and other Left wing demonstrations usually comes from the anarchists and Communists, not the people who believe in a larger role for American government. I only bring it up to highlight the hypocrisy of those on the Left, like Bloomberg, Napolitano, and Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars who are out slaying imaginary dragons and feeling really good about it while real life monsters are packing SUVs with gas cans, propane tanks, and fireworks.

There is a war going on, despite the Obama Administration’s claims to the contrary, and even if some Tea Party activist with a few screws loose blows himself up in Times Square that doesn’t change the equation. The overwhelming terrorist threat to this country comes from Islamic radicalism. Pretending otherwise, or even hoping otherwise, is foolish and dangerous.

Michelle Malkin has lots more information on the arrest of Faisal Shahzad and Hot Air has lots of great content here and here.