Of brats and supermen...

Children are easily puzzled by this bit of mathematical trickery: three typically late tenants surprise the landlord by paying their $100 rent (each) on time. Eager to encourage this behaviour, the landlord hands $50 to one of them, to be shared equally by all three. The recipient, a clever fellow, pockets $20, and splits the $30 remaining between himself and the other two tenants. Now for the puzzle: Each tenant has effectively paid $90 thus making the total $270. The dishonest chap has $20 in his packet bringing the total up to $290. What happened to the remaining $10?

Centrist "pragmatist" Democrats, it seems, are equally gullible where we to substitute, in the puzzle above, "$10" with "Florida votes". Where, they question, did the few votes that cost Gore Florida in 2000 go? Their answer: To Nader, of course!

Here is Crooks and Liars:

Whether or not he wants to accept responsibility for it, Nader's campaign arguably did contribute significantly to Bush's ultimate placement in the White House.

They go on to quote the San Francisco Chronicle:

[..]"To an awful lot of people, Ralph Nader appears to be threatening, once again, to play the role of a spoiled brat whose purpose in life appears to be … electing Republicans by draining off votes from Democrats,'' said (Phil) Trounstine, who heads the San Jose State Center for Policy and Research.

Nader's presidential aspirations are viewed by many as evidence that he is on "an enormous ego trip with potentially destructive impact,'' Trounstine said.

Nader's is the subject of a searing new documentary, "An Unreasonable Man,'' which chronicles his early work as a consumer advocate and the turn in his career toward presidential politics. In the film, critics lambaste Nader, the author of "Unsafe at Any Speed,'' for abandoning his consumer advocacy, and suggest he is the ultimate egotist.

Does one assume such blatant hand-waving and ad hominem constitutes a surrender on the part of the expositor? That might be hasty in this day of Bush-Rove-DoubleSpeak. So, let us take these children seriously! Perhaps we should remind that the title "An Unreasonable Man" is from George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

One need travel no further than the website for the documentary to find the attribution to G.B.Shaw. Now, Shaw, I am afraid (for the chroniclers of all things San Franciscan), is talking about a Superman, not a brat, while laying down some maxims for revolutionists. Revolutionists, not bloggers like you and me. Centrist Democrats one is left to surmise, identify with the more conservative Chesterton on the matter of revolutions.

Only in a place of pretend democracy and a time when draft-dodger question triple-amputee veterans might we come across such a fantastic notion that an individual participating in a democratic process is an "egotist" and a "spoiled brat" -- spoiled by dedicating an entire lifetime to a wide range of causes a tiny bit larger than blogging, perhaps?

The dismissal of democracy is unsurprising, for the illogic is not an insult of Nader alone, but of the public (the public being the democracy is of and for, if such things still make sense) as well. For the assumption is that Nader voters would have flocked to Gore were it not for the vile snake-charmer brat.

Insulting the public is to be the national sport, after all. Iraq and 9/11? Why not. WMD? Sure! Mushroom clouds! Capabilities and plans for WMD program activities! If all that is grist for the mill at a time we "no longer worry" about bin Laden, why not "potential destructive impact" of an egotist brat as a pretext to perpetuate the actual destructive impact of a duopolistic system tending further right at each juncture (the symptoms of which being the likes of Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, as also such ugliness as Welfare Reform).

The mundane truth is that Nader is a mirror to the spoilt brats. His lifetime of activism an unreasonable intrusion of potentials on the actuality of a life behind a keyboard and a lifeless party.

Obama and Lincoln: Kristol clear!

It is not entirely surprising that the younger Kristol stands accused of mugging reality liberally, but this bit (quoted and critiqued at Crooks and Liars) fails to back up the charge:

KRISTOL: We’re electing a war president in 2008. If I can go back to Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this.

Obama’s speech is a “can’t we get along” speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Let’s paper over these differences, rise above politics and all get along.

C&L are understandably offended by the obvious strangeness of the suggestion that a black man would not fall on the anti-slavery side. The analogy Kristol is after, however, seems different and fairly sound: Lincoln went to war to unite the house on a principle (well, at least so the conventional story goes, and we shall adhere to it for this affair). If Kristol's summation of Obama's rather different attitude does not suffice, here is Obama's own web site:

Americans are tired of divisive ideological politics, which is why Senator Obama has reached out to Republicans to find areas of common ground. He has tried to break partisan logjams and take on seemingly intractable problems. During his tenure in Washington and in the Illinois State Senate, Barack Obama has accumulated a record of bipartisan success.

Lest we have lost track, a reminder: these are disturbing days. Illegal wars. Systemic corruption. Erosion of rights. To mention just three significant crises we live amidst. These one could parsimoniously presume are what Americans may be tired of. Ideology sounds like a 4-letter word only because of the way politicians like Obama use it. Without an ideology you stand on nothing. And that perhaps makes it possible to reach willy-nilly and make deals.