It is like Scientology for the extra retarded.

This is what I've termed "Cargo Cult Politics". They can't figure out how Republicans actually win, so they merely imitate the trappings. That's how they thought that Republicans were somehow better at "staying on message", igoring the fact that it's easy to stay consistent if you are saying what you actually believe instead of trying to misrepresent yourself to get votes. And so this time they're going to try to "stay simple".
Cool. We might as well chalk up a win in 2008, too. Filibuster-proof majority, here we come!

Yes, the left knows best and us poor clods in the right and middle, well, we are just to stupid for our own good. Never mind that most of us have as high, if not higher, IQs as the left, that we have the same education, and having the same, are actually smarter because we have overcome the liberal bias of college and think for ourselves. No matter how much you prove it to them they still think they know what's best for us, and what is an individual they ask? People who want to run their own lives? How stupid, when they could have the brilliant left do it for them. Lefties, your time in power is over, and hopefully it will stay over.

Ace--

Three words: Philosophy. Of. Governance.

If they run another election as the "anti" candidates, they'll lose. Mercifully for them, 2008 is a reset year, so they'll *have* to put at least some candidates who say, "Hey, I want this job to do good, and not just to prevent evil."

Oh, and as for Slate? Is it just me, or did they choose a real shitty time to go "All Lib, All The Time"?

I guess that if for the next four years they really want to be Al Franken with better hair, or Salon with more readers, fine by me. But by putting all their eggs in one basket, they just completed the jump off the cliff into political irrelevance to everyone but Josh Marshall, Filet-O-Fish, and that crazy tech support girl in my office who writes "NO MORE WAR!" on the zip drives she loans out.

Maybe Rich Lowry can bribe Hitch to come on over to National Review? He and Jonah can do shots. . . (my money is on Hitch-- you ALWAYS bet on the British drunk).

Cheers,
Dave

I thought there was a lot of simplicity in Bush's message, but that isn't the reason I voted for him. However, it is nice to support someone that doesn't need the foot pulled out of his mouth every couple days. Also, you didn't really need to go around telling people what Bush "meant to say" which is something Kerry's supporters had to do a lot of.

Also, it's nice that he actually has a message, unlike his opposition.

You know what I'll remember for the rest of my life? That all of these people were voting for a guy who spent half his life saying the Vietnam war was a waste and the Vietnam was not a threat to the US. Then says "I know what it's like to defend my country". From Vietnam? Well done, senator.

I love how lefties constantly insist that IQ is a fallacy, standardized testing is unfair, emotions are more important than intelligence, and such things simply don't matter (especially when testing is used for education reform).

But deep down, they're all just waiting for the moment to scream, "MY IQ IS HIGHER THAN YOURS! So you have to listen to ME because I'm SMART and you're DUMB!" Or something such as we get with all the sore losers today going on about how the "dumb Southerners" voted for Bush. The minute they lose, it's all about IQ.

I like it that he admits they don't have humanity.

Please, Iblis, the fact that 89% of the Democratic Party are reptilian aliens is about the worst kept secret in American politics.

Smart piece, Ace.

I'm reminded of an explanation, made some decades ago, why poor white trash were racist: it gave them someone to be better than.

Lifestyles of the loud and clueless.

They will never get it. Their whole self image is dependant on constant reinforcement of their ideas. That's why they live in echo-chambers like the DU. Conservatives will never be in that position because on a very deep level, we just don't get gratification by knowing that someone passionately agrees with us. I don't really go out of my way to market my ideology. My destiny is my own, and I'll take the heat, or the reward, for the decisions I make. Plain and simple.

I can't help following that letdown speech to its furthest end.

"I'm sorry but you're just too darn nice. If it were not for that I'd have your penis in my mouth right now, here on the quad."

"Um, what if I slapped you around a little?"

Every time the left loses an election, they blame their tactics rather than their ideas.

Hang on to this well written post, Ace. You can use it a lot in the future.

Hang on to this well written post, Ace. You can use it a lot in the future.

Heh. No need to hang on to it; this is third time I've written something similar.

I haven't had a new damn thing to say in at least six months. I've just basically been rewriting the same tired crap.

I've learned to be more sympathetic towards Maureen Dowd over the past year.

As to the dems picking a candidate, Saletan seems to be forgeting that what he is suggesting is exactly what they did. Kerry wasn't picked for intellect or nuance, he was picked precisely because they determined he could beat Bush. Must have been the hair. It's a good thing those people don't judge swimsuit contests, lord knows what we'd wind up seeing.

