February 10, 2008

TRADERS CATCHING UP WITH HORSEFEATHERS

Sunday on the Presidential trading markets

Intrade

Contract Bid Ask Last Vol Chge
2008.PRES.CLINTON(H)
Hillary Clinton to win 2008 US Presidential Election 23.0 24.9 23.0 180878 -2.5
2008.PRES.McCAIN
John McCain to win 2008 US Presidential Election 33.3 34.0 33.3 123778 +1.1
2008.PRES.OBAMA
Barack Obama to win 2008 US Presidential Election 40.7 40.9 40.9 86877 +0.6

January 04, 2008

IT'S ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING

        The idiotic Iowa caucuses have revealed enough so that Horsefeathers is now ready to call the 2008 election: Obama will easily beat Mc'Cain for the Presidency.
        Instead of worrying about the election, save time and energy; skip the next 9 mos of the media manufactured horse race. Instead get ready for a torrent of politically correct cant, and the replacement of neo-conservative utopianism by liberal utopianism. The neo-conservative faith in Democracy for all, with its accompanying fantastical belief that everyone craves freedom, will be replaced by the Liberal utopianism that believes all conflicts can be resolved using words and therapeutic empathy. When Islamic barbarism strikes again, we'll deploy cadres of psychotherapists and lawyers to help the aggrieved Jihadis, driven to despair by the unfair distribution of wealth and power. Remember this, however, it might have been worse; it might have been President Hillary.

September 13, 2007

HILLARY CLINTON SPEAKS: IT DEPENDS ON THE MEANING OF THE WORDS "WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF"

        Modern day Liberalism has become nothing more than a stance, a pose, a set of attitudes designed to flatter and comfort frightened children and immature adults. The latest illustration was the behavior of the infantile Democratic Congressmen and Senators during the questioning of General Petraeus. It's difficult for children to acknowledge that an adult may be smarter, stronger, or simply know more about a subject than they, and so too the Democrats. They whined, they stamped their feet, they demanded, they had tantrums, they condescended, they lectured, they provoked, but none of it could change reality. These specimens of arrested development, are immature children who can never learn. It's just too wounding to accept that there are things they don't know. Some children grow up physically, though not emotionally, and become wordsmiths, creating fictional narratives that soothe their hurt feelings. The love object of the New York Times and its metrosexual liberal readers, Hillary Clinton, made use of her wordsmith skills in an effort to discredit General Petraeus. She behaved like an arrogant,snot-nosed, glib 10 year old, showing off her superior mind. In so doing, she accused him of the very thing she was doing--inventing an alternate reality. Of course, she is a veteran at the liar's trade, for whom such concepts as honor, truthfulness, courage and integrity are weird and archaic notions. Ms. Clinton indicated that General Petraeus was such a dispenser of untruths that it would require the "willing suspension of disbelief" to accept his assertions as fact. When she uttered the phrase she seemed to puff up with pride in her own command of literary English.
        The use of the phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" caught my attention because I'd never heard it used outside of a literary salon, English lit course, or a theater review. In literary circles it's usually a term of praise, as in "the author was able to create a fictional world and the reader willingly suspends disbelief in its existence."
        "Suspension of disbelief is an aesthetic theory intended to characterize people's relationships to art. It was coined by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 to refer to what he called "dramatic truth". It refers to the alleged willingness of a reader or viewer to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic, impossible, or otherwise contradictory to "reality". It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment..."
(see the full definition here.)
        How clever of Senator Clinton to display her skill in finding a way to call someone a liar without actually using that word. It is a fortunate thing for America, that the Children's hour allowed us to see the difference between frightened, fearful children like Hillary Clinton and adults like David Petraeus. For Hillary, with a bit of gender bending, I have my own literary description: "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read/ With loads of learned lumber in his head.
--Alexander Pope

April 16, 2007

THE RACE POLICE OR IMUS: WHICH IS WORSE

Three or four powerful energic forces collided last week to create a perfect cultural storm that ended in toppling one of the giants of radio entertainment from his current venue. The forces at work were a) the culture of offensive humor and its audience of millions of lovers of pie-in-the-face comedy led by Don Imus; b) the paranoid hypersensitivity of black, moth-eaten, demagogues Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their grievance collecting, loser minions; c) tens of millions of dollars in advertising fees whirling around in the ether and in danger of encamping to safer venues; d)and billions of watts of hypocrisy radiating from CBS, which is no newcomer to Imus’s brand of humor, and the multitude of media people—whited sepulchers all.

Don Imus is a gifted entertainer who has been practicing his art—offensive humor—for decades, and has won a following of millions, and a salary estimated at $10,000,000 a year. His morning show, listened to nationwide, consists of commentary on sports and politics and interviews with figures in the news. Sprinkled in among these items is his Shock-Jock humor—his trademark. Nothing , noone, no group, religion, race, or class seems spared from his insults, if they are in the public eye. He’s very good at this kind of thing and he is almost never out of control, it never becomes a rant. That is what makes it entertainment rather than an assault. His tone is never mean—the shock part of his insult is only in the words and not in the emotion.

