This is what Dave THINKS he said.

But I like it, so I am going to steal it:

BW has a rare luxury: He can know (as we know), actually know, that his position is destined for victory. Real outcomes are not something opportunists or manipulators can game.

Bill Buckely is a circus performer performing the role of official “intellectual”. His kind is endemic to affluent society and Ivy League environments. You know, you go to a party and there are these nitwits discussing “the issues of the day” under rules that you are not supposed to take offense.

But that is the nonsense of polite society. Meanwhile, politics is about people taking offense and that is why it regularly degenerates into bloody violence. But don’t tell your Congressman. He doesn’t want to think about it.

Comment by Dave

mderpelding says:

Wow, you actually want to be at fault for our present situation?
Who made you God?
I was born into a lower class Republican family.
You know, authority is allways right.
In the upper midwest.
It took me years to overcome the crap programmed into my head.
I still am trying desperately to think for myself.
FOR A CHANGE.
What has happened to us as a people ANYWHERE is not the failings of a few “enlightened”
individuals.
You don’t have a monopoly on bitterness, or regret.
Neither do I.
So wah for me, and wah for you.

Comment by mderpelding —

MY REPLY:

If you weren’t into Bob’s Blog, you couldn’t recognize this as a commenter’s version of a compliment. underpelding was presumably not in the recovery program, but he has common sense, which is the same thing. When you are in that position, you try desperately to save people.

If you are a sponsor and so forth and you trry desperately to keep people from falling back on drugs, and they destroy themselves anyway, you blame yourself.

At first.

Then someone points out to you that you are not the God you think you are. Get off the self-punishment, Bob. Not because it is good for you to get off the self-punishment, but because the self-punishment is, forgive me, Joe, SILLY.

mderpelding says that me and Joe cannot bear responsibility for what happened.

But if I had nothing to add to this, it wouldn’t be Bob’s Blog. I am NOT saying that I take responsibility for THEIR failure, THEIR cowardice, THEIR pretenses. I am NOT saying that there is Great Responsbibility here that only a True Philosopher could Truly Understand. I AM saying that it is time that we called silly asses silly asses and went on.

Bless you miderpelding, but I am not inside the moral dilemna you are trying to free me from.

Someone needs to keep repeating silly and trying to be sophisticated because it is the truth. I do NOT feel guilty. I feel BORED. I feel that I have listened to this crap for fifty years, and I am TIRED of it. Your attempt to make me feel better is appreciated, but misdirected.

And the bottom line is that you are pushing the same line Joe is, the neoconservative line, the respectable conservative line. The silly people ant to talk about how i feel, they want to consult the dictionary, they want to talk about guilt complex and factual complexity as a philosophical concept.

I say they are silly asses who cover themselves with “sophistication.” I say that everybody who tries to deflect attention to Bob’s Guilt complexes or dictionary definitions is their ally.

We could get off the point by discussing whether you MEANT to do that.

I won’t do that. You are doing something bad. Joe is doing something bad.

Back to the reality we are dealing iwth.

I want to thank Dennis for what he said. Joe would never admit it, but he is grateful too:

NOT SPAM

This may not be much, and not really on topic, but this comments section is here, and I’m going to use it.

This following quite means a lot to a Gen X’er (or am I a Gen Y?) like me..

>Joe and Budarick and I are not the jolly old Santa Claus types who sold out everything you young >people SHOULD have inherited from us. We are hurt and bitter and vicious about the fact that you >got
>sold out. We tried so desperately hard decade after decade to sound the alarm.

You may not be aware of the disgust and dismay I had, watching the baby boomers and their ilk, revel in what they had, get lost in pointless nostalgia, and leave for us the bill for their lifestyle. I can tell you, that some of us, those in my generation who understand, feel robbed by the ones before us and much of my politics comes as a rebellion against the baby boomers/WWII generation and counter culture ‘revolutionaries’.

But it is good to hear people like you admit this and genuinely feel bitter that your peers couldn’t leave a better future behind, it does mean a lot, a lot more than you may think, because you really are in a minority, a very, very small minority. A minority so small, I’ve yet to meet anyone in person who would even begin to THINK like that.

