Quote of the Day III

“My bridges, if you want to call them my bridges — the state’s bridges — will be built. It’s just a matter of when… But it’s a project that gained a lot of publicity because of Katrina and frankly, John McCain, and they started this ‘bridges to nowhere’… There’s never been a bridge built anywhere that didn’t go somewhere” — Alaska Rep. Don Young, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, on the “bridge to nowhere” earmark controversy.

Bridges do require two separated pieces of dry land, he’s right about that.  As Nebraska’s U.S. Sen. Roman Hruska said some years back when named the dumbest senator, even dumb people deserve representation.

A blogger caught the 7 a.m. (!) Iowa Repub debate and gave high marks to Rudy G., noting his being the only candidate to demonstrate opposition, even contempt for lib positions.  PowerLine’s John comments:

I think the point about viewing the Democrats’ positions as distasteful is an astute one. Giuliani on the stump can be devastating: I’ll never forget the impression he made on me at the Republican convention in 2004. He is capable of eviscerating liberals and their positions in a way that the others, with the possible exception of McCain, don’t really aspire to. When people fret about whether Rudy can fire up the Republican faithful, I think they are overlooking his ability to articulate the scorn for liberalism that most conservatives feel.

It’s yet another reason he’s my man for the first Italo-American president.  But is he Italian enough?

 

Here’s a view of Tony Blair that may be unfamiliar to most of us:

Throughout his years in office, he kept inviolable his belief in the existence of a purely beneficent essence of himself, a belief so strong that no quantity of untruthfulness, shady dealings, unscrupulousness, or constitutional impropriety could undermine or destroy it. Having come into the world marked by Original Virtue, Mr. Blair was also a natural-born preacher.

Reflecting psychobabble, “the modern tendency to indulge in self-obsession without self-examination,” he asked forgiveness in a final address:

Bless me, people (Mr. Blair appeared to be saying), for I have sinned: but please don’t ask me to say how.

Etc., by the pseudonymous Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, contributing editor of City Journal, and Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, whose thinking is said to have been adopted by Rudy Guiliani. 

The CIA’s “’estimates’ have always been inherently political documents, and its executive summaries are written to be leaked,” says Angelo M. Codevilla in a review of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (HarperCollins) and John Prados’s Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan R. Dee) in Claremont Review of Books, Summer, ‘07.

Prados’s title, says Codevilla, “masks the Left’s perennial agenda of encouraging its own ends by depriving America of coercive means.”

He calls “transparent projection” Prados’s contention that in the Truman years the U.S. “cheapened the coin of its appeal by covert actions that, to foreign populations, did not represent American policies democratically arrived at.”

The reader is supposed to believe that foreigners-none of whom, including the British, have any say in their countries’ foreign policies-look askance at America because not all the details of its foreign policies are decided “democratically.”

This is too much for Codevilla, a Boston U. international relations teacher, who notes that “these very foreigners . . . are supposedly shocked that Americans do not live in perfect equality and sometimes speak unkindly about one another. It is clear enough that Prados is expressing his own judgment on America, not that of any foreigners.”

Having it in for the U.S., he assumes others do too.

It’s an old joke, but maybe you never heard it: Hearing police siren, one dude to other: “Change your name, here comes the wagon.”

This is the wise(guy) strategy of libs, now espousing “progressive.” I’ve said it before, I say it again, what’s wrong with liberal?

What’s wrong with it is that the ones who have used it the last 50, 100 years are in flight from their awful record and would like us not to think about that.

Besides, conservative has gained cachet, so that its presumed opposite has lost some.

Answer? Presto-change-o, let’s be PROGRESSIVE. After all, who wants to be un-progressive, i.e., stuck in mud, opposing new ideas, unwilling to change, etc.?

It’s a marketing ploy by those who, hearing siren sounds of voters switching, make haste to adopt new nomenclature.

The immigration bill is a sign of what’s to come with legislation once too complicated to understand except by highly paid lobbyists.  Thus John Podhoretz in NY Post, here excerpted.

This was a “comprehensive” bill, designed to thoroughly “take care” of a thorny problem. It sought to address every important issue relating to immigration – border and employer enforcement, guest workers, legalization and the means by which immigrants can become citizens.

