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Dudemol
10.26.15

I propose a new word for our lexicon: Dudemol.

A fellow I used to work with would do us the favor of repeating things he said that he deemed particularly clever, just to make sure we got it.

Lonny walks into the break room. The guy says "Lonny! What did you brush your hair with? An eggbeater?"

Then the guy looks around the break room. "Dude, I'm all 'What did you brush your hair with, an eggbeater?' "

So a dudemol is when you repeat something that you've said that you're pretty proud of. Like when talk show hosts say "It's like I posted on my Facebook page last night . . . " Or when a politician says "Like I tweeted . . . "

(Is it just me or is there something unsettling about an adult running the government talking about what he "tweeted?")

So that's a dudemol. Like I'm about to commit.

It's like I posted on Facebook . . .

If you choose the easiest answer instead of the correct answer, you haven't solved the problem.

That approach certainly frees up your brain from considering the issue any further, but locking up the wrong suspect leaves the bad guy at large.

#ReasoningIsNotRacism

That was in response to a series of Facebook comment rants ('cause it's totally cool for an adult to go on and on about what happened on Facebook) where some mindless nimrod was answering any comments about Obama's handling of Islamic State as "Racist!"

I will give him credit. Although his basic idea was as lacking in originality as you can possibly get, I was impressed with how many different sentences he could form using the word "racist" without saying anything new.

What if I tell you about a guy whose career was a community organizer, whatever that is, with no experience running anything? He's spent a couple of years in the Senate, but never really did anything to distinguish himself. Are you going to consider him as a serious candidate for the United States Presidency?

Of course not.

Okay. Now let's say he's black.

Oh, hey now. That's different! Now people will support him for President. Why? Because they aren't supporting him at all. They are trumpeting the idea that they are cool and open-minded and hip and with it, because see? They voted for the cool black guy.

Geraldine Ferraro was exactly right. If Barack Obama were a white man, it's doubtful you ever would have heard of him.

It's brilliant, really. He didn't do anything to win it, so he can't do anything to lose it. Nobody who voted for him did so because of his ability or ideology, so nobody's going to withdraw support for any incompetence or incompatibility he shows.

Quite the contrary. Because their coolness and hipnosity hinges on him being such a prize, they will make fools of themselves painting anything he does, no matter how stupid or dangerous, as being brilliant.

    >> Point 1: Barack Obama was elected President because he is black.

His supporters admit that very thing. They do. When we criticize his performance they say we only criticize him because he's black. Oh? Okay, so if you've reduced him to nothing but his race, that's the only reason you can support him. You said so yourself—there's nothing else there. If there were, we could oppose him based on that.

Okay, so you offer a candidate that could never get elected on his merits, but is guaranteed to get elected because of his race. What kind of candidate are you going to pick?

Are you going to pick someone who is mainstream and reflects the values of the American voter?

Of course not. Why bother? Why waste a "historic" candidacy on someone who could have gotten elected without it?

You're going to put up a radical.

    >> That's point 2. Barack Obama is a radical.

And that brings us to point number 3. Because he's a radical, which I've skillfully explained is the whole reason he got in there, reasoning people are going to oppose him. They are going to passionately oppose him because he is tearing down the country that they love. They don't like radicals and they don't like socialism and they don't like being lied to or stolen from and they are going to make a lot of noise about it.

In so doing, they are passionately opposing . . . a black man!

Racists!

Wow, you say, they're getting pretty wound up about Barack Obama. It's got to be because he's black.

Actually, it really is. Because if he were a white hippy socialist radical he wouldn't be in the position he's in. So, oddly enough, you are quite correct.

But I have no idea what it is.

It's that deal where you say one thing, knowing that the person will hear something else. One of the classic stories is the lady whose friend was in a Broadway musical. The lady went to the play and her friend was horrible; her singing was unbearable. Afterwards they met in the lobby and the friend asked her what she thought.

The lady said "I don't know how you do it night after night!"

Awwwww! Thank you!

There's a guy at work I'm waiting for the opportunity to tell "Sometimes I try to imagine what this place would be like without you."

I've probably been on the receiving end a thousand times more than I know. There's an endless number of ways you can implement this one.

Some variants are things like "The check should have gotten there by now." It certainly should have, but you didn't mail it yet.

Or, here's one you might get. "What if I told you that . . . ?" Yeah, in reality he wasn't late because he was running a sick friend to the hospital, but he didn't tell you that, he just asked what if he did.

Bill Clinton (pardon my language) was a master of the technique. He'd say something that sounded like it exculpated him, but if the truth ever came out he could point back to that statement and claim he told you, you just heard it wrong.

"I caused pain in our marriage." Oh, he left his socks on the bathroom floor. Then as you find out that he's a serial cheater he can claim "I never lied! I told you that from the very beginning!"