Well said, Ace. I noticed, too, the dems have a lot of imaginarey friends to prove their strange notions of what we all think and want. Forget valid studies. They have become so intellectual they simply Know. To make sure we believe them they invent "friends" to illustrate their Truth. It's for our own good. Maybe this is the same idea behind C-BS. We know the Truth and we just need to put a little something together to prove it to the little people.

Explanation number 1 - "We didn't get our message out" - places too much blame on them personally. It should be "We weren't allowed to get our message out".

This time around it's the Swifties who didn't allow them, but other elections, other culprits.

What I find interesting is how the left is going on about the process that created the modern conservative movement, but is unwilling to examine any of the core beliefs that informed the process. You may hear that the left needs "their Reagan" or "their Goldwater", a progressive of uncompromising stature around whom to build a movement. This idea of nominating a "simple" candidate is of a piece. The idea seems to be that, if we can only create a mirror image of the PROCESS that led to Republican success, then the same sort of outcome will happen for us.

Unexamined is the possibility that, no matter what the process, the American public will reject them because they reject the core tenets of liberalism. Does the left seriously think it would have helped if every time Bush referred to himself as a conservative Kerry would have called himself "progressive"? Quite the opposite. If anything, this election was the absolute best time to test this hypothesis. When are the Democrats likely to nominate a candidate with such sterling liberal credentials as antiwar activism and a 20-year liberal voting record? They act as if Kerry made a tactical mistake by running away from his record, when, in reality, running from his record was the only thing that made this election even close.

In my opinion, the left is still one Presidential ass-whipping away from a moment of clarity. To truly gain some wisdom, they will need to nominate a liberal who actually campaigns as a liberal. Until they get this ultimate rejection of their policies, they will be forever torn between aping centrism and running under their true colors.

(you could argue that this is what happened with Dukakis, but once again, the left attributed the loss to the man, not the message)

Top 10 reasons the Rethugs were able to steal the election

10. Jon Steward and George Carlin did not campaign

9. Fox “news”

8. Campaign finance loopholes

7. Too many idiots think war is good

6. Moral Majority

5. Swift Boat Vets

4. We are too nice, the Rethugs have no morals

3. Moral issues

2. Secret invisible vote rigging

1. Too many idiots were allowed to vote wrong

Gee, Ace, I actually had to think when I read that. Thoughtful, inciteful, succinct and on topic throughout. Totally unlike you. As a fan (not the round and round type) you made me think. Here again, something you rarely do.

If we look at today's liberal, oh, say someone like Michael Moore, we can draw several conclusions. I know, let me finish. The liberal of today is the sum total of liberal philosophy over the past 20-30 years. Mom and Dad started buying into the philosophy that IQ was unimportant. Grades were an illicit measure of ones ability and were unnecessarily harsh. Spanking is bad. Becoming too wealthy is evil. America is a bully.

Get it? Liberals have become what they are by following and believing in their own dogma. Well duh, you say. Really, it's true. They are all spoiled brats. They are a true product of their environments. All of our belief systems come from what we learn from our surroundings and our families. Children born of the liberal 60's and 70's can't see reality for the haze they've been insulated with for their entire lives. Liberal politicians, like Mr. Kerry, pander to this inbred philosophy because they can always count on results.

When people say liberals are going to have to wake up to what the moral majority think, well, no they won't. Until morality, true history and belief in right and wrong enter the educational mores of this country, it will never change. What we have to do as "roadkill for intellectuals" is quit abdicating our reponsibility to our children and our peers and start fighting for values in our system once again. It doesn't have to be right, center right, or left. It just has to begin with teaching the truth and accepting responsibilty.

Your friend was clearly on the wrong Ladder, tried to jump to the other ladder, was kicked in the head and fell into the Abyss.

I'm not sure how Ladder Theory applies to Party Politics, but getting "kicked in the head and falling into the Abyss" does sound a bit like what happened to the Dems last night.

Geez, I'm still riding that high. This has been such a great day.

You know what's better? I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and Bush will STILL be President. God, I love this country.

Oh, and here's Ladder Theory for the unititiated: http://www.intellectualwhores.com/masterladder.html

Some people may find it offensive, ... but not many of the readers on this site I think ...

Many years ago,I decided the college educated world was divided into two groups,Fuzzies and Techs.This was dependent on whether a major was knowledge or feelings based.A friend and I compiled a Fuzzy Quotient Test,based on objective t/f questions.Students were asked toidentify the intellectual rigor of nine major groups ;math,history,etc.We then correlated SAT scores and political party affiliation with boththe SAT and the F.Q.scores.The less difficult the major{subjectively},the lower the SAT and the higher the F.Q. The higher the F.Q.,the more likely the person wastohave voted Democratic.I remember one ofthe questions was whether a femaleathlete had run a four minute mile;17 of the 20 social science majors believed it was true.{Either the social scienceor the education major was the nadir

Wow, cargo cultism. One of my all time favorite paradigms. It ranks right up there explaining the left along with the emperor’s new cloths (emanations and penumbras) and the golden goose (greedy pharmaceuticals).