The humor of insult and shock is an art, a very old art. It goes back to a time when man learned that it was almost as satisfying to hurl an insult as it was to hurl a stone or a spear—and much safer. Almost all comedy involves the expression of hostility and even when it appears to be gentle it is only well disguised hostility, as the following example will demonstrate. Spike Milligan, the great Anglo-Irish writer of low comedy, wrote what is reputed to be the best joke ever created:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"

The humor of insult has its origins in Aristophanes’ Greece in what came to be called the “Old Comedy.” This was comedy that addressed itself to social commentary, using the language of farce, burlesque, and travesty. The point is to make fun of politicians, social institutions, and the foibles of the powerful. The “outsider” always plays an important role in this form of comedy. They may be slaves, non-Greeks, Persians, Jews, nappy-headed ones, ones with funny accents, and these “others” become the butt of comic insult or appearance. These “outsiders” always function as characters against whom the society measures itself.

The legacy of comic otherness is the legacy of ethnic humor and comic stereotypes like “Amos ‘n Andy” and Steppinfetchit in the thirties. By the time of Plautus, comic otherness had transcended the role of the target of insult to become the low comic hero like Pseudolus, the slave character in Plautus’ play which became “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum” with Zero Mostel as Pseudolus, the fake, the liar, the trickster. In modern times it was Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp—the low comic hero, impoverished eternal outsider, who was always ready to stick his finger in the eye of the fat rich guy.

Old comedy seems to have its legacy in vaudeville, physical burlesque and farceurs like the Marx Brothers. Groucho, the modern champion of comic insult, has been replaced by comics like Jackie Mason, and the great British comics like Spike Milligan, creator of the Goon show, and who once caused a stir by calling the Prince of Wales a "little grovelling bastard" on television in 1994. Instead of being fired he was made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). And it was the zany, obnoxious humor of Milligan and the Goons that inspired the Monty Pythons. Who can forget the hundreds of sketches targeting high and low alike—stuffy ministers, stupid policemen, gays, women. All human foibles were equal to them. Probably their ultimate and greatest example of the Old Comedy was “The Life of Brian,” a brilliantly witty satire on the follies of religion and a poke in the eyes of two billion Christians.

Whatever else Imus is or is not, he is a member of this tribe, this long line of social critics who are both funny, irreverent, and ignoble.

Part of what makes Imus funny in the context of his show is the unscripted nature of the interchanges between him and his claque. It takes a lot of courage and skill and a little luck to pull off that kind of routine day after day for years without crashing. Unfortunately, he ran out of luck that day. And, although he has uttered many more obnoxious insults and pseudo racist remarks over the years, two things went wrong in this case. The first is that the Rutgers Women were totally innocent of any fault—they are intelligent, educated, hard-working, gifted athletes, mature, and gracious. And what was worse, they were powerless—they had no access to a public voice—which made Imus into a bully-boy. It’s okay to insult big guys—celebrities, politicians, movie stars—they can protect themselves.

What Imus should have done that day was to call the women and arrange for transportation for them to come and meet with them for a private apology, and as an expression of good will offer a contribution to the team’s monetary needs. He should not have made any public apology, but handled whatever criticism came with humor. He should have made fun of the critics and of himself.

Instead he allowed two nappy-headed demagogues to crawl out of the woodpile—hos to their eyeballs—who then pre-empted the situation. Sharpton and Jackson, clever racist hatemongers who live on the misfortune, ignorance, and stupidity of their tiny constituency which is growing smaller every year as black America works its way into the middle class.

We have come to judge public events and motivations nowadays by subjective perceptions rather objective evidence. In Washington or in the media, more and more judgements are made on appearances rather than realities. Down the drain with “innocent until proven guilty.” And these changes in cognitive values and justice is what men like Sharpton and Jackson count on. Every day, somewhere in America, there is a perception or misperception (misperceptions mostly, since most perceptions turn out to be incorrect or incomplete) of injustice done to somebody of color. And there is always a small community of losers nearby—on the dole and “victims of the white man’s oppression” who will take up the cry of injustice and reach for their cell phone to call one or the other of these racial demagogues. And the next day Sharpton and/or Jackson are Johnny-on-the-spot with an angry demonstration making claims and threats just in time to get on the evening news.

That is the way these men operate, the Race Police, just as corrupt policemen work by selling their power. The Race Police can threaten politicians or businessmen—in this case CBS and their sponsors, by getting on the evening news no matter what the rights and wrongs of the matter are.

The most regrettable aspect of this matter was the strength that racial demagoguery achieved. Everybody lost but Sharpton and Jackson. And in this matter the fault lies with Imus for caving in to the real racists and CBS for allowing themselves to be snookered by the Race Police.

Everyone has already commented on CBS’s hypocrisy, no need to beat a dead horse, but their retreat in the face exaggerated accusations was a betrayal to their and Imus’s fans—their rightful constituencies. These folks were their first responsibility. They should have fought the good fight and told Sharpton and Jackson to buzz off and that they were still in command. And then perhaps they should have made a major public relations effort to give democracy a chance by letting Imus’s fate be determined by voting on the internet. Should we keep Imus or not? Just the way the life or death of Tinker Bell is determined—by the love and applause of the audience.