That's not the best example, but he did it all the time. He was a master of that. You phrase it in a way that the person can hear it one way, but you have plausible deniability that you never lied.

I'm going to call it the ambivalent phrasing technique.

Okay. I told you all that so I could tell you this.

In my own defense, every single other radio station was on a commercial (except NPR--the flow chart for that is the next step from KSL, and it's a branch: NPR or "off.") Doug Wright was talking and I almost just hit the off button. But he was actually making sense. He said the minimum wage is here to stay, like it or not. But it should be indexed to something.

So far so good.

Then he said "Marco Rubio even said 'you can't live on $11 an hour.' "

Maybe you think I didn't scream.

Among the stupidest phrases ever uttered was when Bill Clinton (pardon my language) said that he supported an increase in the minimum wage because "You can't raise a family on $4.25 and hour."

Seriously. The President of the United Cotton-picking States thought that the minimum wage is intended to raise families on.

So I was pretty disappointed that Rubio, a man with an actual brain, thought that the government should mandate what employers pay 3.9% of workers who are paid by the hour (which obviously is only a part of the total workforce) to a level that competes with what they pay workers who have developed skills in an effort to provide for their family.

I was really disappointed and really re-thinking what I thought of Marco Rubio.

Then it occurred to me: What if there were some giant electronic repository, kind of like a real-time encyclopedia, where I could access what Marco Rubio had to say and I didn't have to take the word of a host I choose not to listen to on an ABC affiliate radio station?

So I looked it up.

Please, I'm begging you, please Karma, God, Cosmos and Beloved Reader, forgive me for contaminating this sacrosanct space with a link to . . . I can't say it . . . that . . . whacked out psycho nut job show on the most whacked out network outside of North Korea. But I did it for a reason.

That person has a radical socialist agenda, and even with that agenda he couldn't hide the fact that Marco Rubio did not say what Bill Clinton (pardon my language) said.

Marco Rubio said "You can't live on $11 an hour." Now, please note that the minimum wage is not $11.00/hr. Rubio was not saying "You can't live on minimum wage and we need to increase that so you can." He was saying the exact same thing I'm saying. You cannot live on minimum wage. And you're not freaking supposed to!

The Marco Rubio quote wasn't a . . . whatchamacallit . . . an ambivalent phrasing . . . deal. It was a classic "taken completely the freak out of context" deal combined with a little hint of straw manning.

But the lesson is, think what people are saying and don't get lost in the words they are using.

Also, don't believe what people on the radio say.

I was in the second or third grade. Recess was over and I ran over and got in line behind the four or five people who were already there. I was standing there minding my own business as the line formed behind me, when the teacher came and yanked me out of line. She was furious. Tammy had told her I shoved her out of line to get in the front.

No such thing had occurred. I was too bewildered to protest as the teacher pulled me to the back of the line.

The teacher had believed bad information and she thought I was a scoundrel because of something someone else said that wasn't true.

That's the lesson.

If Doug Wright tells you Marco Rubio is a whacked out liberal idiot, maybe you ought to give Marco Rubio a chance to tell his side of the story before you get mad at him.

Bernie Sanders. Wow

So, the Bernster thinks college should be free. Free!

That's brilliant. Simply brilliant. Free college education for everyone! I don't know how you could oppose that!

Unless you had an actual brain.

Here's the problem. We've been watching too much fiction on TV and in the theaters. Bernie Sanders couldn't get away with spouting that crap if this were 1950. But after sixty-five years of sitting in front of various screens willingly suspending our disbelief, we just go with it.

"The neutron blasters won't work because we're out of Algorium!"

"Wait! I have an idea! We can get some Banterilite from the stasis chambers on that abandoned Targulvian freighter, and if we shoot polarized light through it, it will power up the blasters almost as well as Algorium!"

We just sit there munching our popcorn "Yup. Yup. Whatever you say."

We're conditioned to not think it through. Just cheer in the right places. We're not even inclined to think about how plausible it is.* We just hear "That smart guy in charge can make it all better."

That's the world Bernie Sanders lucked into.

"See all those giant institutions staffed with thousands of people? They don't need money to run!"

"The Educationite is going critical in the Collegium!"

No problem. We'll just suck the Productivitum out of the Taxpayollitzol reactor until the Educationite magically diffuses throughout the entire Starship Free Enterprise and Utopivite powers all the vessel's needs.

Yup, yup, yup. Pass the popcorn.

---

* In real life, of course, the Banterilite the Targulvians use is a beta grade, which doesn't respond to polarized light, and even if it did, the half-life isn't nearly enough to stabilize the neutron blaster's Rouseyan field.

But I didn't need to tell you that.

But honestly, Bernie isn't the only buffoon on the stage.

