Wolfgang von Skeptik

THREE EXAMPLES OF TERRIBLE STUPIDITY

I AM BATTING VERY badly these days, batting so badly I am giving serious consideration to never batting again. Though I once and indeed for most of my life took great pride in my research and investigation skills, my abysmal computer illiteracy has finally tripped me up badly, with the result I stupidly attempted to find some numerical data on the Internet only to make a truly moronic mistake and thus be taught the undeniable and infinitely humiliating lesson that – as good a researcher as I was in libraries and government archives using old-time card-catalogues and hard-copy documents – I am utterly worthless when it comes to data research via the Internet, and given my age it is unlikely I will ever be any better than worthless, which means that, at the very least, I should henceforth always caution readers whenever I am using Internet data to which I cannot link directly. But what shames me is not just the sting of discovering that my skill has been rendered useless by a machine; it is also the fact that my intelligence is clearly deteriorating with age, proof of which are my other two infinitely stupid errors: my vote for George Bush in the presidential election, and my vote for Christine Gregoire in the Washington state gubernatorial contest.

Taking the two political blunders first because they are each halves of the same even greater personal folly, note my equally impassioned commitments to a ten-amendment Bill of Rights, a strong national defense (especially in the sense of war against the Islamic enemy of American liberty and indeed all civilization), and a functional social safety-net. Given the political realities of Enron Nation, it is not possible in today’s America to find a single party that is true to all ten amendments (especially the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth amendments), that supports a properly muscular military establishment, and that genuinely believes the Christian notion the true measurement of a society is how it treats its poor and disabled. The Republicans are good on defense and claim (often falsely) to defend the Second Amendment, but just as George Bush told his professors at Harvard Business School, the GOP believes the poor are poor merely because they’re lazy, and Republican social policies (including policies toward the disabled) are accordingly vicious. The Democrats claim (often falsely) to be the protectors of the poor and the disabled, but the truth is that here in Enron Nation, the Democrats are as indifferent to the poor and disabled as the Republicans are hostile. But the Democrats at least sometimes go through the motions.

Hence my two votes: Bush for president, as a vote for the defense of the nation against Islam, and Gregoire for governor, as a vote to preserve Washington state’s social safety net against the War-on-the-Poor depredations of the Bush League and the Republican Congress. (Hence too the one vote I do not regret now and will not ever regret in the future: for George Nethercutt against Patty Murray, as much a protest-vote against the Subversive in Sneakers as a vote for a stalwart defense .)

The errors in my two mistaken votes were the very worst kind of errors – errors of assumption.

In the case of my vote for Bush, I assumed the GOP would increase its margin in the House and would unquestionably defeat Obstructionist Democrat Tom Daschle but would otherwise gain no further ground in the Senate. This, I reasoned, would protect the social safety net from the worst of the Bush League’s schemes for resurrecting the Herbert Hoover economy even as a Bush presidency gave us the robust military we desperately need (and will need for at least another hundred years) to defeat Islam’s most recent escalation of its 1400-year war against civilization.

Similar reasoning prompted my vote for Gregoire: she is a pragmatist on the Second Amendment (she publicly opposed feminist/pacifist demands for draconian restrictions on concealed carry privileges and she is rumored to favor shooting-range protection laws), and there was no question she would defend the socioeconomic safety net. Just as there was no doubt that – as a conservative Republican and thus a sworn enemy of the social safety net – Dino Rossi would savage it. (Another factor in my own anti-Rossi thinking was his connection with the real-estate Republicans, who in their obscenely greedy enthusiasm to convert shooting ranges into suburban developments have for years betrayed the Second Amendment community by siding with anti-gun Democrats to obstruct passage of shooting-range protection laws, with the result that Washington is – or so I am told – the only western state that lacks them.) Gregoire, I believed, would at the very least reign in the Democratic Party’s anti-gun radicals and – to the best of her ability – she would also protect the poor and disabled from the Bush League.

What happened in either instance was much different from what I anticipated.

In the national election, the Republicans also swept the Senate, which means there is absolutely nothing to stop Bush from imposing the entire Ronald Reagan domestic agenda: total destruction of the New Deal and complete restoration of the Herbert Hoover economy, especially its system of two castes: the plutocrats in one class, and all the rest of us in the other, all of us downsized, outsourced and generally disempowered people who at the very best are only a few paychecks from homelessness – those of us the old-time Reds used to call “the proletariat.” Mistake number one: I assumed the Republican hostility to the poor and the disabled would be politically counterbalanced, and I was wrong. As I said already, I voted against myself and my socioeconomic class, and I am not only sorry but ashamed.