I certaintly have learned from that mistake, and will under no way allow myself to do anything which will give my children a more uncertain future.

Comment by Dennis

It is SO good to have one of the people I fought for acknowledge me.

When I was in my teens, I kept demanding conisederation of “future generations.” All of the peole I was talking to, from Catholic priests to liberals to Objectivists, kept explaining to me that these “future generations” didn’t matter. The priests, in which category I include the preachers the way Jefferson did, told me that Jesus only meant “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to apply to the PRESENT generation.

I could not explain to them that none of us were in Jesus’s PRESENT generation, so there was something wrong with that argument.

That was in my teens. My teens ended in 1961. So if you were born after March 31, 1061 you are one of those mythical and completely unimportant “future generations” that no decent “Christian” gave a fig about.

At the University of Virginia, a Public Choice expert explained to us why it was absurd to be concerned about “future generations.” He said, “What is a representative of these ‘future generations’ could talk to you? What if he came back inhis ghostly garb and tried to make a DEAL with you? What could he OFFER you? NOTHING! So why would you be concerned with him?”

From Buckley to Marx, their only concern was that a Mexican NOW was real, whereas future generations — you — was something mythical.

This is something for the birds. Literally.

If a bird was logical he wouldn’t spend all that time mating and feeding chicks and defending chicks with his or her life. What does he get OUT of it? Nothing. A lot LESS than nothing.

Why should a bird spend most of tis one precious lifetime assuring that birds who look like him or her populate the earth long after he or she has ceased to exist? This is how every sociopath reasons. But in my day, thiis was not the basis of being a sociopath. This was and is the basis of being a CHRISTIAN or a conservative or a libertarian or anything else.

This is MORALITY!?

Joe could desribe this as a disagreement between me and them. He could pull out his Lexicon and find forty-two good solid synonyms for “disagreement.”

I do not regard this as a disagreement. It is a DISCONNECT. Mortality is NOT how you bargain with people. Morality first of all applies to people who CANNOT bargain with you. Above all, morality concerns the future you leave to people who are not born yet.

Dealing with people who can hurt you is not MORALITY unless you are a sociopath.

Two plus two is four.

No synonyms.

I care about future generations because I was BORN to care about future generations. I was born to care about MY future generations. A more sophisitcated person, a non-redneck, would be BEYOND such tribal basics. Everybody has told me that, and Joe is merely the latest.

Which is why the article by Rushton and Jensen was such a landmark, why Premise Checker and Elizabeth pronounced it as such. The leftists and respectable cosnervatives did not even bother to demand a lynch mob when it was published. LibAnon will tell you that the left is more than willing to accept its premise: Race is family.

Race is family is not nostalgia, it is MORALITY. That article states that a healthy person wants his own kind to survive and prosper. In fact, thought neither Rushton nor Jensen would be willing to listen to a redneck like me, they said that the race that took America would say, “We the people of the United States of America … and OUR posterity …” was the basis of all morality.

Power does not come from the barrel of a gun wielded by some black militant. Power comes from US. The only way to take power from us is to make us take any other idea seriously. Which is what Joe and George Will keep trying to do.

Before this SILLY — no apologies to Joe — generation came along, nobody but Lincoln-obsessed conservative would have taken a second to agree with this. A healthy mind would wonder why I have to belabor the obvious.

Dennis honors us, which we appreciate. But more important, he swears what he will never take this silliness-covered-by-sophistication seriously. He will be MORAL. He will listen to no preacher, no priest, no libertarian.

Joe will never admit it, but that is what the remnant of white moral beings on this planet live for. And Dennis is almost unique in not just bitching about he has been screwed, but in recognizing that there are a few of us mutations around who carried the truth on.

I don’t NEED somebody to see this. I have carried on alone. But it feels good to see that Dennis declares the truth. For every Dennis there are a hundred more who see it but don’t express it.

To me, THAT is a triumph of morality.