Postmodernism is basically cargo cultism from France.

Nathan - Cargo Cult Politics. Exactly right.

Fan of Richard Feynmann by any chance?

all the sore losers today going on about how the "dumb Southerners" voted for Bush. The minute they lose, it's all about IQ.

I live in the rural South.
I have an IQ of 165.
I voted for Bush.

And, on the myth of only dumb Southerners voting for Bush -- the county-by-county map:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm

Boris - Yep, post-modernism is cargo cult scholarship.

But then most philosophy is cargo cult stuff.

Wow, Feynmann. Who isn't?

I know what cargo cults are, but what's the connection between that and liberalism, again? In what way is it a cargo cult philosophy?

You mean just that they find things but don't understand them and ascribe to them talismanic powers?

The case for postmodernism ...

The difference between science and otherways of knowing is that science is somehow stealing all the mojo from the otherways and that's the only reason it appears to work better.

Let's deconstruct the hell out of it and our otherways will start working just like that.

Well, post-modernism specifically is gibberish dressed up to look like philosophy. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, but it's phrased in philosophical terms to make it look good. Lots of philosophical terms. There's a random post-modernist babble generator somewhere on the web that produces output indistinguishable from the real thing.

Physicist Alan Sokal famously exposed this with his paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity which was published in Social Text in 1996. It was deliberately constructed to be completely nonsensical, but the editors of that august journal accepted it with glad cries.

The couldn't tell that it was nonsense because all post-modernism is nonsense.

Here's an example of what Nathan's talking about, Ace:

I remember talking to Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Dem Network, at the Democratic convention last summer. You'll remember, he and his group were profiled in the Times magazine around that time. The article, in brief, was about plans to create a Democratic-leaning counter-establishment along the lines of what Republicans did two generations ago -- with an alternative media, activist groups, organized political giving, in short a political infrastructure.

No need for Democrats to even consider the possibility that there's anything wrong with their message-- all they have to do is build bamboo hangars and a bamboo control tower to Rosenberg's plan, and the cargo planes will begin landing.

Well, it's interesting. I just like the whole idea of cargo cults, and if that topic can be mixed with politics, sounds cool to me.

I don't know who came up with the idea first, but if any of you guys have an interest in polishing it up into an essay, I'd like to post it here.

If it was Pixy, well, you should probably write that out and post it, rather than wasting your good ideas in my comments.

Okay, I see upthread it was Nathan who started it. Any interest?

Pixy,

Yeah, I like that hoax. Very funny.

I've had the same thought for a while. I think Steven Den Beste has written on it too. But he's gone now, so we have to pick up the slack on the deep-philosophising-from-an-engineer's-perspective stuff.

Lots of philosophical terms. There's a random post-modernist babble generator somewhere on the web that produces output indistinguishable from the real thing.

I dated a postmodernist for a while, and talking with her about ideas was just a chore.

She wanted me to edit a paper she'd written, and I sort of had to beg off, because what I needed to say was, "Honey, basically, my method of 'editing' this into readable form would be just to induce you to try to explain to me what the hell you're trying to say, if anything, and then rewriting it entirely without keeping a single word you've written, except for some prepositions and articles."

But I also knew that that was the game she was expected to be playing, and I knew that the turgid, infinitely recursive style was actually what was considered good writing in her department.

I think I just told her that it was "beyond me" or something like that, although, honestly, I think it was probably saying something both simple and stupid that I could easily have understood had it been written in a language similar to English.

Air America is another example of cargo cultism in action. Then again, so are half the movies that come out of Hollywood.

There's a great article on a net by an engineer (I think) who decided to 1) understand postmodernism 2) fake postmoderism and 3) write a passably plausible postmodern essay.

It boils the schtick down to its three or four simple, idiotic tropes, and explains how to dress those simple ideas (like "viewing the object changes both the viewer and the object," "viewing the object puts the viewer in a superior position to the object," crap like that) into inpenetrable recursions, digressions, and shout-outs ("as Eco noted in his essay on Derrida").

"Then again, so are half the movies that come out of Hollywood."

Galaxy Quest, doubly brilliant, because in spoofing Star Trek, it used a favorite Star Trek plot ("discovering 'historical artifacts' from earth and patterning a society on them") to explain why the aliens had built the Star Trek spaceship in the first place.

Now that's recursive.

