Don't Mind If I Do...
My first post. Wow. Great to meet you all.

Deep breath...hold it...and now the fire:

Susan Sontag was a marxist-socialist who was wrong on just about everything, save the beauty of photography. She said it best when she explained:

"Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"

In a word, yes.

Poor Smart Susan, fighting against the tide of history, whereas Dumb Ronald Reagan was able to see clearly that which was so obvious to so many people in Middle America (the same people at whom the folks living in that collective known as "the Upper West Side" look down over their Beluga from Zabars).

But then again, liberals have always had a soft spot for communists and dictators. Just read Nicholas Kristof's recent and pathetic paean to Castro.

Sontag used the descriptor "enemies". Which brings me to Teddy Kennedy. If you wonder why the Democratic party is an intellectually dead entity, you need only read the speech he made to the Washington Press Club yesterday. Democrats are infactuated with Bush. Bush, who turns everything into a crisis. Bush, who will never admit his mistakes. Bush, who plays Texas but was born Yankee. Bush, who used his daddy's influence to get a job in the TexANG. Bush, ad infinitum and ad naseum.

Pretty precious stuff from a man who drowned a co-ed in 1969.

But, to use a cliche, I digress. The real point here is that Social Security is a horrible deal. The myth of the Social Security Trust Fund is finally being exposed, its 1% management fee is more than what I pay Vanguard to manage my index funds, and let's not forget that in most major cities ponzi schemes are illegal. Bush wants to modernize the system to meet the economic realities of today's economy. Not such a bad idea IMO (for the record, I will not ever use an "H" when employing this acronymn) . Instead of engaging on ideas, the Democrats have nothing. Trotting Kennedy out as the future of the party is laughable, but welcomed by conservatives.

If you don't help shape the debate, you will be run over by it.

Most people believe that "once bitten twice shy" is a generally useful heuristic. Not Democrats. 1994, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004... "Bitten 5 times by the electorate and still indulgent of the left" might be kind and sensitive, but this is politics, not pillowing.

- posted by Anonymous @ Thursday, January 13, 2005