November 06, 2006

THE RACE THAT COUNTS MOST: LIEBERMAN VS.THE ANTI-SEMITES

        Horsefeathers regards the pseudo-science of polling as mainly a way for the media to transform politics into something exciting, like horse racing. We all love predictions; that's why fortune tellers make more money than shrinks. They give the illusion of knowledge and control where it doesn't exist. Pollsters are as accurate as stock market gurus-- and as forgetful. When they're wrong they just move on, reputations intact, to the next set of predictions. If they're lucky enough to make an accurate call they trumpet their great foresight, when it's actually pure chance. If 100 people are asked to call a coin toss, the one person who gets it right 10 times in a row will be proclaimed a genius---if he's a stock market guru or a political pundit.
        That said, Horsefeathers will not be surprised if the Democrats do well in tomorrow's elections. History suggests they should. Parties in power become complacent over time, and voters want something new. The problem is the Democrats offer nothing new in the way of solutions to problems; instead they offer tantrums and denial. However, if the MSM and the rage-filled infantile liberals do drag the Dems over the finish line first, it won't save them. They remain a party devoid of ideas. Whining and proclaiming your superiority can only get you so far. When the Islamo-fascists start blowing up buildings and beheading our countrymen, the adults step in. The very success of the Bush administration in preventing another 9-11 has paradoxically allowed the childish mindset of contemporary liberals to reassert itself. They forget how we all expected more attacks following 9-11, and they now minimize the 'gathering storm' by focusing on the hated Bush and the evil neo-Cons. They tell each other how smart they are because they read Tom Friedman, and how morally superior they are because they march for peace.
        If their recent nominee for President, John Kerry, were half as smart as he imagines he is, he'd have read Tommy and known enough to keep his mouth shut. Kipling's insight remains true as ever; the wordsmith elites who disdain them, will cower behind the warriors when the shooting starts: "...For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"/ But it's "Saviour of 'is country," when the guns begin to shoot..."
        As far as we're concerned the most important race this election season, is for Senator in Connecticut. This is because it is the vote whose outcome transcends petty day-to-day politics. When utopian dreams prove unattainable, scapegoats are necessary and Jews become targets. Joe Lieberman has been subjected to open and vile Jew hatred from the army of left utopians who dumped him in favor of Ned Lamont. Lamont has welcomed the support of the Jew haters, taken their money and appeared at rallies denouncing Israel. Should he prevail in tomorrow's race, it will validate the scapegoating tactic. The Democratic party is already in financial thrall to the Jew loathing George Soros, and is home to such anti-semites as Jimmy Carter, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. How fitting that the grandson of Corliss Lamont, wealthy apologist for Stalin, would help the Democratic party become the home for those carrying forward Stalin's war against the Jews. We'll be hoping for a Lieberman win.

November 02, 2006

DEMOCRATS SECURE AN IMPORTANT ENDORSEMENT

"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.
See the rest here.

March 23, 2006

SCREWING UP THE SCHOOLS

Horsefeathers guest blogger Rita Kramer on what’s wrong with New York City’s schools


Whether it’s running a war or running a school system, look out for leaders who don’t know what they’re doing. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg was voted into office promising to make a success of the city’s wildly unworkable schools. He knew nothing about education, shopped around for advice, and made an unfortunate choice in his schools chancellor. Joel Klein, a successful attorney for government and big business, knew nothing about education either. Both men know about management, and in their naivete about teaching and learning, fell prey to the proponents of the very ideology that has corrupted the system they set out to reform. Those reforms look good on paper—abolishing the top-heavy bureaucracy of the Brooklyn-based Board of Education, and improving test scores (although the statistics are a little like three-card monty—they are open to various interpretations). They bought into a set of ideas that, although dear to an influential faction in the education establishment, has been discredited by research and classroom teaching experience. You have to turn over the right card to find any meaningful improvement in the schools, and you may find it’s not there.

Just ask a parent whose child is being subjected to “whole language” or “fuzzy math” as a way of learning to read (recognizing words from their context rather than learning to sound out letters) or to solve arithmetical problems (an approximate answer is good enough as long as the student gets the general idea of how it’s done; no more memorization or rote drill, it’s the concept that counts, not arriving at the right answer).

Or ask a middle- or high-school student who’s taking a course in American history. He or she is more likely to be familiar with the particulars of the Iriquois League than those of the U.S. Constitution. And to know more about the sins of his country than about the foundations and evolution of its democratic institutions.

And still all this is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the changes in what children learn and how they are taught lies the bedrock of a point of view, a way of looking at education, an ideology. Not many parents of schoolchildren and even fewer members of the public are aware of how the schools have been corrupted in the name of a distorted idea of equality, not of opportunity but of outcome. Schooling has become less about transmitting knowledge than effecting social change.

The goal of the public school system is no longer really educational so much as it is political. The schools are thought to exist not to teach anything considered of particular value in itself so much as to achieve the aim of educating everyone alike. When “all children are gifted,” as one New York City principal was recently quoted, no children are gifted, and there is no need for classes designed for gifted children. The Utopian ideal is that ever child should come out equal at the end.