. . . . For almost any lay person outside of government, it might as well be written in Urdu – so indecipherable is the drafting language.

That is by design. These bills aren’t written by the senators who negotiate them, but by the staffers who work for the senators. And since the bill seeks to “reform” existing laws, a lot of it simply makes reference to those laws and says Word A should be changed to Word B.

All of this shields the actual meaning of the legislation from the public, which must rely only on the general summaries of the legislation from politicians.

That’s the culture of Washington, thwarted by the Internet:

There was almost no way in the pre-Web era to piece together the actual provisions of reform legislation before it became law. Lobbyists were paid millions of dollars to do just that for panicked business clients – and to get their friends to stick in a few words here or there that would tilt the balance of the new law to benefit them and their clients.

This time, the bill, “released within minutes of its completion” on the Internet, “was quickly hacked to bits by paid experts, think tankers, lay thinkers, lawyers and logicians.”

They reported that “the bill would be ineffective at best at doing what it promised to do – identifying and regularizing illegal immigrants already here – and would only accelerate the entry of illegals after its passage.”

There was nothing to recommend it to those who believe illegal immigration is a critical problem for the country. Worse still, many of us who hold the view that illegals have proved a net plus to the nation could not countenance the legislation once the corkscrew impact of its provisions became clear.

So?

This can be a problem for any piece of “comprehensive” legislation, particularly those touching topics on which there is no national consensus. And the immigration bill’s defeat suggests that comprehensive bills of all ideological stripes will be susceptible to citizen revolts.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have met the enemy, and the enemy is not us, and we have free speech like never before.

Tony Peraica is going for broke as a lone wolf at the county board table.  His own release makes virtue out of his failure to get any support for his latest effort:

CHICAGO, IL – Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica’s resolution of “No Confidence” in the Stroger Administration failed to garner even a “second motion” in today’s County Board meeting, cutting off debate and a vote on the measure.

“By failing to support this resolution, my fellow commissioners have made it clear that they stand with Todd Stroger instead of the Cook County taxpayers,” said Peraica. “By voicing confidence in Stroger, they are saying loud and clear they support the rampant corruption in County government, the hiring of Stroger’s political cronies, the utilization of the County budget as a political payback tool, the continued third-world conditions at Stroger Hospital, and Stroger’s support for a property tax increase.”

However, he quotes other commissioners, agreeing with his intent if not his resolution:

“I think we’re about to see a revolt,” said Commissioner Larry Suffredin in a 5/29 CBS 2 News story. “”There’s no confidence in this government today.”

“I think this is a hijacking of the county budget,” said Commissioner Mike Quigley in a recent Chicago Sun-Times column, speaking about Stroger’s use of Richard Velazquez, who is paid out of the public defender’s budget, as his personal legal counsel.

“There has been absolutely no leadership from [County Board President] Todd Stroger or anyone else in this county,” said Commissioner Forrest Claypool in a recent Chicago Sun-Times story, discussing the deteriorating conditions at the County’s Juvenile Detention Center.

His fellow Republicans want no part of this:

The Republican commissioners – including Liz Gorman, who also serves as chair of the Cook County Republican Party – have been largely silent on Stroger’s failings. This isn’t surprising, given that not one commissioner – Republican or Democrat – supported Peraica’s recent resolution opposing the governor’s “Gross Receipts Tax” proposal. Several Republican commissioners also supported Stroger’s budget, which cut countless frontline workers and county health clinics, while protecting Stroger’s patronage army.

So.  Cook County marches on . . .

P. Noonan, of “Read [his] lips” fame — she wrote it, he broke the promise — has something worth noting:

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than time.

She means letting go of GW as leader.  He and his people are calling people names.  The wrong people, if names are to be called.  Like father, like son, she calls it, in their “squandering” of political inheritance.  It’s in the Online Journal.

Tony Peraica is still running for Cook County Board president, FYI.  Has You Tube video PERAICA TV: STROGER’S FRIENDS AND FAMILY here. 

He’s a Republican.  If that’s not OK with you and you’re not OK with that, then visit the site of the reform-minded Democrat who is running to unseat Todd Stroger in the next primary. 

And look at the long list of Dems who are fed up and won’t stand any more of Todd.  Can’t find them or it myself.  Tell me when you do.