Well said, Retardo. “Liberty” of the economic sort is the only freedom the right has ever been interested in.

I have never been a fan of mental health professionals, Dr Montalban, but I could learn to love you.

or in the words of b^3

egalite, liberte, 401(k)

I wish that problem were unique to the right, Auguste, but it seems to have infected a lot of what passes for the left in America, as well.

Well, perhaps that’s not fair…..there’s a good bit of respect for personal liberty there, too – as long as it doesn’t interfere too much with that economic liberty.

I just wish we could talk “our guys” into swinging the pendulum back a little bit more toward the idea of rights for people, and a little bit less toward rights for businesses.

Ah, well….a girl can dream, can’t she?

Isn’t Krauthammer the guy who freaked out in Time magazine when Kasparov lost to Deep Blue??

Speaking of psychiatrists (Was he a psychologist or a psychiatrist?) I forget, but rumor has it, he’s given up song-blogging and right-wing politics for apolitical dance songs. I stumbled across this, I’ll try to look up where I found it. Was it some obsure Euro top ten dance hits charts? Once again, I don’t recall, but I cut and pasted the link here for those of you who are following his music:

Buck in the System
words and music by Dr. BLT
(c)2006
http://www.drblt.com/music/buckinthe.mp3

But haven’t you heard, Jillian? Businesses are people, too! Don’t squelch their freedom with your notions of “human rights,” you liberal commie hippie. So what if the water is poisoned and the children have cancer? The mighty corporation lives on, merging with other, smaller entities until it becomes The Anti-Captain Planet.

Topsoil, hot air, sludge, hydrochloric acid, spleen! Combine!

“It represents an escape from freedom, a demand for an arbitrary powerful state in whose bosom you can settle for life.�

It appears Chuck K. has mommy issues that he chooses to project upon a much safer target – the government and its bosom.
And I guess it’s more honorable for folks like Armstrong Williams and company to take government money to shill bad policies or Halliburton to take government money and not do the work, than it is to be a postal worker or police officer. Such freedom!!!!

“There have, I suppose, been other peoples in other places who yearned for a life of mediocrity.�

In some countries mediocre people actually become president. For two terms.
Just saying.

“The vibrancy of a society can almost be measured by its precariousness.�

I felt pretty fucking vibrant in the 1990s when the worker-to-job ratio was weighted in the worker’s favor, and I had a lot more career options.

I guess Chuck feels vibrant because he gets to pose as a journalist while also serving on the president’s bioethics commission and acting as a speech consultant. Apparently the market has a demand for pompous turds who have no ethics, no understanding of intelligence or warfare and no appreciation for the complexities of geopolitics.

Or sumthing.

Seriously, what’s wrong with a life of mediocrity? Human beings are destructive, vicious assholes who widely consider it better to be infamously inhumane than unregarded.

I don’t want to change the world. I just want to not contribute very much to wrecking up the place. If more people thought like that, we might be better off.
Imagine how we’d all be doing if Bush had decided to be a mediocre slacker instead of a messianic madman intent on making an impact on the world.

Leave no footprints. At least mediocrity is harmless. Harmless is a good thing to aspire to, in today’s world.

(Of course, being one of those folks who doesn’t believe in creationism, I don’t have to live with any spiritual or biological destiny larger than filling my niche and avoiding the sorts of environmental stresses that select an entity out. It’s the sort of thing that makes me intensely glad I’m not a fundamentalist Christian.)