It amazes me the kind of money and energy that goes into making a TV show. I'm watching Blue Bloods right now and I look at the sets and the prep and think of all the money that's spent every single week. All for entertainment.

The brief clip I saw of the democrats' debate was the same kind of thing. They put all that money and preparation into making it almost like a real current events kind of production, but then . . . "Oh, crap! Who was in charge of bringing in the talent?"

Right? I don't know how you could take any one of those idiots seriously. Every single one of them. You're thinking "Did you even practice this in front of a mirror? Or is this really how you intended to come across?"

It's like the silly student body elections you used to have in grade school with all the hand made posters and kids standing on a little stool saying why you should pick them.

(And you knew everybody was just going to vote for Leslie, no matter what anyone said, 'cause she was in the fifth grade and already starting to get breasts.)

Americans on both side of the gun issue are desperate to find a solution to the kind of attack the monster made on that community college in Oregon. I'm inclined to give the other side a reasonable grace period to opine on how we need to get rid of private ownership of guns in this country.

Time's up.

Someone posted "If you think we don't need Gun Control, you're dreaming!"

Dreaming? Here's dreaming. Thinking you can put the toothpaste back in that tube. Do you seriously think you can round up all the guns that have ever been manufactured? When you make that call do you really expect the gangbangers and loonies to rush to get in line?

You're freaking dreaming.

Nine college students are dead.I'm as freaked out as anybody. If you could solve the problem by rounding up every single gun in the world I would be at the front of the line to give up my guns.

Safest bet I'll ever make. That's going to happen right after Bridget Moynihan gets arrested for stalking me.

I'd be at the front of the line, but I wouldn't throw mine into the smelter until every single other gun on the planet was in there first.

Explain how that works. Explain how you eliminate that technology. You can't. And as long as the bad guys have guns, I'm going to have guns. And the bad guys will have guns until you flashy thingy (sounds cooler than "neuralizer") everybody back to about 1200 AD. And when that happens I'll try to be the first one to invent them again.

Just freaking stupid.

So . . . guns are here. You can like it or you can hate it but you can't change it. Just like having a moron community organizer in the White House. You can't change it. You just have to deal with it.

Now that we've established that, let's think about it from there. The problem is that a gun gives the crazy guy in the school the advantage. But, the problem is not that he has a gun. The problem is that he has a gun and no one else does.

This isn't groundbreaking information. As long as you have guns you have to have guns in the hands of good guys. So if the bad guy has a gun, and everyone else in the classroom does, too, you don't end up with nine grieving mothers.

But you don't need every person in the classroom to have a gun. If you have about three people armed--or if the bad guy is pretty sure there could be three people armed, you avoid this sort of thing.

Either that or we go with your magic Make all the Guns Disappear deal.

Okay, let's bang on some more really dumb liberal ideas. By the way, I gave liberals a grace period, but not Joe Biden. Joe Biden is just too dumb to get a grace period. "I guarantee you he used a semi-automatic assault weapon!" Hey, Joe, why don't we wait three seconds until we know something? Go fire a couple of quail shells off your back porch.

Here's the next really stupid liberal idea: When the bad guy realizes no one has guns, he will put down his.

How'd that work out for you?

But hold that thought. The fact is that in the hands of good guys, guns prevent violence. Remember when I explained to you that order/peace requires an imbalance of power? You remember, you were amazed at the brilliance of the insight, that equality is noisy and messy. A gun is an imbalance of power. And in the hands of a good guy that's a good thing.

A couple of punks are thinking your face needs rearranged. They are going to practice their MMA skills on you. Maybe there's two of them, and two of you. Maybe you all have baseball bats. It's going to get violent and messy. It's going to be bloody, for them as well as you. That's because there's more or less equality.

But you pull out a gun.

The punks decide your face is fine the way it is, they go away, and you put away the gun.

See how that works? When it's the good guy that has the gun and no one else does, he really does put it down. And that saved violence.

That's an idealized scenario to illustrate the principle. I know that life isn't that simple, but the principle is still sound. In the hands of good guys, guns prevent violence.

You remember "Joe," the imaginary guy I made up, completely out of my imagination without reference to any real human beings that I used to work with, just to illustrate how dumb liberal ideas can be.

"Joe" was trying to figure out how to get around the law that said a company couldn't prohibit employees from keeping guns in their cars in the company parking lot. But the law didn't say that you couldn't have a separate parking lot for cars with firearms. Joe was chortling over his idea. He was going to have a big sign that said "Cars in this lot have valuable firearms in them!" He was tickled that gun owners would be getting their property stolen.

A asked him how he was going to ensure that only good, responsible, law-abiding citizens stole the guns.

He just waved it off. Honest to God, he was more bothered by law abiding citizens having guns than thieves and criminals.

Make sure you look through that lens whenever you try to understand the left's thinking on this issue.