Columnist.
Among the many words that don't mean what they say, but which too many of us accept as if they did, are those staples of political discussion, "liberals" and "conservatives." Most liberals are not liberal and most conservatives are not conservative. We might be better off just calling them X and Y, instead of imagining that we are really describing their philosophies. Moreover, like most confusion, it has consequences.
Words are supposed to convey thoughts, but they can also obliterate thoughts and shut down thinking. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a catchword can "delay further analysis for fifty years." Holmes also said, "think things, not words."
Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men's counters, but they are the money of fools. That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.
When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.
President Barack Obama boldly proclaims, "The buck stops here!" But, whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush. The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama "inherited" the big federal budget deficits and that he has to "clean up the mess" left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.
Most people have no idea what "E-6" is. To avid baseball fans, E-6 is the way to record an error by a shortstop on your scorecard. But there is another E-6, in photography. This E-6 is the developer in which color slides are processed. Recently, I received an e-mail from Chromatics, a photo lab used by professional photographers in Nashville, that they will be discontinuing the developing of color slides and color transparencies in general, after September 9th. This was sent to me as an old customer of theirs.
The proposed mosque near where the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed, along with thousands of American lives, would be a 15-story middle finger to America. It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious, so it is not surprising that the intelligentsia are out in force, decrying those who criticize this calculated insult. What may surprise some people is that the American taxpayer is currently financing a trip to the Middle East by the imam who is pushing this project, so that he can raise the money to build it. The State Department is subsidizing his travel.
One of the things that makes it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured.
There is so much political spin, and so many numbers games being played, when it comes to medical care, that we have to go back to square one and the simplest common sense, in order to get some rational idea of what government-run medical care means. In particular, we need to examine the claim that the government can "bring down the cost of medical care."
How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but very different values and ways of governing?
One of the few campaign promises that Barack Obama has kept was this: "We are going to change the United States of America!" As in many other cases, those who were thrilled by the thought of "change" seldom seemed to consider whether it would be a change for the better or for the worse. True believers in the Obama cult assumed that it had to be a change for the better.
"We the people" are the central concern of the Constitution, as well as its opening words, since it is a Constitution for a self-governing nation. But "we the people" are treated as an obstacle to circumvent by the current administration in Washington.
"We the people" are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States-- the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.
The bean-counters have struck again-- this time in the sports pages. Two New York Times sport writers have discovered that baseball coaches from minority groups are found more often coaching at first base than at third base. Moreover, third-base coaches become managers more often than first-base coaches. This may seem to be just another passing piece of silliness. But it is part of a more general bean-counting mentality that turns statistical differences into grievances. The time is long overdue to throw this race card out of the deck and start seeing it for the gross fallacy that it is.
A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn't go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions.
Rumors of Congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration's actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two long-time Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama "cynical" and "racially divisive," that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes. A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.
You expect Republican politicians to criticize Democratic administrations and vice versa. But when Democrats start criticizing Democratic administrations, that is news. Someone once said that the headline "Dog bites Man" is not news, but "Man bites Dog" is. We are now starting to get "Democrat bites Democrat" news. Long-time Democratic pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen last week took on one of President Barack Obama's most bitter betrayals of his campaign rhetoric and the high hopes of people who voted for him.
Credit card fraud is a serious problem. But race card fraud is an even bigger problem. Playing the race card takes many forms. Judge Charles Pickering, a federal judge in Mississippi who defended the civil rights of blacks for years and defied the Ku Klux Klan back when that was dangerous, was depicted as a racist when he was nominated for a federal appellate judgeship. No one even mistakenly thought he was a racist. The point was simply to discredit him for political reasons-- and it worked.
If you could spend vast amounts of other people's money just by saying a few magic words, wouldn't you be tempted to do it? Barack Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money just by using the magic words "stimulus" and "jobs." It doesn't matter politically that the stimulus is not actually stimulating and that the unemployment rate remains up near double-digit levels, despite all the spending and all the rhetoric about jobs. And of course nothing negative will ever matter to those who are part of the Obama cult, including many in the media.
