From Under the Rubble…Words, Words, Words!
A few weeks ago, Pope Francis asked us to pray, fast, and give alms on Saturday, September 7, for peace in Syria. We did, and on Monday, September 9, Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times somehow occasioned what Joe Sobran once referred to as “the qualm before the storm.”
The Rubble couldn’t help but notice in the background noise to war the tenor of our leaders’ reaction to Putin’s piece. “It turned my stomach,” said Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I was insulted,” said House Speaker Boehner.
Well, isn’t it nice that our nation’s leaders tell us how they feel!
All this comes to mind as we observe the cacophony of verbal concupiscence surrounding the alleged “shutdown” of the federal government.
Harry Reid calls the Republicans “anarchists.” For Pelosi, they’re “arsonists.” Chuck “The Schume” calls them “fanatics.” Dan Pfeiffer, a “Senior White House Advisor,” calls them “suicide bombers.” Al Gore calls them “Political Terrorists.”
According to the New York Times, Obama accuses them of “blackmail.”
Blackmail. That reminds me of my father’s story of his days as a young lawyer in 1923. His client was being blackmailed, so Dad paid a private visit to a senior judge to seek some advice.
“Pat,” the judge said, “there are only three things you can do with a blackmailer. You can pay him. You can kill him. Or you can tell the truth.”
Tell the truth? These days, it appears that a lot of politicians don’t want to tell the truth – or hear it, for that matter.
They will erupt with indignation and lay bare their innermost feelings, but none of them will have done with the epithets and speak rationally. Intelligent discussion might survive in private conversation, but, when it comes to the public, all we get is bombast.
The unanimity of this tactic indicates that it emanates from carefully-conducted research, conducted by the Beltway’s “public opinion experts.”
The Density Of The Masses
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
At a recent birthday party in Washington, I met an old friend who ranks among the best of professional pollsters. “You have your finger on the pulse of the public mind,” I said. “What mentality are you dealing with when you reach out to the public at large?”
“Many of them can’t read very well,” my friend replied. “They certainly can’t write. And you can’t ask them long questions, because they get lost after a couple of lines. You have to keep your sentences very short.”
My friend’s report harmonizes to an alarming degree with the views of my friends who teach college students. And apparently our politicians agree.
Well, with two generations of voters who have been brought up in public schools to “feel good about themselves,” should we be surprised that our politicians are counseled by the experts to tell these people how they feel?
But keep it short. “I was insulted.” “It turned my stomach.”
After all, explaining the shutdown rationally might take more than two sentences.
It would also require big words, like “Constitution” and “Separation of Powers.”
It might also require a detour into that dreaded subject in which pupils often fare so miserably – arithmetic.
When paired with challenging prose, math merely compounds the difficulty. “Your household income is your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) (joint MAGI if you’re married), plus the MAGI of your dependents who make enough money to have to file a tax return,” says Healthcare.gov. “If you don’t have coverage in 2014, you’ll have to pay a penalty of $95 per adult, $47.50 per child, or 1% of your income (whichever is higher).”
“Uh… when do I get my Obamaphone?”
In 1984’s Ministry of Truth, Outer-Party member Syme is hard at work on a new edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He regales Winston with his dreams of ultimate success:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make Thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it…. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
Uh-oh. Syme was telling the truth.
So he was vaporized.
Big Brother has Newspeak, Huxley’s Brave New World has the “Feelies.”
Are we there yet?
Fetal Slaveholder Syndrome
Last month the Senate Judiciary Committee approved President Obama’s nomination of Cornelia Pillard to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
According to Lifenews.com, Pillard’s professional writings include her view that “[r]eproductive rights, including the rights to contraception and abortion, play a central role in freeing women from historically routine conscription into maternity.”
Alas, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were passed only after the War Between the States, so the right of a mother to kill her slaveholding baby is quite new to the law. In fact, Ms. Pillard acknowledges that her rather lethal take on the matter defies centuries of tradition and practice. But that’s fine with her, because, unlike the rest of the law, “reproductive freedom” must admit no limits.
“Antiabortion laws and other restraints on reproductive freedom not only enforce women’s incubation of unwanted pregnancies, but also prescribe a ‘vision of the woman’s role’ as mother and caretaker of children in a way that is at odds with equal protection.”
Well, if Ms. Pillard’s nomination should fail, she can always apply for a job in the Hatchery in Brave New World.