Well, perhaps not quite. Some, to drag out that Orwellian warhorse again, feel entitled to be more equal than others, a claim they justify on the grounds of past group suffering. A vast contest seems underway to determine who among us can claim to have been most victimized and to award preferences accordingly.

For some, in the words of a recent graduate of a prestigious school of education, it means “putting in place the women’s agenda.” Or the African-American agenda. Or, as the dean of a California university’s school of education puts it, “Curriculum is not about content, it’s about empowerment.” Pressed for her meaning she adds, “It doesn’t matter so much what you teach; what matters is whose interests are forwarded.

The educational process has not only been politicized, it has been reoriented toward what might be called the psychopathology of education. Until recently, the model of the student was the more or less normal child. Now, with various legislative innovations brought about by special interest groups, it has become the abnormal –“special” is the preferred euphemism—child, and in order to teach such children there has had to be a massive shift of resources. Today the education culture is dominated by learning pathologies and the methods appropriate to the student with learning difficulties—what might be called educational therapy.

The education culture is dominated by the illusion that everyone is the same, when what is needed is to design different systems for different kinds of students. Everyone needs a foundation in the basic skills of literacy and numeracy; beyond that there are some for whom an academic program is the right fit and some who are motivated in other directions. It is no longer true in our mobile society that “tracking” has irreversible consequences. It is possible to return to school at any age, to go on to college or university at any time of life and to study almost anything except the most highly technical and specialized courses of study. The system can be enormously flexible for the highly motivated individual. And it can be made even more so if we recognize individual distinctions rather than pretending that there is no such thing.

What is needed is to maintain standards while at the same time keeping doors open. Instead, the public school system is being debased and fragmented. The common culture is under attack as white-male-dominated and Eurocentric. Racial and ethnic separatism are emphasized, in the name of “self-esteem.” Bilingual programs are leaving many of the children who live in this country without a working knowledge of the English language. How will that benefit them in later life unless Spanish has become the nation’s official language? Hard work and discipline are deemphasized, content is trivialized, and accountability ignored. No one wants to find out what the results of these policies actually are for those children most in need of help. No one is concerned about whether they are being educated in any real sense, whether they are being introduced to the glories of the past, the science that keeps changing the world almost day to day, the arts that enrich life, the literature that opens windows on other times and other places. The partisans of these policies and the curricula they foster are not really interested in education at all; what interests them is a political agenda.

Since what matters to the educrats entrenched in the institutions that train school administrators and professors for other teacher training institutions is not whether children have learned anything of value, but that no one fail to pass, the threshold is lowered as required for almost anyone to get by with a minimum of effort. And criticism is effectively muzzled with the threat of the charge of “racism” against even lifelong liberals, like the charge of “sexism” that recently brought down Harvard’s president Summers. The “multicultural” and “global” approach that sounds so good on paper is in practice a thinly disguised rejection of American values and institutions and of the very idea that underneath all the variety of backgrounds we are and should continue to be one nation, one culture.

These are the things that Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein should go about correcting, not raising scores on dumbed-down tests that prove nothing in the way of real progress. But first they would have to become aware of what, beyond the slogans, really goes on in the classroom.

Rita Kramer is the author of “Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Schools.”

February 05, 2006

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY CHANCELLOR HITLER

This week is the 73rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in democratic Germany. For those sour, doubt-ridden skeptics who track these things, it was on January 30th 1933 that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and less than three months later all other political parties, labor unions, and the basic freedoms of speech, press, and associations disappeared in Germany’s post-World War I Republic; democracy was dead.

“Democracy is the worst form of government; unfortunately, it is the only one that works,” said Winston Churchill, in one of his epigrammatic moods. Even Churchill, the great statesman and historian, didn’t get it quite right. What he should have said was “Democracy is the worst form of government; unfortunately, it is the only one that sometimes works.”

Now that America has begun a new diplomatic crusade—to export freedom and democracy to those countries of the world which are democratically impoverished, it is well to take into account some facts of political life.

The first is that there is a big difference between democracy and a crusade for democracy. The former is a political process rooted in life and quotidian exigencies, the latter a religious activity unhinged from reality.

Anybody who understands a bit about the history and geography of democracy knows that democracy (and its impure form republicanism) exists and can exist only under certain specific circumstances.

It might be worth a few moments to reflect on how it was possible for a highly civilized nation—land of Beethoven, Goethe, Thomas Mann—a free country with democratic institutions to lose its freedom and civility in the blink of an eye. How did Hitler do it?

Although there were many shaky political moments between the time in 1919 when a new constitution for Germany created the Weimar Republic, and the Reichstag (parliamentary) elections of 1928, economic and political stability seemed to have returned to Germany in the years preceding that election. The anti-republican parties of the left and right together received only 13 percent of the total vote, with the Communists receiving about 10 percent and the Nazis taking only 3 percent.

And things seemed to be looking up on the international front as well, when, in 1929, the Allied Reparations Commission recommended that German reparations be reduced to 37 billion gold marks, less than one-third of the amount originally scheduled in 1921, and that these payments be stretched out for sixty years to make them easier to pay. It also called for the dissolution of the Reparations Commission and for an immediate end to what remained of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland.

