August 29th, 2011 by John Feehery
A mighty wind blew in over the weekend. Television anchors were stretched to the limit as they desperately sought ways to fill airtime. Emergency workers looked far and wide to fill in their time cards. And plenty of people suddenly freaked out over the possibility that they might get wet.
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided to close down the city’s mass transit system a full day before the storm was supposed to hit the Big Apple. When the rainstorm finally hit (without any of the promised flooding), a lot of the Mayor’s critics wondered in loud and not very pleasant voices, if he was over-reacting.
He said that he would rather be safe than sorry, and that is a very common reaction among politicians. “We must be safe, not sorry,” should be the catchphrase of the 21st century.
That sounds completely rational in the abstract. It makes perfect sense to be cautious, especially when it comes to a major storm like a hurricane.
But being overly cautious is not without its own risks. I call it the “Chicken Little Syndrome”. If political leaders continually warn that the sky is falling, and the sky does not fall, it can cause a huge problem with voters. Read more...
Tags: America, Chicken Little Syndrome, Economy, Government, hurricane Irene, Hurricane Katrina, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, politicians, Politics, war on terror
Posted in Bad Decisions, Government, History, Media, Politics, Radicalism, Theory, bad news, national security, terrorism, tragedy, war | No Comments »
July 25th, 2011 by John Feehery
It is awfully hard to comprehend what happened in Norway over the weekend.
How could one man do so much damage in the name of Christianity?
How could that one man be so completely delusional to think that by killing so many innocent lives that he was fulfilling some greater mission?
Anders Behring Breivik shot dead 68 young people on Utoya Island right after he set off explosives that killed eight in downtown Oslo. According to news reports, Breivik, a blond hair blue-eyed native Norwegian, wanted to save Europe from cultural Marxism and from Muslim immigration. He apparently went on the shooting spree because he wanted to send a signal to the ruling Labor Party as a way to punish it for its lax policies on immigration.
Breivik, with more than a hint of irony, quoted the father of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, saying, “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.” Of course, it was Mill who helped to design the principle of no harm, which, according to Wikpedia, “holds that each individual has the right to act as he wants, so long as these actions do not harm others. If the action is self-regarding, that is, if it only directly affects the person undertaking the action, then society has no right to intervene, even if it feels the actor is harming himself.” Read more...
Tags: America, Anders Behring Breivik, Eric Cantor, Government, gun control laws, John Stuart Mill, Norway, Norwegian, RUSH LIMBAUGH, United States, Utoya Island
Posted in Bad Decisions, Foreign Relations, Government, History, Media, Politics, Radicalism, Religion, Theory, bad news, national security, terrorism | 2 Comments »
January 17th, 2011 by John Feehery
Barack Obama. Oprah Winfrey. Robert Johnson. Dick Parsons. Bill Cosby. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods.
It goes without saying that all of these individuals owe a great deal to Martin Luther King Jr., who is remembered today on the anniversary of his birth.
Milton Freidman. Frederich Hayek. Ayn Rand. Adam Smith. Ronald Reagan. Jack Kemp. Arthur Laffer. Dick Armey.
It might be less obvious that this second group owes every bit as big a debt to King’s legacy.
King’s legacy isn’t just about civil rights; although that is quite appropriately the reason most people celebrate him today.
But he also fought against, in his own way, with his own style, the restraint of the free market, even though he might not have known it at the time.
King may have thought himself a democratic socialist, and David Garrow, the historian, said that he told close friends that he considered himself a Marxist. In fact, he once said, “good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.”
That doesn’t sound very much like a committed capitalist, now does it? Read more...
Tags: Barack Obama, civil rights movement, freedom, Government, Martin Luther King Jr., Marxist, oprah, race, rights, slavery
Posted in Government, History, Media, Politics, Radicalism, Theory | No Comments »
January 11th, 2011 by John Feehery
It was Charles Manson who said: “Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone’s crazy.”
It sure seems that way. You just have to take a look at what is on the TV for a few minutes to confirm for yourself what Manson has asserted. From reality shows to the 48 Hours Mysteries to Glenn Beck and Keith Olberman, it seems that as a society we have all gone a little cuckoo.
Friedrich Nietzsche put it this way: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” These days, both in individuals and in groups, nations and epochs, it has become the rule.
Insanity has made an entrance again on the national stage, as a disturbed young man tried to kill a popular Congresswoman and succeed in killing many more. Conservatives believe that this was an isolated case of a crazy person. Liberals believe that this crazy person was born of a movement of crazy people that they call the vast right-wing conspiracy. Read more...
Tags: 48 Hours Mysteries, Charles Manson, Congress, Congresswoman, Conservatives, Crazy, faith', Friedrich Nietzsche, Glenn Beck, Government, Keith Olberman, Media, President, Religion, Tea Party
Posted in Bad Decisions, Government, History, Liberal Media, Media, Politics, Radicalism, national security | No Comments »
March 5th, 2010 by John Feehery
I hate it when David Brooks writes a column on a subject that I have been researching on and planning to write about for weeks. And he did it to me this morning, with a great column about “The Wall Mart Hippies” (http://budurl.com/2r5v).
His central thesis is that tea-party crowd is not really conservative at all. “Both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings. That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.” Read more...
Tags: Abby Hoffman, Barack Obama, Conservatives, David Brooks, democratic process, Dick Armey, Edmund Burke, Glen Beck, James O’Keefe, RUSH LIMBAUGH, Russell Kirk, Tea Party, The New Left
Posted in Government, Politics, Radicalism | 7 Comments »
A mighty wind blew in over the weekend. Television anchors were stretched to the limit as they desperately sought ways to fill airtime. Emergency workers looked far and wide to fill in their time cards. And plenty of people suddenly freaked out over the possibility that they might get wet.
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