Miscellaneous Musing #25

It's understandable that schoolchildren had the summer off in the days before the invention of air conditioning, but now that it's become standard for a building to be cooled artificially, why don't they attend classes throughout the year?

Uncommon Commentary #125: Obama, the "Anal" in "Analogy"

On his taxpayer-financed tour of electoral hot spots, during which Emperor Nerobama has sought to "help" his party retain control of the houses of Congress by associating local Democrats with himself—Does he even realize how widely detested he's become, or does he, like other leftists, blame the manifest waning of his popularity on pollsters like Rasmussen?—he has used a metaphor that he, doubtless, considers very clever: he tells voters that we need to keep the car (representing our economy) in D(emocrat) gear in order to drive out of the ditch that our economy is in, and that putting it into R(epublican) gear will only keep us in the ditch.  There is, however, a flaw in his analogy.  As is known to anyone whose automobile has ever gotten stuck, staying in D usually just keeps you spinning your wheels; switching into R is often what needs to be done so that the car can then be moved forward.

Uncommon Commentary #124

When Emperor Nerobama launched the "Race to the Top," how were we to have known that (to draw a conclusion from, among other things, his Injustice Department's refusal to prosecute Black criminals) this meant that he would be moving race to the top of the political agenda?

Uncommon Commentary #123

It used to be that the only fems who wore bikinis, miniskirts, &c. were those who knew that they had something to flaunt; now, even ugly ones dress that way.  People haven't merely lost their modesty; they've lost their knowledge of the concept.

Uncommon Commentary #122

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod (who deserved to be ousted not for alleged racism but for her left-wing political actions) is indignant not at those who unfairly discharged her but at Andrew Breitbart, who made that infamous video—evidently sent to him by someone else, who had edited it—available online; she has accused him of being "willing to destroy me ... in order to try to destroy the NAACP."  How does she know that he was "willing to destroy" her?  Breitbart has said that "this is not about Shirley Sherrod" and that (to quote a Fox News story) he "posted the clip to show that racism exists at the NAACP, since members in the audience laughed as she told the story"; this explanation is quite credible. (Even the person who sent Breitbart the video clip is not necessarily guilty of malice; if he sought to make the same point about the NAACP that Breitbart did, he would not have needed to exhibit the whole video—if that would even be feasible—but only the part in which the NAACP members demonstrated amusement at Sherrod's relating of how she denied the White farmer as much help as she could have given him.)  Sherrod is treating Breitbart precisely as the Obombast Administration treated her in sacrificing her without hearing her side of the story.

Uncommon Commentary #121

I don't know how the story got started that it's nearly impossible to subdue Afghanistan.  The Afghans have actually been defeated by just about everyone who conquered in that part of the world: Persians, Greeks and Macedonians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, British—multiple times by some of these.

Uncommon Commentary #120: Slick Words for a Sick Byrd

In his eulogy of Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, Bill Clinton said that "He once had a fleeting association with [the] Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?  I [sic] tell you what it means.  He was a country boy from [the] hills and hollows of West Virginia.  He was trying to get elected.  And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done and he spent the rest of his life making it up."  Presumably this Rhodes scholar meant not "making it up" but "making up for it," but let me begin my assessment of the Failed President's funeral oration. (I refer to the words of Clinton; our current Failed President also said something ridiculously disingenuous about Byrd, replete with cloying pseudo-patriotism, but his remarks are outside the scope of this uncommon commentary.)

1.            What Clinton calls a "fleeting association" with the KKK began in the early 1940's, when Byrd founded a chapter of that organization by recruiting 150 new members, who (unanimously) made him their "Exalted Cyclops" or leader of said chapter; the title seems accidentally appropriate for so monstrous a man who became so powerful a member of the US Senate.  Byrd would later say that he ended his membership "after about a year," but as late as 1946 or 1947 he wrote to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan that "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state [sic] in the nation [sic]."

2.            What does Dirty Byrd's having been a country boy, and his "trying to get elected," have to do with his having been a Klansman?  Was Clinton slandering rural West Virginians, by saying that Byrd's environs made him a bigot? Or that racism was so pervasive in the people's hearts and in public debate that he had to pretend to be one in order to get their votes?  There's something wrong with this alibi, anyway: When Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan, he was under 25 years of age, and thus wasn't even old enough to stand for public office.  Indeed, Byrd said that he never considered a future in politics until a KKK official told him that he had a talent for leadership, and that this happened at age 23 or 24, hence, in 1940 or 1941.  Furthermore, in 1952, when he began his career of corruption by campaigning successfully for a seat in the US House of Representatives, he told the electorate that his participation in the KKK was a thing of the past.

3.            What did Clinton mean, "maybe" (Byrd "did something he shouldn't have done")?

4.            How did Byrd make up for the wrong that he had done: by becoming the congressional "King of Pork?"

It seems to me that it wasn't Byrd but Clinton who was "making it up," that is to say, fabricating offensive nonsense to disguise the reality of the late Senator's failed life.