Well, Thursday was an interesting day. Abracadabrajab once again proved that he's profoundly and dangerously mentally ill and should be restrained. He doesn't believe in the Holocaust or in 9/11. But he's looking forward to those 72 virgins. Maybe don't feed him for a couple days to re-acquaint him with hunger and give him some anchor in reality.
I didn't listen to the Comrade's speech (didn't really listen to Abracadabrajab's either, in full). Apparently the Comrade is still saying to Iran, "Hey, come on over to the White House. We'll talk."
Again: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The Comrade doesn't get it. Abracadabrajab doesn't want to be friends. He'd rather vaporize the planet. A more productive approach might be to help Israel vaporize Abracadabrajab first. But we don't want to piss off any crazy militant muslim terrorists. After all, what did they ever do to us?
On the positive side, the Republicans came out with their Pledge to America at almost the same moment the Comrade was addressing the U.N. I found it interesting that they unveiled the Pledge at a lumber yard, also that the guy who owns the lumber yard is so incredibly articulate. Not criticizing anything about this. Sort of a Joe-the-Plumber touch. It's nice that the Republicans are working so hard to look connected to people outside the Beltway.
The Pledge is actually pretty nice. I wonder who wrote it. Nice typefont... Poor Richard? You can download the whole thing in a PDF file, but I don't have the address at hand. Just google it. Pretty quick reading, apparently in keeping with the promise to make political stuff manageable.
Anyway, I read the whole thing and found it actually kind of compelling. I really, really hope they mean it. They didn't make a lot of promises, and I've heard Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan (Young Guns) on TV all day, explaining that "These are things we can do right now in congress, even before the election."
Well, not all of them. There's a bunch of stuff in there that talks about reforming congressional rules and somehow I can't even imagine Pazzo Pelosi or Harry Reid endorsing any of it. For one thing, the Pledge doesn't support the idea of writing legislation behind closed doors and then disallowing any debate and/or amendments. You really do need a majority to set that to rights.
Also went to the American Spectator web site to see what kind of opinion was raging there amongst the commentators regarding the Pledge. Kinda predictable. The libertarians believe you should just blow up Washington and start over (or maybe not); the moderates are in a "show me" frame of mind; and no one thinks the Pledge goes far enough. They want specific solutions.
I don't. I kinda like the vagueness of it. At least I prefer that to the other party's approach -- coming in with a full-blown agenda and detailed proposals thousands of pages long that, apparently, were just left on the House's doorstep in the middle of the night by some kind of Beltway Tooth Fairy (likely sponsored by George Soros or one of his minions.) I like that the Republicans aren't over-promising and that they're allowing some space for political realities.
And here's also a key point: If people are free to find their own solutions to their own problems, they will come up with a billion different solutions. Things no one has even thought of yet. I much prefer that to the government locking us all into one way of doing things. If you bring-your-own-bill, you might end up having to defend something that secretly you know really sucks, but it's yours.
And here's an example of another dangers:
The dems say: "Here's a massive bill to nationalize the American health care industry."
Everyone else says: "I don't like it."
The dems say: "Well, where's your plan then?"
That's kind of a fallacy, you know. If you go back and write your own massive bill to control the health care industry, you're conceding the dem's point -- that the health care industry needs to be federally controlled. Either way, you end up with socialized medicine. See? It's a trap. I'm glad the Republicans didn't fall for it.
The truth is, the health care industry doesn't need federal control, except to protect against things like fraud or outright criminal activity -- and the insurance industry has been subject to plenty of that. But let people find their own solutions. Including insurance companies. Let them develop all kinds of policies, anything anyone is willing to pay for. What's wrong with that?
That's freedom. It's unpredictable. It unleashes everyone's imagination, their knowledge, their capabilities in general. Then you get 35 or 50 or more solutions, and you can bet that at least a few will be positively brilliant.
You know, it's because of our freedom that America is such a great country. I'm not being sappy and weepy here. It's true. If people are free to attack any problem -- any challenge at all -- you get like an explosion of really cool stuff. 'Course some of it will be junk, but it's worth sorting through the junk to find the gems.
I used to be a magazine editor. Look at it this way: You have all those blank pages to fill every month. You can drive yourself nuts writing stories, racking your brain for new ideas and then searching for some expert to develop them for you, or you can see what comes in "over the transom" and invite others to help you and let them do their own thing on it. ('Course, you do the final cut....) But it's amazing. You find out how many people can do a better job at things than you can, come up with lots of neat ideas. It's astounding the talent that surrounds us all.
So rather than having an ironclad list of resolutions and proposals all ready to jam through congress by twisting arms and making threats, just free up the process and let it go. The results will be positive -- better than anything we've ever seen. You can depend on that. I think this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
Save the Republic.
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