Sushi-eating

If it was aimed at the educated, it was very poorly aimed. But if it was aimed at the “not from Iowa” I’d say it was right on target.

The infamous ad: run by the Club for Growth in 2004, and aimed at the “Deaniacs” who came in from out of state to tell the benighted Iowans how they ought to vote in the Democratic primary. If you google 2004 Iowa Primary Campaign Ad Volvo, you should get it on youtube. The interesting thing is that it DOESN’T mention NPR, Brie or tofu. The original list is
tax-hiking
government-expanding
Volvo-driving
New York Times-reading
body-piercing
Hollywood-loving
freak show

But it keeps getting reshaped in memory, leaving out things liberals don’t want to talk about, and throwing in others they’re proud of. There’s an article in there somewhere.

What intrigues me, Jane, is that from what I can gather, you always vote, and you always vote Democrat. This is despite your knowing and acknowledging much, if not quite everything, that’s wrong with the Democrat side of politics, and the corruption of a significant fraction of its prominent politicians, eg Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Teddy Kennedy and a supporting cast of hundreds if not thousands.

After nearly 20 years of reading constant barrages of mainly ad hominem and straw man abuse of the vanishingly tiny number of admitted Republicans in rec.arts.mystery and elsewhere on the net, when Democrats stop casting all non-Democrats as being stupid, or uniformly at the extremist right end of the political spectrum, I’ll start taking Democrat criticism of Republicans seriously. Hell will freeze over first, I think.

The most egregious of these are those who state, or imply, that people who vote Republican must be stupid because they are voting against their own interests. The sheer blinding arrogance and, dare I say it, rank stupidity, of such thinking boggles the mind. Don’t these people understand that it is precisely that mindset, that they know what’s best for other people, that brought the likes of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Castro and every other totalitarian tyrant to power throughout history.

In my experience, the beginning of serious electoral campaigns is the point at which sensible people should switch off and read up on what the various candidates/parties have actually done in the past rather than what they say they will do in the future which, invariably, is sheer bovine excreta.

Personally, I’m with William F. Buckley, Jr when he said:
“I’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.” .

Not responsible for Iowa campaign ads, and primary ads are not generally run by a party anyway. Haven’t seen broadcast TV–well, anything not on DVD, really–in 10 years. But as far as I’m concerned the Democratic Party called me an ignorant bigot before I was old enough to vote. Let them revoke the quota and preference laws and then talk.

Not least of which because the graduates of all of them will largely fit the description of NYT reading, wine drinking, brie eating, Volvo driving, etc.

If you want to proclaim your dislike of the performance of graduates of particular universities, you say we’ve had too many alumni of X, Y and Z whose policy decisions go in the wrong direction, so you question the value of an education at X, Y, and Z.

You don’t go on about people’s taste i n food amd drink.

And although individual Democrats have called me a racist and a theocrat, the Democratic PARTY never has.

That was a campaign ad in Iowa, and there’s been a fair amount of similar crap this latest time around.

Supporting hate crimes legislation will indeed lose my vote if I know about it, but telling me I’m no better than scum because I’d rather read than watch NASCAR will lose it for good.

Lots of conservatives said they voted for Bush over Kerry because they wanted someone they’d feel comfortable having abeer with.

Well, I want some I’d be comfortable having a drink with, and Michelle Bachmann ain’t it.

Of course, neither is nancy Pelosi, so there’s that.

And, once more, you drag in JHU, which was never part of the problem to obscure the bloody footprints leading to Harvard, which very much is. I have never heard a conservative speak with anything but the utmost respect for JHU, MIT, Cal Tech or UND. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia are another matter. For that matter, when did Norwich, the Service Academies and St Johns cease to offer good educations? It is certainly possible to get “a certain kind of education” without attending or supporting the universties which created and perpetuate many of our national problems. A good thing, too, because those universities don’t seem much interested in education. And even if it were not, it would still not make all criticism of those schools anti-intellectualism. If there is only one well in town, that does not make it improper topoint out that it’s polluted.

I note your criticism of racial prefernces, hate crimes, speech codes social welfare programs and the political jihad never keep you from voting for the people who love them, and insisting the alternatives are beyond the Pale.

The Chinese Communist Party allows five “opposition” parties, who remind me very much of you relationship with Harvard, its allies and the Democratic Party. You’re not even a respectable gadfly. You’re political cover.

Try this again when you’re rested. You’ll still be wrong, but you’ll make a better case for yourself.

Anyway.

” “well, if they Chinese workers are more flexible, better trained and more self disciplined than the American workers are, the Chinese workers deserve to win.”

Really Jane? That’s what you took from the whole article?

If it were only about productivity, Americans would do fine. If it were only about base pay — then how is it Germany can pay *its* workers on the order of $40/hr, provide free health care?

And remain internationally competitive?

I have to get ready for work, so here’s a slide show, the first few slide are of particular interest:

http://www.connectthedotsusa.com/pdf/WheresMyJobSlides.pdf

Ask them yourself when the time comes. I don’t think it will be very long now–five, maybe ten years to the crisis requiring a national will and sense of identity which no longer exists. My guess? It won’t be their fault–not because their actions didn’t lead there, but because it wasn’t what they intended. What they intended was impossible.

And yes, it DOES matter what that common story is. You can tell about the bloody footprints on the road to Trenton, and you can can tell about the Creeks who fought alongside Andrew Jackson being driven from their homes afterward. Both are true. Tell only the first type, and you’ve sanitized history to the point of lying–but you’ve set a high bar for sacrifice in the national cause. Tell only the second type and you’ve told two lies–the second being that there is no common cause worthy of sacrifice. That sort of common story is getting easier to find, and it will lead to exactly the result you specified.

And now a word in favor of George Wasington. Yes, he was a slaveholder. Yes, Robert Carter freed all his slaves. But Washington never sold a person without that person’s consent–which he never got. He lived well within an admitedly good income, and in his will freed his slaves on his wife’s death, his savings establishing a considerable trust fund used to set the former slaves up in trades, and to provide for those who could not make a living for themselves. Robert Carter may be more appealing, but if a thousand tidewater planters had followed Washington’s example, it would have broken slavery in the United States in a generation.

And that is not generally taught either. I suspect it’s because while we don’t mind completely fictional heroes, real-life men who live in accordance with their moral codes make a lot of our teachers very uncomfortable.

(As for Carter being the only one to “do the right thing” I’d also like to know what more John Adams Ben Franklin or Alexander Hamilton might have done? Not every founding father was slaveholder to start with.)

And I’m not going back to three TV channels. I remember those three channels.