Although members of the German government welcomed these changes and accepted the new terms, right-wing opposition parties saw the plan as nothing less than a renewal of Germany's post-war humiliation. Led by Alfred Hugenberg, the press and movie-industry lord, the nationalist opposition tried to force the government to repudiate the reparations debt completely as well as the war guilt clause of Versailles upon which the debt rested. To run the opposition's campaign, Hugenberg engaged Hitler, the leader of the apparently moribund Nazi Party.

Fortunately, the bitterly fought national plebiscite that followed found only 13.8 percent of the voters favoring the objectives of the right wing. But an unintended effect of Hugenberg’s campaign was to give widespread public exposure to Hitler, who used his access to the Hugenberg-owned press empire and to its weekly movie newsreels to give himself and his Nazi movement national publicity.
Within a few months the Wall Street crash brought an end to German and world-wide prosperity. The crash had an immediate effect in Germany as American investors, anxious about their financial position, began withdrawing their loans to Germany. Prices on the German stock exchanges fell drastically during the last month of the year. Business failures multiplied. Unemployment rose to three million during the course of the year, and by the winter of 1932 it reached six million.

The first critically important political effect of the economic crisis came in March 1930 when the government coalition fell apart over the rising cost of maintaining the unemployment program. The Social Democratic Party, representing labour, and the Peoples' Party, representing business, were unable to agree on the size of the government's contribution to the fund, and their coalition dissolved. When a new coalition could not be formed, parliamentary democracy in Germany came to an end.

Political instability forced President Hindenburg to invoke his emergency powers, which he used to appoint Heinrich Bruning of the Catholic Centre Party as Chancellor. Moreover, his fateful decision to call for Reichstag elections in September 1930, inadvertently opened the door to the enemies of democracy. Together the Nazis and Communists gained nearly one of every three votes cast. Although bitterly opposed to each other, during the next two years the Nazis and Communists succeeded in mobilizing the political and economic resentments generated by the depression. Hitler's charismatic appeal and the youthful energies of his movement were attractive to large segments of a populace fearful of being ruined by economic and social disaster. Hitler was without a doubt a genius, albeit an evil genius. He had an extraordinary capacity to remain in tune with the grievances of the lower-middle classes. To an embittered Germany he offered crude solutions and false hopes: He would unilaterally end reparations and refuse to repay debts incurred by others; he would crush the Jews who were to blame for the defeat of 1918 and the hyper-inflation, and whose greed was the source of every economic ill; he would provide every German with a job and food. He promised a Germany without partisan politics and a country to be proud of.

The power of Hitler's appeal was reflected in the party's growing membership lists—from 170,000 members in 1929 to 1,378,000 in 1932—and in the swelling ranks of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing, the infamous storm troopers.

The depression reached its depths in the winter of 1931–32. Unemployment was still rising; as was the succession of business failures. Some hope of breaking the political impasse came with the presidential election required at the expiration of Hindenburg's first term in 1932. Hitler's opponents recognized that the 84-year-old Hindenburg, now physically weak and politically apathetic, represented their only hope of preventing Hitler from winning the presidency, and, with great difficulty, they convinced Hindenburg, who wanted to retire, to seek a second term.

Although Hindenburg was eventually reelected, a runoff was necessary, and Hitler won 37 percent of the popular vote. His larger aim, however, had been to make himself the leading, or only, candidate for Brüning's position as chancellor. (The President, in the Weimar Republic, as in many European democracies, was head of state with the power to appoint the Chancellor, or head of government—Prime Minister.) Hindenburg did choose to replace Brüning in May 1932 but named the political dilettante Franz von Papen rather than Hitler. Desperate to find a base in parliament, Papen called for Reichstag elections in July. The result was a disaster for Papen and another triumph for the Nazis, who again took 37 percent of the vote, the largest total they were ever to acquire in a free election. The Communists won 15 percent of the vote. Thus the two parties dedicated to destroying German democracy held a majority in the Reichstag.

After six months with no relief or improvement in the situation Papen was replaced by another weak, stop-gap Chancellor, Schleichen, and when Hitler finally became chancellor, two months later, on January 30, 1933, it was not on the crest of a wave of popular support but as the result of backroom political intrigue by Schleicher, Papen, and the president's son, Oskar von Hindenburg. Only Hitler, they believed, could bring together a coalition with Hugenberg's DNV Party and possibly the Centre Party that could command a majority in the Reichstag. They assured the reluctant president that Hitler's radical tendencies would be checked by the fact that Papen would hold the vice-chancellorship and that other conservatives would control the crucial ministries, such as those of war, foreign affairs, and economics. The Nazis themselves were restricted to holding the chancellorship and the insignificant federal ministry of the interior.

Whether the Nazis would ever get a chance to implement their ideological objectives depended, when Hitler became chancellor, upon whether they would be able to tighten their initially tenuous hold on the reins of power. Liberals, socialists, and communists remained bitterly opposed to Hitler; important segments of business, the army, and the churches were to varying degrees suspicious of the measures he might take.

It was a combination, finally, of Hitler's daring and brutality, of the weaknesses of his opponents, and of numerous instances of extraordinary good luck that allowed him to establish his totalitarian dictatorship. He was able to take advantage of the Reichstag fire (probably the work of a lone and deranged Dutch communist) of February 27 to suspend civil liberties and arrest communist as well as other opposition leaders.