In the state election, I assumed Gregoire would win by a healthy margin; she was ahead something like 15 percentage points a week before the vote. But that’s not what happened – and the way Gregoire won amounts to a defacto coup. To understand how this is so, it is necessary to know something about Washington state politics – especially the fact that the state’s Democratic majority includes a substantial proportion of rural and/or union-member (and thus decidedly pro-Second Amendment) voters whose values are not much different from my own: strong national defense, strong 10-amendment Bill of Rights, strong socioeconomic safety net. But in Seattle and King County and in Bellingham, there is an entirely different kind of party, Democratic in name only and in truth matrifascist to the core: this is the party of Sen. Patty Murray, the radical feminist who makes no secret of her hatred for all that is symbolized by “a white man in a necktie” and her love for “war against the white patriarchy” as symbolized by Osama bin Laden; the party of Rep. Jim McDermott, one of matrifascism’s useful idiot-eunuchs, more favorably disposed to Saddam Hussein than to the president of the United States. Had Gregoire won by the anticipated 15-point margin, she would have claimed a mandate from the Democratic rationalists – the farmers, the union members, the commercial fishers and loggers – and she would have wisely invested this political capital in staving off the extremism of the Seattle/King County/Bellingham faction. Indeed, the political insiders I know tell me Gregoire’s intention was to show the entire nation how the Democratic Party had finally outgrown its self-defeating personal-as-political dementia and was at last returning to its definitively pragmatic New Deal roots – yet another factor that prompted my vote. But now, because of the defacto coup by which Gregoire became governor, all of these hopes are demolished – reduced to nothing save the intellectual rubble that tells me I made (another) grave error.

It’s not Gregoire’s victory that makes me regret my vote for her. It’s the truly horrific reality implicit in the way she won – a reality that may require further explanation: Older readers will remember how Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley stole the 1960 presidential election from Richard Nixon by massive vote fraud and gave the presidency to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. What most people do not know is that from then until 1972, when the Daley forces were at last ousted by the coalition that (unfortunately) celebrated its triumph by nominating George McGovern, Daley and his machine ran the national Democratic Party in much the same way Hitler ran Germany: Daley’s word was law. (Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 candidacy would have been impossible without Daley’s approval, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention were part of the reaction to Daley’s tyranny.) Similar tyrannical relationships, built on similar coups, were characteristic of local Democratic politics: the Haig and Kenny machines in Hudson County, New Jersey, and the Crump machine in Memphis. Because each of these county bosses delivered critical votes, they (and their local party apparatchiks) became absolute dictators. And thus it will be in Washington state now that the Seattle/King County Democratic machine has handed Gregoire the governorship.

What this means is that Washington state will now be ruled by the Seattle/King County Democrats: the most ruthlessly matrifascist Democratic Party apparatus in the nation, run by Patty Murray and Jim McDermott and their hand-picked puppets. It is the most hysterically anti-gun, most viciously anti-white-male, most rabidly anti-American, most vindictively politically “correct,” most stridently female-supremacist Democratic organization in all the 50 states. It is so far Left it has come (via its gender and racial bias) fully Right: its ideology is ultimately an especially perverse form of National Socialism, with “all power to the Aryans” replaced by “all power to womyn and oppressed minorities.” It is utterly impossible for people who have not encountered it first-hand to imagine its venomous zealotry. It is all the subversive evil of matrifascism personified, and it is now in total control of Washington state. Because of the magnitude of the marker it collected by delivering the governor’s mansion, it now owns Gregoire , it now owns the legislature, and it now owns the state.

I have already discussed what this will probably mean for Washington state gun owners, but I will say it again. The King County Democrats have sought total abolition of Second Amendment rights in this state at least since the mid-1980s. In the late 1980s, they nearly succeeded in sneaking a total semi-auto ban through the legislature, and Gov. Booth Gardner would have signed it had it not been defeated at the last minute. In 1994, Seattle/King County Democrats pushed through a state law criminalizing any mental disorder for which the outpatient treatment-period was greater than two calendar weeks, a maliciously anti-gunowner measure that Second Amendment advocates cravenly accepted with submissive silence but which was finally (and courageously) vetoed by Gov. Mike Lowry after intense lobbying by mental-health professionals and veterans’ organizations. In 1997, Seattle/King County Democrats organized Initiative 676, which under the guise of mandatory “gun safety training” would have imposed New-York-City type licensing and registration on the whole state. All of these anti-gun horrors will no doubt come back to life again in this year’s legislature. Gun shows will be prohibited. Mandatory storage will be imposed – mandatory storage as in Canada or Washington D.C., where all firearms not only have to be locked in safes but kept disassembled (and thus rendered useless for self-defense). Concealed carry permits may well be abolished. And because of the debt she and her fellow Democrats owe the Seattle/King County party apparatus, Gregoire and her more rationally minded colleagues cannot resist the anti-Second Amendment onslaught. It is the Washington state version of the Daley/Haig/Kenny/Crump syndrome, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it until 2008.