Cure For 95% Of All Cancers Found! Treatment Free!
What if that headline were true?
If a pharmaceutical firm developed a drug that cured 95% of all cancers, throughout the world, it would make billions, win every Nobel Prize, and gain accolades of gratitude and praise from millions for generations to come.
The same is true for Alzheimer’s, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or Diabetes.
But curiously, no major news outlet has trumpeted the news about the miraculous cure for HIV/AIDS that is now available free to everyone in the world, no matter what their social or financial standing.
Why not, you might ask. After all, according to the Center for Disease Control, this well-kept secret could prevent 94.9 percent of HIV/AIDS.
That’s right: the CDC reports that in 2011, “94.9 percent of HIV diagnoses among teenage boys (13-19-years-old) were linked to “male-to-male” sex. And 94.1 percent of the cases among young men ages 20-24 were from “gay” sex.
President Obama’s FY 2014 federal budget request contains some $30 billion for HIV/AIDS research and treatment.
In a sane world, wouldn’t the president take to the airwaves and celebrate the logical, free, sure-fire cure for HIV/AIDS – abstinence from male-to-male sex – far and wide?
Well, uh….. no.
Instead, as Peter LaBarbera reports, Obama’s CDC awards taxpayer funding to build “self-esteem” among homosexuals (as young as 13) and to protect them from those who might try to warn them of the consequences of their actions (which the CDC daintily classifies as “risk behaviors”).
Such truth-tellers are “bullies,” you see. And Obama doesn’t want to bully the gays.
He only bullies Republicans.
This article, From Under the Rubble…Words, Words, Words! is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/from-under-the-rubble-words-words-words/
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Excellent article!
It’s like Obama secretly hates the whole system and doesn’t mind at all bringing it down if that’s what it takes to include all those he feels should be included–which is everybody regardless of their situation, regardless of their own particular responsibility. With homosexuals and their ‘unions’ in the military, they announced on a Monday that now benefits were open to homosexual ‘couples’, and three days later they announced that benefits had been cut or curtailed across the nation (in milItary housing, commissary privileges, health care). And as you may know, it already was a scandal. NPR did a special on it just a month or so back. There are veterans affairs buildings that are in danger of actual collapse under the weight of the paperwork.–I’m serious, there are filled room after room with stacks of unread files. But no benefits get awarded, to the men and women dumb enough to fight in a US ‘war.’ And now it’s the same with Obama care. You have to listen to what was the opener of the California ‘exchange.’ The speaker, California some politican, was saying as he ‘cut the ribbon,’ literally, ‘Now you won’t get rejected, no matter what.’ Right. The rest of us will bear the financial burden to treat your obesity, your sexually transmitted diseases, your HIV, your sex changes. It reminded me of the shock I felt in Mexico when I first went to buy car insurance and they didn’t ask for my driver’s license, so I thought maybe I hadn’t understood the Spanish, so I offered it, and the guy said, No, we don’t need it, and I said, How will you check my driving record, then? And he looked at me with complete perplexity: we don’t check driving records, he said. But, I said, what about the rates for bad drivers? And he said, No, it’s the same for everybody. Perhaps you have to know how some folks, some young folks, some young lady folks, drive in Mexico to see the injustice of that kind of algorhythm. You can pass ten fender benders on the way to the grocery store every single day. And you will pay for them, in Mexico. And now the same with our health insurance. And we won’t be able to afford it anyway, we can no longer afford our property taxes, and the system will collapse. And then they are going to start killing the older people. Out of mercy, of course.But you can say goodbye to your health insurance as you know it. Profits and sin will eat it up.
Yes, of course, we want to help those who need help. We want to help people with problems. there are very many charity organization that make sure kids with health problems, adults with most health problems get help. But problems caused by people’s own behavior is another matter, and it’s real. There was a guy in the hospital when I had my heart attack who weighed like five hundred pounds, had both arms and both legs below the knee amputated, continued to eat prodigious amounts (with help from ‘friends’), and drove the staff crazy. He was in and out of the hospital a couple of times a month, and they were bitter about it even though it was their job. Because it’s like ten grand every hospitalization, and they were keenly aware of the resources it was eating up. Sorry.
Sorry to rant, too, but the pattern is just so clear. Obama is a wrecker of the existing system. That’s what change means to him. We can’t afford what he promoses and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t mind seeing it collapse. Suckers didn’t deserve their health care, appears to be what he’s thinking.