When the Centre Party refused to join the Nazi-DNVP coalition in January 1933, Hitler demanded elections for a new Reichstag. The elections of March 5, 1933, were preceded by a brutal and violent campaign in which Nazi storm troopers figured prominently. Despite this campaign of terror, the Nazis did not win a majority, gaining only 44 percent of the total, but the 8 percent acquired by the DNVP, was sufficient for the two parties to wield a majority in the Reichstag. At its first meeting on March 23 the new Reichstag—under great pressure from the storm troopers and the SS (Schutzstaffel; “Protective Wing”), the elite corps of Nazis headed by Heinrich Himmler—voted in favor of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to ignore the constitution and to give his decrees the power of law.

The decree powers were the pseudolegal base from which Hitler carried out the first steps of the Nazi revolution. Within two weeks of the passing of the Enabling Act, Nazi governors were sent out to bring the federal states into line, and a few months later the states themselves were abolished.

The final step in Hitler's seizure of political power came on August 2, 1934, when, upon the death of President Hindenburg, he appropriated the powers of the presidency and combined them with his own as chancellor.

In this fashion, the Nazis established the regime they called the Third Reich, the presumed successor of the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich) and of the German Empire ruled by the Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918 (the Second Reich).

Thus, through a combination of various factors, it was possible to transform a civilized nation with a democratic government into a dictatorship that was acceptable to a large segment of the population which would remain loyal through twelve years of peace and war.

What were the factors that made this possible? In summary they were:

A constitution in which there was insufficient separation and distribution of power. The executive branch of the government was the creature of the legislative branch.

A parliamentary government with many factions which makes governing difficult and gives rise to a greater degree of extreme political values.

A young democratic government without political traditions and conventions to appeal to in crises.

An economic crisis of major proportions leading to unemployment and loss of property and hope.

An aggrieved and embittered population looking for relief from a strong leader.
Lack of strong traditional leadership

A charismatic antidemocratic leader who instills hope for the future and identifies a scapegoat for peoples’ troubles.

A weak media which is capable of being manipulated.

These then are the factors which led to Hitler’s rise and his acquisition of power. None of these factors is a rare occurrence in weak nations and young democracies. In fact one or more of these conditions almost always exists in states in which democracy is untried—weak constitutions, few democratic traditions, anti-democratic demagogues, a class of wealthy reactionary power-holders who want to maintain the status quo, and a hopeless and discontented populace.

The fact is that democracy is a sometime thing, and American democracy, strong and solid as it is today, didn’t get that way overnight but only after a civil war and two hundred years of evolution.

Is it wise then to go chasing after chimerical democracies in the Arab Middle East, throwing American tax-payer dollars at diplomatic illusions only to end in supporting and financing Hitlerian despots who hate America?

February 01, 2006

HORSEFEATHERS MOMENT AT THE SOTU

        The Groucho highlight of the State of the Union address had to be the moment when the sullen, petulant, sneering and sniveling Democrats rose as one to cheer when the President noted: "...Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security -- (applause)..."

        Groucho knew he was being funny; these clowns don't have a clue.

January 18, 2006

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: THE DEVIL WE KNOW

“If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
--Winston Churchill

        Christopher Hitchens has been an eloquent voice arguing for the military liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. There, we've made a “favorable reference” to the aging Marxist ideologue. Horsefeathers took note of the fact that even when he urged America on vs. Saddam, Hitchens never uttered a word of appreciation or encouragement to Israel, a country at the front line of the war against Islamo-fascism, long before the U.S. confronted Saddam. In fact, for years Hitchens went out of his way to demonize Israel's army and its leader, Ariel Sharon, as war criminals. When he wasn’t doing that, he was solidifying his bona fides with the crackpot left by endlessly attacking Henry Kissinger, also as a war criminal, and trying to undermine Winston Churchill’s reputation. His alliance with his great friend Edward Said put him in the camp of the UN anti-semites and supporters of the intifada, for whom Israel is a criminal, racist state.
        Hitchens apparently got lonely for his old buddies. Now he's returning to his leftist roots, joining a group of anti-semites and old, far left Bush haters (CAIR, Greenpeace, Nat’l Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Barnett Rubin—now there’s a blast from the ‘60’s past!) in an ACLU lawsuit designed to cripple our efforts to interdict terrorists. Of course Hitchens protests that he has nothing in common with his new allies, but like Churchill’s alliance with the devil, they share the same goals. According to the New York Sun “…Mr. Hitchens said he believes that the president and the intelligence establishment are using the war as a vehicle to expand their power beyond what is justified...” See the rest here.

January 03, 2006

HORSEFEATHERS SALUTES DENZEL WASHINGTON

From our San Antonio correspondent:

Don’t expect to read about this in our liberal press.
A few weeks ago Denzel Washington and his family visited the troops at Brook Army Medical Center (BAMC) in San Antonio,Texas. This is where soldiers that have been evacuated from Germany come to be hospitalized in the States, especially burn victims. They have buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher House is a hotel where soldiers' families can stay, for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying in the hospital. BAMC has quite a few of these houses on base but as you can imagine, they are almost completely filled most of the time.

