Gratuitous Annual Christmas References

[from 12/22/10]

Let’s talk about a stupid sentence!

I heard this sentence on a stupid TV news show, uttered by a stupid “conservative” member of Congress: “You can’t balance budgets by taxing.” Whaaa?!

We don’t need to know who said that. We don’t want to get personal here at Adventures in Irony. We just want to laugh at the stupidity of stupid, stupid ideas. And this Dumbo’s idea is a doozy!

Let’s eliminate all our taxes then, and balance our budgets your way, “conservative” Dumbo! Start flapping your ears! Hey, everybody, clear the room! Elephant flapping his ears!

I’m sorry. Not only was that last comment entirely based on supposition, in that I don’t really know how the stupid “conservative” thinks budgets can be balanced without taxing, I also used a reference to a movie that 95% of my readers are too young to remember. I should have found a way to get my point across using Lady Gaga.

No, let me go back even before the flying elephant movie. Let’s go back to Joseph & Mary. That’s right. It’s Christmas. Here’s my gratuitous Christmas reference. Joseph & Mary knew all about taxes. They traveled by donkey 100 miles to pay their taxes in tax season, without a hotel reservation.

“So, what’s your point this time, Wes?” Well, I’ll tell you, Wes. Two thousand years ago the parents of JESUS didn’t have to be defeated in Congress to pay THEIR taxes, they paid them willingly, even when it meant riding a stinking donkey for over a week.

And how does all that fit in with this “conservative” label? How is balancing budgets using taxes some new-fangled liberal idea, when 2000 years ago the Romans were funding THEIR empire by taxing?

OK, let’s turn that observation around. How SHOULD the Romans have funded their Empire? Setting aside for the moment the notion that the Romans ought not to have had an empire, should they have funded it with bake sales? Rummage sales? Used book sales? Rock music benefits? Pledge drives? Subscriptions? “Your ad on this shield?” Selling naming rights to monuments?

I don’t know that they didn’t do all that and a lot more! The Romans, give credit where credit is due, were very creative. They invented ipso facto. They invented indoor heated flush toilets. They invented bat spit crazy politics. They were the real inventors of French fries, which are misnamed, as you all know, only they didn’t make them out of potatoes, they used parsnips. The French today call them “Panais frits” and make you wait an hour for them, then only bring two bites worth with a teaspoon of gravy on top.

But that’s beside the point! You can’t fund a whole empire charging a quarter quadrans per toilet use, or exporting fried parsnips to the Teutons. Even those and all the other tricks I’ve mentioned put together aren’t enough. Empires are very expensive.

So what’s it going to be, “conservatives”? Are we going to go so far back to the good old days that we don’t even have an empire? Seriously? Are we withdrawing from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ, our German bases, Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Kosovo?

Hell no, we won’t go. We never go. We’re going to be the Empire of a Thousand Years. So how do you fund an empire? How do you ALWAYS fund an empire? What’s the plain old normal way that all conservative governments that do things plain old-fashioned old normal ways use to fund an empire? They tax. Tax, tax and tax some more.

Going into Christmas time, or whatever you heathens call it, “End of the personal year” “No COLA Time”, “Unemployment”, let’s try to keep in mind that there could be no War on Christmas if there were no Christmas, and there’d be no Christmas without imperial tax collectors.

This is real conservatism: You balance budgets any way you can, and if that means raising taxes, you get on it. Grow up, people who want to call themselves conservatives.

Homeless Don't Belong Near Homes?

I just took an online quiz to find out how Malaysian I am. I am 25% Malaysian, it said. That's good to know, isn't it? We all struggle with our identities. Now if I can only figure out what my other three quarters are.

One of the things I've struggled with is how liberal or conservative I am. I've decided those labels are used wrongly all the time. I've decided I am both conservative and liberal, and everyone who isn't both simultaneously is a fool.

Some self-identified conservatives are saying Obama makes America look weak by admitting to other nations that we have made mistakes in the past. How is it conservative to go around saying you have never made mistakes? That's not a political stance at all, it's a character flaw.

Other "conservatives" are saying both that "getting through this recession will take sacrifices from everyone" and that "taxing the rich more is not the answer." Taken separately these do indeed resemble familiar conservative propositions. But together they just prove a kind of schizophrenia. What sacrifices are the rich going to make if not higher taxes? Should we draft them for a shovel-and-pick carrying economic army, a mandatory public works program for the super rich? Will Bill Gates and Paul Allen and friends lay the asphalt for the new Mercer Boulevard? Oh please, say it's so.

The poor, in fact, are sacrificing already, by being poor and getting poorer. So for the "sacrifices from everyone" to ever kick in, the rich have to sacrifice. Again, what? Well, what do they have? Duh, money.

