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“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
– George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946
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Anyone retaining respect for the United Nations will jettison their misguided sentiments next year.
But there is an option.
Come spring when even atheists catch a glimmer of God in the annual renewal of life, the U.N. will host an anti-racism conference. Like most Orwellian institutions, the name given saints disguises the monster beneath.
The head of the monster de jure is the chairman of the committee who hails from Libya. Unknown for its adherence to civil or human rights, yet well known for explicit links to bombing jumbo jets and an aggressive WMD program, suspicion of Libyan racial intolerance is understandable.
Since criminals are pack animals, hand-selected “friends of the chair” will include Iran and other ideological backwaters. The explicit aim of the conference leadership appears to again claim that Zionism is a form a racism and thus the only way to counter such is to be even more racist (repeat until dizzy and you will have as good of a grasp of mid-East politics as anyone). A European Union proposal to discuss “freedom of expression” as part of the conference was denied as being “political in nature.”
Odd. The U.N. is a political machine but with less class, honor and ability than all the others. Why not discuss political matters?
The anti-racism conference is an offshoot of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council which has little to do with rights and appears to be opposed to humans. An idealist recently proposed that the Council oppose female genital mutilation, a procedure performed in barbarous localities and whereby many enjoyable pieces of the feminine reproductive system (clitoris, labia) are removed with little warning and no anesthetic.
Egypt’s response was “We will not discuss issues related to Shariah law.”
The U.N. is hopelessly soiled. Since U.N. membership is open to all nations — regardless of what band of baboons run these countries — co-opting the organization to spread human abuse is a natural direction for the U.N. to go. Like welfare offices everywhere, the U.N. cannot discriminate between good and bad actors and in short order the evil, corrupt and lazy run the show.
Hence the un-UN (also warmly referred to as the Alternate U.N. or Liberty league). The proposal calls for free nations to form a new confederation with higher admission prices to keep out the riffraff. The gauntlet might include a list of civil and human rights and a track record of adherence (which means my friends in the U.K. and Mexico might have a tough time getting in given their bans on self defense tools).
This alternate United Nations would receive most of the cash currently dumped into United Nations Plaza. The lucre would be used to actively export freedom and counter balance anti-human initiative, instead of extravagant life styles for third world diplomats. It would also provide free nations a perpetual planning forum for promoting freedom universally.
And the weakened United Nations would remain as a year-round debating society and a good place to keep careful watch on the likes of Lybia and their pals.
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Is Obama nano-thin or jello?
I spent an enjoyable hour chatting with my childhood chum and painfully funny fellow Chris Muir, creator and chief instigator of the Day By Day Cartoon. We share an insatiable appetite for politics and bashing anyone remotely disingenuous.
So naturally we talked a long time about Barack Obama.
I betray no secret in exposing Obama’s gift for reciting lofty teleprompter platitudes. His lighter-than-air oratory now generates complaints from residents in heaven, a plane to which Obama’s speeches have ascended. Jesus is particularly pissed over Obama’s messianic messaging that threatens to steal His thunder in the actual second coming.
Chris claimed that Obama’s policy and character were “nano thin” — so slight as to be transparent and thus impervious to serious assault. Try to spear his position and like morning mist his position separates, engulfs and reforms. My more simplistic take was that Obama is like a fist full of Jello: whenever you squeeze to get a grip on it’s substance, it simply squishes through your fingers.
And oddly a newspaper that is slightly to the left of the American Communist Party agrees.
On the same day Chris and I traded Obama Barbs, the San Francisco Chronicle — a paper with an editorial board manic enough to publish my op/eds — ran a pair of page two Obama stories, the substance of which being that Obama has no substance.
In a single day Obama changed his position on offshore drilling and reneged on his vow to debate McCain in town hall formats, opting instead to swat softballs tossed by mainstream media mates instead of grenade lobbed by agitated voters.
I’m no McCain fan. I wish he at least offered the entertainment value of other candidates. After eight years of presidential preposterousness, McCain may be boring enough to be electable.
Obama offers voters something of which to be wary. When trapped — changing position, playing the race card or side-stepping his notorious acquaintances — he nuances. He attempts to explain away what he did or said by shifting slightly to one side or another, propelled using nearly Orwellian language. His position on anything is as firm as a fist full of Jello.