While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how much one of them would cost to build . He took his check book out and wrote a check for the full amount right there on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear this story and want to get the word out to the American public, because it touched their hearts.

The question is where are the Hollywood bloviators like Alec Baldwin, Madonna, Sean Penn and the others who make front page news with their anti-everything America crap and this doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the base newspaper in San Antonio.

A true American and friend to all in uniform!

December 18, 2005

THE NYTIMES: OUR VERY OWN AL JAZEERA

We can now add 'treachery' to 'cowardice', as defining traits of left utopian Liberalism. Its house organ, The New York Times, having appointed itself arbiter of national security, is prepared to see millions die at the hands of fanatics to preserve its grandiose sense of virtue.

“This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.” --President George W. Bush, Saturday, December 17th, 2005

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."
--Marcus Tullius Cicero 42B.C

November 30, 2005

NEW YORK TIMES: WAR IS HELL

You can always count on the New York Times to shed darkness and spread confusion wherever it can in the service of its ideology and politics. Continuing what has recently become a consistent weekend feature—news for hand-wringers, for the walking worried, and for the perplexed and dismayed of the Upper West Side. Horsefeathers singles out from an array of grim possibilities something it knows a thing or two about—psychopathology.

Saturday’s front-page story below the fold is ambiguously entitled “The Struggle to Gauge War’s Psychological Cost,” by their reporter Benedict Carey, continued onto the whole of page 8. The size of the article together with its front page positioning would suggest to the innocent reader that America has major mental health problems among its young people in the armed services, and the article’s hazy, rambling style provides neither reassurance nor clarity.

NYT’s reporter Carey has no real news to report to us except that some members of the armed forces find their service stressful. But by innuendo, implication, and obfuscation he manages to suggest that the Iraqi war is a special war, a different war more likely to drive our soldiers crazy because of its moral ambiguity. “Military psychiatry has always been close to a contradiction in terms. Psychiatry aims to keep people sane; service in wartime makes demands that seem insane….This war in particular presents profound mental stresses: unknown and often unseen enemies, suicide bombers, a hostile land with virtually no safe zone, no real front or rear. A 360-degree war, some call it, an asymmetrical battle space that threatens to injure troops' minds as well as their bodies.”

Well, of course, as anyone can tell you who has studied the history of warfare over the years, such an idea is nonsense ever since Lt. Henry Shrapnel developed the concept of an anti-personnel shell at the end of the eighteenth century. This diabolic device was meant to explode into a thousand pieces, causing widespread mutilation among soldiers. Over the years with improvements in artillery technology—first timed fuses, then proximity fuses—death and mutilation by way of long-range artillery barrages became modern war’s most terrifying and effective weapon.

The proximity fuse was developed by joint British–American research and was already adopted for ground bombardment in the Second World War. This type of fuse allowed field artillery to burst shells in the air at a lethal distance above ground targets without having to establish the exact range for the fuse setting. The effect on the soldier was devastating and demoralizing because death and destruction could come at any time from some invisible enemy many miles away. And in twentieth-century wars, hundreds of millions of invisible, unexpected mutilating land mines have terrorized soldiers much like shrapnel.

Oh, and what about suicide bombing, and that war with no safety-zone, with no front and a 360 degree space? There hasn’t been a front since 1918, and why use suicide bombers when you can use homicide bombers—thousands of four-engine bombers carrying millions of tons of bombs to every corner of the globe at any time, day or night, unexpectedly. Sixty million people died in World War II, more civilians than soldiers in places like Stalingrad, Nagasaki, London, Coventry, Cassino, Berlin—a 360 degree space the world over.

Our enemies in Iraq, compared to our enemies in the past, and the amount of terror that they are capable of, compared to what our soldiers in the past have had to face, are a pathetically hapless bunch. Our enemies can cause death and mutilation only in small numbers—that is what is special about this war. So reporter Carey’s theory that what’s driving our soldiers mad is that this war is especially terrifying because of the invisibility or ambiguity of the enemy is more nonsense.

Carey’s report suggests that a large number of our fighting men and women are affected by depression, anxiety and a dubious diagnosis left over from Vietnam called a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “But just how deep those mental wounds are, and how many will be disabled by them, are matters of controversy. Some experts suspect that the legacy of Iraq could echo that of Vietnam, when almost a third of returning military personnel reported significant, often chronic, psychological problems….And at bases back home, there have been violent outbursts among those who have completed tours….And three members of a special forces unit based at Fort Carson, in Colorado Springs, have committed suicide.”

When Horsefeathers tried to confirm whether the above-mentioned set of three suicides had anything to do with their deployment overseas we ran into a helpful chap named Staff Sgt. Kyle Cosner, spokesman for the Tenth Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, who indicated that Carey knew all of the details of the story of the suicides from other journalists who had published stories about the men back in October. Carey, unfortunately, neglected to include in his report the important fact that the cases of the three men of the Tenth Special Forces unit who committed suicide had been investigated by the Army CID (Criminal Investigation Division) and that it had found that none of the suicides were thought to be connected to overseas deployment. And that in fact they each had enough psychological baggage and trouble in their personal lives to account for their acts of suicide. It is even possible that an anti-malarial medication which they all were taking may have been a cause or contributing factor in their bizarre behavior.