The other horrific impact of Seattle/King County dominance will be on the very social services I voted for Gregoire to preserve. Here's how:

For most of the Gardner years, for all of the Lowry years, and for the first part of the Gary Locke years, the Washington state Department of Social and Health Services was a matrifascist dictatorship within a state that was already becoming more feminarchy than democratic republic. DSHS feminists began scheming in the early 1980s to use Reagan Administration welfare cutbacks as camouflage for restructuring social services “in accordance with feminist doctrine” – the demand that males be denied all such stipends and services (including veterans’ benefits) until women are granted absolute economic parity. By the late 1980s, the restructuring was complete: hence the pointedly hateful quota-mongering that deprived thousands of Caucasian males desperately needed vocational rehabilitation or medical and psychological treatment. Females meanwhile – including even middle-class females – were given carte blanche access to social services of every imaginable sort. Some of the most unfortunate victims of DSHS prejudice were Vietnam veterans – men whose veterans’ benefits were repeatedly denied by the institutionalized miserliness of the Reagan-era Veterans Administration, men who were literally flung into homelessness by DSHS everything-for-“womyn,” nothing-for-males policies. Hence too the DSHS-feminist “boys-will-be-boys” malice that led directly to the savage wave of homosexual rape at the now-infamous OK Boys Ranch (for which Google).

But sometime around 1998, the ideological pendulum began to reverse itself. Whether Governor Locke deliberately set out to break the matrifascist stranglehold on DSHS, or whether it simply dwindled of its own accord, I do not know – if the former, Locke surely deserves epic honors for bravery. In any case, the social-services access situation improved to the point that a desperate or temporarily disabled white male could again turn to the system with reasonable assurance of getting real help – not a haughty bureaucratic brush-off or a life-destroying re-diagnosis maliciously intended to condemn him to permanent unemployability. But given the unabashed anti-white-male hatred of Patty Murray and the Seattle/King County Democrats in general, the probability is that all of the Locke-era achievements (which Gregoire the moderate would have defended and even fostered) will now be undone. And in this era of renewed warfare, with thousands of veterans returning home to face another Republican-run (and thus determinedly stingy) VA, the resulting crisis will be many times the magnitude of the tragedy I witnessed in the ‘80s. This is the very opposite of what I thought I was voting for, but because of the Seattle/King County coup, this is almost certainly what I will get. I am sorry I voted for Gregoire. Not only was I wrong, I was guilty of abysmally sloppy thinking to imagine – even for a second – that Gregoire would ever be allowed to retain her independence from the Seattle/King County extremists.

I was also wrong about something far more personal: the amount deducted for Medicare Part B premiums from my monthly Social Security pension. And as a consequence of being wrong, I owe the Lucianne.com poster who goes by the screen-name of Dragonslayer a personal apology, which I will e-mail (with a link to this eating of bitter crow) as soon as I finish it. The correct sum, confirmed by a Medicare document I misplaced during the recent move, is $66.60, not the $58.70 I mistakenly plucked from an Internet site – a site I found profoundly misleading (hence my error) but which would not have misled anyone genuinely skilled in Internet research, which I have hereby obviously proven I am not, and which (given my age), I almost certainly will never be. My error also changed the percentage by which Medicare premiums increased: 17 percent, not the 33 percent based on the $58.70 figure. (Moronically, I read the 2003 monthly premium – the $58.70 – as the 2004 monthly premium. I sought the information on the Internet because my own Social Security hard-copy document file was temporarily lost – misplaced, actually – in the lingering chaos inflicted by the ouster from my country home and the attendant forced return to city living last September.) The differences caused by my mistake do not change any of the conclusions I discussed in “The Serpent in the Medicare Bush,” available here, but the mistakes themselves utterly demolish my credibility on the entire subject. Once more, I am sorry. As I said last night, if nothing else this season, you can at least be thankful you are not me.

Posted by Loren at December 23, 2004 11:53 PM