The Reticulator

I didn’t think the day after the election would reveal this: There really ARE a lot of people out there who think of the election of Barak Obama in terms of race. There are conservatives who ought to be concentrating on Obama’s fascist proposals; instead they think of him as a black man. And there are liberals who think their vote was somehow an expiation of white guilt.

These are nice people, the ones who probably won’t take part in the pogroms. They are people I link to in my blogs.

I hate it when people live up to the stereotypes.

I don’t even want to analyze what’s going on. It’s too embarrassing.

Today I realized one more thing that’s irritating about the way the left is treating Joe the Plumber. They keep talking about what would happen under Obama’s plan. It’s that word plan.

In the olden days it wouldn’t have been called a plan. It would have been called a campaign promise.

We all know what those are worth. But some people somehow think calling it a “plan” somehow makes it legitimate. Under Obama’s plan, he’s going to tax us a lot and somehow that is going to generate magic revenue that he is going to graciously bestow on people. We know it’s all pie in the sky, and we know he knows it, because he’s dressing up his handouts and calling them “tax cuts.”

But that’s not what’s really annoying about all of this. What’s annoying is that people think the economy can actually be planned. But the only part that’s a sure thing is the tax increases. That we can count on. In fact, we can count on getting even more of those than are being promised. There is a huge government constituency that will hold Obama to those promises. As for the rest of it, that part can no more be planned than affordable housing can be planned. And we now see what all of the plans to give us affordable housing got us.

BTW, I googled “Obama’s plan” and “McCain’s plan” (with the quotes). “Obama’s plan” gives 516,000 hits, and “McCain’s plan” 310,000. That would be a reason to vote for McCain over Obama, especially when you notice that there are a lot more web pages that talk about Obama’s plan as though a plan is a good thing. That’s a good reason to vote for McCain (but it’s not a good enough reason).

Nostalgia is in the air. The presidential campaign is reminding those of us of a certain age of our youth, when McCarthyism roamed the earth.

“Senator Obama, is it true that terrorist Bill Ayers is a fellow traveler of yours?”

“Governor Palin, are you now or have you ever been a member of a traitorous secessionist party in Alaska? ” (This was an accusation being flung around in the comments section of Strangemaps.)

“Senator Obama’s health care plan is socialism.”

“The Big Bailout is socialism.”

These are all good topics of discussion, but to reduce them to labels and guilt-by-association is not exactly discussion.

Instead of just crying “socialism!” Obama’s opponents ought to explain that his health care plan is bad for the same reasons that socialism is bad. And they should tell us what those reasons are. The same for the big bailout. It’s more work that way, but it’s necessary work.

Palin’s association with a secessionist party is certainly worth asking about. Maybe some good discussion would come of it. Andrew Jackson hung around with secessionists when he was a Tennessee politician, before he became president and eventually became a strong supporter of union, as was revealed at the 1830 Jefferson Day dinner. (“Our Federal Union! It must be preserved!“) Maybe an inquiry into the topic would lead to a discussion of secessionist movements in Chechyna and Georgia, and of just what it is that makes a unified nation.

And if it turns out that Obama had friends and acquaintance from all walks of live and all ideologies, including terrorist Bill Ayers and Pat Robertson’s fan club, that would actually make me more respectful of him. I would hope he would have done more to influence them to moderate their ways than vice versa, but mere association wouldn’t be a reason to oppose him.

But for now it looks like we won’t get into those interesting discussions. We’ll have to settle for nostalgia for the good old days of the HUAC.

Last night Google News was flogging the story about Carla Fiorina and Sarah Palin. It was giving prominent place to headlines telling us that Fiorina said Palin was not ready to run a major corporation.

My immediate thought was that none of the candidates in this campaign is ready to run a major corporation.

Then, if one looked further into the news articles, the truth came out. That’s exactly what Fiorina had said. Somebody with Palin on the mind had asked Fiorina about Palin, and she answered the question truthfully. But that person had not even asked Fiorina about the other candidates. Fiorina had to take it upon herself to bring that up. But that didn’t make it into the headlines. No, the news media are obsessed with anything that can be spun against Palin, no matter how contradictatory they have to be about it.

There are reasons for serious concern about Palin’s candidacy, e.g. on foreign policy — reasons that might keep me and others from voting for McCain-Palin. And I’m not talking about her level of experience.

But if you believe the news coming out of the opposition research teams, you’d conclude that Palin was probably the only one of the four candidates who would come close to making money for you at the head of a major corporation. Put Obama in charge, especially of a corporation that needed to remove the deadwood, and you could say goodbye to whatever money you invested. He’s never once bucked the corrupt Chicago machine. McCain would be too busy finding ways to annoy people to focus on his job. Biden just doesn’t have the chops. But if we believe the opposition research, Palin would get things done. She would be ruthless enough to make heads roll and get the people she needs in place, people who would be motivated to focus on the company’s mission. She would have just the right balance between focusing on the big picture and paying attention to the details.

It’s not necessarily the way a government should operate, so it doesn’t tell us much about her suitability to be Vice President. (Think about Ross Perot, a successful businessman who had ideas of being President.) But run a corporation? Most of us would pick Sarah Palin far ahead of any of the other three to quickly get up to speed and make money for us.