But reporter Carey did not think it was safe to allow his readers to make up their own minds about the connection between these suicides and whether they were attributable to their Iraqi deployment. Big Brother wants to help you think about these things. Carey justifies his distortion of the facts on the grounds that the Defense Department is politically motivated to cover up the presumably large numbers of soul-wounded men and women who are victims of the military-Bush malfeasance. “Yet for returning service members, experts say, the question of whether their difficulties are ultimately diagnosed as mental illness may depend not only on the mental health services available, but also on the politics of military psychiatry itself, the definition of what a normal reaction to combat is and the story the nation tells itself about the purpose and value of soldiers' service.”

Naturally, reporter Carey will always be able to find somebody to interview who will put the right words into his article. Here is pretty Specialist Abbie Pickett’s story (her before and after pictures appear on the front page.): “Specialist Pickett, who served with the Wisconsin Army National Guard and whose condition has been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.‘You never want family to hear that, and it's a selfish thing to say. But I'm not a typical 23-year-old, and it's hard being a combat vet and a woman and figuring out where you fit in.’ Specialist Pickett, has struggled with symptoms of depression …and a seething resentment over her service, partly because of what she describes as irresponsible leaders and a poorly defined mission. Her memories make good bar stories, she said, but they also follow her back to her apartment, where the combination of anxiety and uncertainty about the value of her service has at times made her feel as if she were losing her mind.”

Since war has been studied in modern times, it has been observed that there are a great many factors in war situations that may play a role in the development of psychopathology: length of exposure to battle, the quality of leadership, the unit morale, rest, food, physical relief from the weather and—most of all—pre-war psychological strength, adaptability, and emotional maturity. It is almost never any one bombardment or battle that will result in severe pathology, but a combination of many aggravations and chronic things which combine with a sensitive and troubled personality.
Psychiatric experience and practice indicates that something very similar is at work in everyday life. One finds in practice that almost anything can become a “trauma” or trigger that can stimulate chronic pathology—childbirth, puberty, the onset of menstruation, loss of a loved one, job loss, marriage, divorce—almost anything that has serious emotional meaning. Strangely enough, the connection between the triggering experience and the chronic symptomatology is not easy to connect. Often there are one or more intervening layers of psychological symptoms, such as chronic drinking, or weight gain, or chronic school failure.

The main point in this context is that there is little likelihood of military service triggering a chronic psychological illness without some degree of latent pre-military psychopathology. At the end of the article even Carey must acknowledge this clinical fact by quoting that “…others say that the rates of the disorder are just as likely to diminish in the next year, as studies show they do for disaster victims….Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, said that given the stresses of this war, it was worth noting that five out of six service members who had seen combat did not show serious signs of mental illness….The emotional casualties, Colonel Ritchie said, are ‘not just an Army medical problem but a problem that … the civilian system… as a whole must work to solve.’”

Carey’s report is characteristic of the NY Times’ pseudo-analytical journalism—deep trash. It identifies a “problem,” gets several experts to provide quotes that state the Times’ point of view, a couple of paragraphs of muddled and contradictory statistical facts which are either meaningless or, worse, obfuscating. Then come two or three interviews with the disgruntled victims of the injustice that the Times has identified, in this case stress caused by a morally ambiguous war brought about by poor leadership. And finally, what is most reprehensible is that the interviewees either do not realize they are being exploited by the Times’ reporter, or they—the “victims”—and the reporter are exploiting each other.

November 18, 2005

JOHN KERRY: HE'S BAAAACK!

"There are no second acts in American lives."-F. Scott Fitzgerald.

        How could the great novelist have been so wrong? He himself demonstrated that America is the country of self-reinvention, in which there's always another act--especially if you're a modern day liberal. Failure in the confessional, therapeutic age of Oprah is a uniquely good career move, as witness Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. If only there were just two acts! Here's John Kerry to remind us that he's not going away: "Would I like to be president? Yes, obviously." In the furor kicked off by Congressman Murtha, heeeere's Johnny: ``I won't stand for the swift-boating of Jack Murtha,'' said Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004."
        It's remarkable, the intensity of hatred aimed by liberals, not at the savage Islamo-fascists who want to kill us all, but instead at President Bush. Perhaps this is because they share, with our murderous enemies, a utopian vision of a perfect world. When such fantasies don't come to pass, like infants torn from the nipple, they rend the air with cries of distress. In the House debate on a motion to pull our troops out of Iraq, one member recounted a conversation with a U.S. Marine: "Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.
``He asked me to send Congress a message - stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message - that cowards cut and run, Marines never do,'' Schmidt said.

Democrats booed and shouted her down - causing the House to come to a standstill..." The truth, when introduced to delicate, feminized children, is painful---but it remains the truth.

October 31, 2005

BUSH FIGHTS BACK. NOW TARGET TEHRAN

Now that the President has come off the ropes and has hurt his foes with a right hook to the jaw, Horsefeathers hopes he finishes them off with a knockout blow: a missile strike on Damascus--and/or Tehran. Hurry up please, it's time.

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