Obama’s polling slide shows that his act is wearing thin. It is not just libertarian-leaning free thinkers like Chris and myself who believe this. Willie Brown — an icon of the California and San Francisco Democrat machines — was quoted in the same edition of the Chronicle saying (and I edited for brevity):
Right now, Obama still appears overscripted. Too perfect.
When Obama gets off the teleprompter, he is as dull …
But right now, Obama is way too focused on being precise in his presentation. Everything has to appear well thought out.
Remember, the public never really trusts a politician until you make a mistake. They don’t want “perfect” - they want human.
No politician can be trusted without the aide of tar, feathers and loaded shotguns. Obama’s policy and promise shape-shifting makes me want to invest in feather futures.
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Barack Obama is playing the race canard … again.
Responding to a reporter, Obama claimed that the McCain camp was “… going to try to … make you scared of me … you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”‘
This is not the first time that Obama has accused his opposition of being racist without any proof thereof. This particular form of falsehood is not new but it is clever. Race has always been an issue in this campaign, primarily because Obama and the media make such a fuss about it (frankly, who cares if an unrepentant socialist is black, white, half-toned, or purple with pink polka dots — his authoritarian tendencies are the issue). The interesting aspect is Obama’s externalization.
For anyone fortunate enough to have not delved into the pseudoscience of Freudian psychology, externalization is the process whereby a person projects their own self loathing onto other people, perhaps the only principle that fraud Freud developed. This defense mechanism makes it possible for weak minded people to deal with what they dislike most about themselves by perceiving the same fault in others.
We do not have to look far to find the origins of Obama’s externalization. In his own book he relates tales of being at odds with his own identities and his difficulty with selecting one. The process was greatly slowed by his admitted narcotic abuse. Being uncertain of his race (either one), drugged out of his skull, inflicted by the insane logic of an openly racist reverend … it is little wonder that Obama has a certain sense of self hatred or that he would rapidly externalize it upon his opponents.
Undecided voters will decide this election. Analysis of independents throughout recent history shows they research more deeply than the average voter and that they base much of their decision on their gut instinct about the integrity (or lack thereof) of the candidate. Obama’s externalizations will be his undoing as independent voters evaluate who is the true racist in this race.
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The ability to laugh remove can remove pain … mainly by preventing us from telling people what we really think about them.
A book I’m peddling to publishers titled Catalog of Canards describes how political lies are created and spread. My tongue-in-cheek prose help mollify the reader who otherwise would self-destruct from anger inflicted by the realization of how thoroughly hoodwinked they have been. In outlining the book I was reasonably sure that I described nearly every form of fib in the dirty dregs of democracy.
I may be wrong.
Attending a meeting of the American Constitution Society — a conclave of left-wing people interested in rigging the judiciary to defeat the will of the people — I heard a form of lie that I am uncertain how to codify. The panel composed of law professors and civil rights litigators (including a lone libertarian from the Pacific Legal Foundation) opened their review of the 2007/2008 Supreme Court season with a discussion of D.C. v. Heller, the now famous gun ban case.
The discussion was academic, which was entertaining for a constitutional autodidact like myself (incidentally, never use the word autodidact when speaking to your congressional representative … I did that to mine and his limited intellect kept him from understanding the concept). Most commentators conducted light ridicule of the majority decision in the case, disliking a ruling that said the Second Amendment does secure an individual right.
A seeming sane legal strumpet from Stanford lobbed a lie which I’m still struggling to classify. In referring to the Heller decision she claimed the court “created a new right.”
If I wanted to torture my readers, I could wax for hours on the nature of reserved rights, preexisting rights, 10th Amendment prerogative and any number of conlaw constructions confirming that everything in the Bill of Rights was purposefully composed and ratified to document sacrosanct individual rights jealously guarded by “the people.” It is mechanically impossible for a judge to create a new right since the basic theory of the American legal system is that all rights are reserved by the people and that we grant government select powers in order to maintain a more-or-less civil society.
That someone so clueless teaches law should scare everyone.
So I’m stuck. Throughout my book I cite the various forms of falsehoods as the lie of … For example, when the media omits pertinent information from a news story it is called The Lie of Context. The Stanford professor’s perjury is difficult to classify. It is in essence Orwellian but defies even George’s subterfuge schema.
Suggestions for a codification are welcome.
