Brains Are Back!

It's called Selective Sanctity of Life, these are the same people to try to save babies from abortion by killing doctors. I just don't get it.

Chris Matthews shows his true colors. Talk about an ongoing free pass!:
Matthews: "I Want To Do Everything I Can To Make This...New Presidency Work"

matthews_11-6b.jpgChris Matthews appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning to discuss Rahm Emanuel's decision to announce he has not yet accepted President-Elect Barack Obama's offer for White House Chief of Staff and other Obama-related stories.

But after some questioning by co-host Joe Scarborough, Matthews said, "I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work."

"Your job as a journalist is to make this presidency work?" asked Scarborough.

Scarborough, co-host Mika Brzezinski and guest Richard Stengel continued the conversation about a journalist's role with Matthews throughout the interview. Stengel described the "constitutional responsibility" of journalists to "hold his feet to the fire."

Does anyone railing against Obama for being pro-choice want to (have the ability to) do any of the following:

1) Demonstrate with evidence or reasonable argument that a fetus is in fact enough of a human being to be deserving of rights in the first place. It is *not* a 'baby'. It's a fetus. Do fetuses have rights? Do not just assume that they do. Please provide an argument. THEN we can talk about abortion. Don't force your assumptions down my throat. (Here's a tough one to explain: a fetus, at six weeks old, can still split into monozygotic twins...so, was there ONE SOUL in the fetus before it split, or only two? Would aborting that fetus before the split have 'killed' two human beings, or only one? Makes more sense to me to say that it's not a fully fledged human yet...What's the pro-life response?)

2) Explain how one can be 'pro-life' and want to save innocent fetuses from death that they have no choice about, and also be in favor of a war that is killing innocent civilians who also have no choice in the matter. For that matter, explain how you can be pro-'fetus life' and not pro-'soldier life'. Are fetuses MORE valuable than soldiers because they are younger? If so, can you lay out for me a graph of relative values of life for different human beings?


THIS above nonsense spouted by so many people who have supported Bush over the years is exactly what this article is talking about: anti-intellectualism and incuriosity. People who not only aren't able to but do not want to stop and question their own beliefs. Why would you want to question your own beliefs? To make sure you're RIGHT. Anti-intellectualists don't even understand the benefits of that.

The problem is that this is a classic story: people who are not intelligent simply refuse to see, or cannot see, the benefit of being intelligent. And I am not talking raw IQ power here. McClellan said that Bush is 'plenty intelligent'. What that means is that he is clever enough to put together a campaign. He is not emotionally intelligent, he is not introspectivelly intelligent. In so many ways, Bush is downright stupid.

And, frankly, he is in the most part defended as being intelligent by people who are also unintelligent, and to unintelligent to realize that they are not intelligent..

The writer has a curious view of "intellectualism": logic, reasoning, and studiousness; prudence and pragmatism; not caring about what's "left" and "right". It certainly would be nice to see reasoning and logic restored to primacy in pubic debate over our emoting society, but reasoning is not the same thing as intellectualism. The other qualities the writer cites - pragmatism and indifference to ideology - are actually symptomatic of anti-intellectualism

To me, this article reads like the all too familiar - and I'd say intellectually lazy - critique of conservatism based on caricaturing Bush and "hating" Bushies. The sneering and spitting at Bush, Palin, et al is a sound and fury signifying the emptiness of Bush's Democratic opposition. It strikes me as odd that Bush's critics over the past 8 years have never thought that perhaps his victories have been more a reflection of their weakness than anything else.

The smug complacency - "Bush can't put a sentence together" - of the liberal critics has a strong anti-democratic streak running through it, which takes the form of dismissing as idiotic and beyond the pale any objection to the world view of enlightened regulators: from global warming to the Paulson bail out plan, the smug view is that the rabble not on board for the "right" policy is hickish and ignorant and therefore not to be taken seriously.

Intellectualism means taking your opponents seriously, based on the view that the only way to win an argument and progress is by having the argument and basing your positions on proof and logic rather than just asserting that Bushies are idiots. Intellectualism also, by the way, has nothing to do with pragmatism. Quite the contrary: intellectualism has always been a tool for looking over the horizon, away from the pragmatic and everyday.

If McCain didn't want negative publicity, then HE should NOT have been negative towards Obama first, old John created his own negative publicity. Because McCain considered changing parties after Bush and Fallwell degraded him and Cindy so bad in 2000, I was shocked and disappointed when McCain became so brutally negative towards Obama, I mean didn't McCain learn ANYTHING about dirty politics?

I believe Obama is Kenyan American and what every his white half ancestry is. Calling him African American isn't true. My wife doesn't like to call herself Native American since she knows she is Black Feet and Sioux . With Welsh and Finish too, so calling her white doesn't fit either. Maybe she could be called 25% since that's about the percentage of each blood she is made up of. But being called American is just fine with her. I'm 75% German and 25% Polsih but I don't go around being called Euro-American since that's not truen I know my ancestry. So maybe can label the new president if you must label him at 50%.

I am so glad that you wrote this Mr. Hirsh. Your analysis is made even more poignant by the fact that you have a typo in the fourth paragraph (extra comma, oops, forgot to spellcheck).

Your article exemplifies the exact type of thinking that reminds me, a moderate Republican, of why I remain a Republican despite my party's recent failures at both governing and campaigning. I love the arrogance of liberal "intellectuals" who feel that any leaders exhibiting a different view of the world or different style of problem solving from their own are stupid, backwards and anti-intellectual. Liberals clearly dominate all of the IQ tests and the millions of voters who supported Senator McCain, Sarah Palin and even those forgotten millions who voted for President Bush over the years, were clearly knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. All of the hard-working conservatives who actually serve our country in various government positions (such as myself), who genuinely want to make this a better nation for everyone (participating in the process as opposed to smugly sitting in front of a laptop playing Monday morning quarterback), have been simply killing time until the smart kids returned from recess.

Mr. Hirsh, I implore you, please maintain this attitude going forward. If the GOP can ever get itself re-organized and refocused on issues that truly matter to this country, and I know that this is a sizable IF, but if we do, your attitude will only provide a rallying cry. People across the nation will have a hard time swallowing your notion that liberal Democrats are the only ones smart enough to lead this great country (obviously, since they told us so).

I hope this Obama turns out to be another John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or even Martin Luther King.