Here's your conservatism: You pick the country you want to live in and you pay for it. You want an America that looks like a Third World country? Fine, that's free. We can abolish all taxes and you can have pregnant barefoot beggars on every street corner. You want an America that has a middle class to aspire to, and HDTVs for all the masses, to keep the revolutions in check, and restore the consumer class to buy the crap your overseas factories make? That's extra.

I started down this rant because of another "Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)" story in the news. The NIMBYs this time were residents of Ferndale, Minnesota. A church there wants to set up a daytime service for homeless people, and the neighbors said, "Homeless people don't belong in a residential neighborhood."

Would that be a conservative position? It's a call back to a simpler time, certainly, when people could say things like "[insert plural of racial epithet] don't belong in a residential neighborhood" and not have to mumble or hide their heads in shame among their white brethren, but it is a slander against conservatism to equate bigotry with the philosophy just because conservatism means to conserve values and bigotry has been a past and passed-up value.

Real conservatism should mean to conserve good values, only. My ancestors, and yours too, if you go back about two hundred generations, valued their enemies' heads for trophies, hearts for food, women for two minutes, and their children for slaves. But those are not values that any non-criminals now want to conserve, so we can remove those values from the discussion of what conservatism means.

Can we please do that with the NIMBYs' "values" too? If homeless people don't belong in any residential neighborhood, where the freaking hell do they belong? A swamp? A big pit with a lid on it? This is not a conservation of a good value; this is just plain asinine unreflective boneheadedness.

Of course they belong in a residential neighborhood, they're residents of this land, they're human beings, humans make neighborhoods. The value you need to conserve is the value of humanity and neighborliness. You let them into your neighborhood and you help them not be homeless, and when you have succeeded in helping them not be homeless, voila! -- no homeless people in your neighborhood!

Done the right way.

Yeah, I'm a Militia

The latest term of the US Supreme Court ended Thursday. We're not in a labor camp yet. Let's all share in a collective sigh of relief.

Talk like that often gets me pegged as an extreme liberal, as if conservatives all welcome being sent to labor camps. That's not how it works. A conservative is someone who doesn't mind if YOU are sent to a labor camp. What part of my editorial "We" didn't we understand?

I'm actually so far right I look left because the Universe is curved.

A good issue with which to illustrate my point is the gun control thing. Until last week I was in favor of gun control because I can't get a gun. If I can't get one, I don't want anyone else to have one. This is a deeply conservative view that has been around since the beginning of history. If I don't have a club, you can't have one. If I have one, mine has to be bigger.

In my case the reason I don't have a gun isn't because the state forbids me, but because the economy forbids me. This brings us to Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963. In that case an earlier Supreme Court decided full-out-freaking unanimously that poor people like Clarence Earl Gideon [mugshot left] (who'd been convicted of burglary) were entitled to court appointed lawyers at state expense, forcing Florida to retry Mr. Gideon, which retrial resulted in an acquittal. All of which was based on the 6th Amendment (4 amendments AFTER the 2nd, so only a third as important) which says, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right... to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." The justices acknowledged unanimously that a right to something that's denied because you can't afford it is a right not enjoyed.

How would that work if the problem had been that Mrs. Gideon couldn't afford a Glock? Let's say Mrs. Gideon was heading home from the sweatshop at 11 PM and a guy jumped her and stole her last buck fifty for a ride on Metro. But the 2nd Amendment says, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." In The District of Columbia v. Heller, last Thursday, the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia pontificating, said that the framers of the 2nd Amendment meant that all the Mrs. Gideons should have the right to guns.

[Above right: See the baby Glock! Is'ms the cutest widdle baby Glock ever? Yes'ms is!]

That's great, but what good does that do Mrs. Gideon, when the cheapest gun in the pawn shop is over a hundred dollars, and it explodes in your hand when you fire it? The answer is, we now need a Mrs. Gideon v. So-And-So in which the Supreme Court would again acknowledge, hopefully as unanimously as before, that a right denied economically is a right denied, period, and order the states to pass out firearms to all us poor people, at state expense. For the sake of American Freedom!

I trust that, when this issue does make it to the Supreme Court, that the conservative justices especially will rule my way, crediting me with being a bigger conservative son of a bitch than they are.

Make mine an Uzi, I can't aim.

Exercises for the Motivated Reader

1. Take any weird conservative ruling of the Supreme Court, such as, say Hudson v. Michigan, 2006, wherein they decided that if cops broke the law and invaded your house without announcing themselves, "It's all good." Think of at least one way that someone light-years to the right of the Roberts Supreme Court might have said, "No it's not." (Hint: His middle name is Not-My-House and his last name is Wesson.)

2. Commentators on Garcetti v. Ceballos, also 2006, in which the Supremes ruled that public employees could be muzzled, have called it a conservative decision. Explain in 200 words or less what value or principle was conserved. Good luck.

3. If you completed exercise 2, and you're a government employee, turn yourself in to the authorities at once.