The "blame the voters" mentality is sweeping the True Believers contingent, isn't it? One of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Moon, has a long thread on her SFF newsgroup in which all of her like-minded friends commiserate over how the "sheep" and "lemmings" of the USA ignored all the utterly clear evidence of the EVIL BU$HITLER's plan to, uh, be evil or something. I dunno.

Yes, of course, the American people were all dupes, patsies, or fundie nutballs forced by Rove's machinations into voting for PinocchiBush and the puppetmaster Cheney, whose cold mechanical heart runs on Halliburton stock prices and ground-up kittens.

It just *couldn't* be the case that the voters rationally chose Bush, who despite his many flaws showed greater leadership in the crucial issues of Iraq and terrorism than his opponent. No, it's just not *possible* that reasonable people could and have disagreed on the many problems and challenges facing this nation in the years ahead.

Because, if that were the case, that would mean that the "Bush=Pure Evil" crowd were, well, *wrong*.

No, no. Best not to think about it. Dean in '08!

- Cliff

p.s. Ms. Moon has also predicted that there will be a "a nuclear attack on this country within the first two years (probably in the front half of that)" because of a Bush win. You heard it here first, folks! Start digging!

"So much of liberal politics is identity politics, and not of the normal race or religion or sexuality kind."

So true. My cousins in Manhattan are just like that - their views of themselves, of others and really of the world are a product of their liberal ideology/superiority complex. And everyone and everything is rated/valued/distorted based on how it fits, or can be twisted to fit, into their ideology. Those in agreement with them are 'smart'; everyone else is beyond the pale.

Mr Pomo was flying coach to Dallas when he decided he’d rather sit in first class. He finds an empty seat and settles in. The flight attendant notices and tells him he’ll have to move back to coach.

So Mr Pomo tells her “The space time coordinates you refer to as coach are continuously overtaking the space time I occupy with a velocity approaching 600 mph. Therefore it is simply an artifact of your limited perception that prevents you from appreciating that here and there are actually the same place in a more universal frame of reference”

The attendant mentions this to the steward who goes over and tells Mr Pomo that since he is not ticketed for first class and he will have to leave. So Mr Pomo tells him “Your arbitrary class distinctions are a historically discredited form of oppression that no member of modern enlightened society could possibly honor.”

The steward mentions this to the captain, who tells the copilot “take over for a minute; I know how to deal with this”. He walks over to Mr Pomo and politely wispers something in his ear. After that Mr Pomo meekly gets up and returns to coach. When the captain returns to the cockpit the copilot asks “What did you tell that guy?”

The captain replied “I just told him that first class wasn’t going to Dallas.”

I was really amazed at the people I met during the GOP GOTV efforts that said. " I am not voting for that guy ...he is an idiot."

As I was walking back to my car form voting I thought about a similar encounter in the parking lot.

-This guy is Presidnet of the US for 4 year, Ran Texas for 6 years, Gets 10 Critical TOp Secret Briefings per Day, Gives 3-6 campaign speechs each day...and intro and thanks each local official by name. He ran companies,Wroked on his dads campaign, Flew Fighter Jets at 800 mph, has a Harvard MBA, Went to Yale undergrade, Perp School...This guy in the parking lot probably can't figure out how to change the channel on his TV if his clicker is lost between the cushions...Thank GOd GWB is Running the country vs. that really smart 'parking lot guy'.

I'm amazed to hear Elizabeth Moon is such a moonbat. Considering that most of her lead charaters are female super-soldiers you'd think she'd was a pre-emptive action sort of woman. I guess it stops being fun when reality is involved.

So does that George Carlin joke mean that if I drive slower than Paul Anka I'm making a fucking maniac out of him?

And it's Zrimsek with the double callback and an Anka reference for the triple word score!

Sorry, I'm giddy here, but as an English prof, I have to keep it on the downlow.

Saletan is right, even though he really
means to be ironic, not accurate.

Book-learned intellectuals do NOT
make good presidents. The opposite
isn't necessarily true, but the
converse is. That is, simple men
aren't necessarily good presidents,
but the best presidents in recent
times were non-intellectuals.

Consider Hoover, Nixon, Carter, Clinton.

All were absolute masters of detail.
All were bad presidents, specifically
because they obsessed about the trees
and couldn't see the forest.

Now consider Roosevelt and Reagan.

Neither could have answered a question
about the Deputy Under-premier of
Lower Slobbovia, but both had a grand
vision and knew how to communicate
that vision.

Actually, Ace, there's a pretty good book by David Lebedoff about this called The Uncivil War that touches on this theme about how the (self-appointed) elites see themselves as better than the rest of us imbeciles and the implications it has had on American democracy.