Life in the Time of Low Information Voters

I used to love American popular culture. I found it rich, diverse and endlessly amusing. These days, I rarely go to the movies or plays and cannot bear to watch television. Even the radio with its repetitive, uninformative news snippets annoys. Our popular culture has moved from family favorites like Your Show of Shows, The Wonder Years, and I Love Lucy to the minute by minute coverage of celebrities not known for their wit, charm, or beauty, They are known for nothing other than the willingness to put their every part of bodies on narcissistic display and to promote the latest chichi leftwing cause.

Alicia Colon examines the phenomenon of the low information voters such a dross culture produces

Right now they are clueless. Consequently they have allowed the Democrats to hijack and distort the GOP's positions on virtually every issue. Republicans, therefore, don't care about the middle class and only want to reduce the taxes of the rich. They are also racists who want to keep minorities down. These distortions are repeated often by anchors on MSNBC and the alphabet networks. CNN is always on in the social service offices and in airports and the formerly legitimate cable station is so far on the decline that it feels comfortable allowing disgusting antics by amoral hosts on its New Year's Eve broadcast.

But it is folly to assume that all the low-info voters are poorly educated or on the dole. College students and graduates of liberal academia have been completely indoctrinated in leftist ideology and loathe all things conservative. Their bibles include the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times which routinely carry and affirm the Democrat lies.

Hollywood trots out alarming films on climate change, environmental doom and the racist doings of evil white men. Stars like Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson, Jamie Foxx, and Morgan Freeman use their talents to shill for the administration and the Democrats. The hypocrites that filmed that anti-gun ad calling for action following the Sandy Hook school massacre blithely ignore their participation in films glamorizing a violent gun culture. Democrats called for the ban on all assault weapons with some leftist reporter asking if we really needed such a weapon to kill an animal.

At one point even Saturday Night Live took note of the clueless citizens among us. Its target was the undecided voter, but a broader sweep was called for. How else to explain that voters elected a man with no executive experience in 2008 (and virtually no other relevant experience of any sort) and then re-elected him after he demonstrated beyond peradventure of doubt why his election to office was a stupid idea in the first place.

This week, those voters who looked the other way as the President funneled billions of dollars into the pockets of his cronies for dumb, counterproductive programs like Cash for Clunkers and Solyndra, got a wakeup call in the form of a higher payroll tax. When they apply for mortgages for home purchases they will find that the rules are more restrictive than they were last year. The Democrats who forced banks to lend to people who did not qualify under reasonable risk assessments have now reversed course.

Tom Maguire notes the irony of selling the Democrats as saviors of the banking industry and the friends of the poor when it was they who caused the problem in the first place in passing Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act (CRA):

Staid old-line banks will like using the government to force potential competitors into line. And all the banks will like the new protection against red-lining type CRA lawsuits.

That is slick marketing by the Dems. If Republicans had announced they were going to reform banking by limiting access by poorer people, Dems would have howled. But the new Dem plan is to protect consumers by shoving them out of the bank lobby and back onto the street.

Nominations to Die From: "The Muzzle is Off"

Jewish voters have been notoriously slow to notice that their former friends on the left side of the aisle have abandoned Israel. But -- just perhaps -- the nominations of Chuck Hagel, John Brennan, and John Kerry, the troika of nominees for Secretaries of State and Defense and head of the CIA most hostile to Israel in U.S. history, might get them to turn off Jon Stewart, pitch their copies of the New York Times, and start paying attention to real news.

Barry Rubin explains Obama's "muzzle is off":

--Their ideas and views are horrible. This is especially so on Middle Eastern issues but how good are they on anything else? True, they are all hostile to Israel but this isn't the first time people who think that way held high office. Far worse is that they are pro-Islamist as well as being dim-witted about U.S. interests in a way no foreign policy team has been in the century since America walked onto the world stage.

Brennan is no less than the father of the pro-Islamist policy. [snip]

--They are all stupid people. Some friends said I shouldn't write this because it is a subjective judgment and sounds mean-spirited. But honest, it's true. [snip]Smart people can make bad judgments; regular people with common sense often make bad judgments less often. But stupid, arrogant people with terrible ideas are a disaster.
[snip]

Kerry, of course, was the most energetic backer of sponsoring Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad before the revolt began. Now he will be the most energetic backer of putting the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Syria. Here is a man who once generalized about American soldiers in Vietnam as being baby-killers and torturers. Such things certainly happened but Kerry made the blame collective, except for himself of course.

As for Hagel, suffice it to say that the embarrassing quotes and actions from him in the past -- including his opposition to sanctions against Iran -- fueled a response to his proposed nomination so strong that the administration had to back down for a while.

What would have happened if President Harry Truman turned over American defense, diplomacy, and intelligence in 1946 to those who said that Stalin wanted peace and that Communist rule in Central Europe was a good thing?

Obama has been president of the United States for four years. Yet in foreign policy, having some decent and competent people in high positions mitigated the damage. Well, the reins are now loosed; the muzzle is off

The Antimatter Coin

And then, with the deficit looming larger by the minute and no reasonable spending cuts in view, the left floated the notion, unwarranted in law or good sense, of a trillion dollar platinum coin as the way off the fiscal cliff.

Tom Maguire again revives sanity, explaining in detail, day after day, why the notion is ludicrous and its serial backers not worthy of support.

jimmyk offers a counter proposal to the platinum coin gambit:

According to this site, antimatter is the most expensive substance. Plus, if the government produced a large enough antimatter coin, perhaps it would result in smaller government via physics.

Posted by: jimmyk | January 11, 2013 at 10:09 AM

Narciso, the Just One Minute unofficial historian, adds:

The Germans didn't run out of Reich marks, either, they just lost all value,

Posted by: narciso | January 11, 2013 at 10:26 AM

Nor does the additional suggestion that the president could issue bonds without Congressional authorization pass Constitutional scrutiny.

Either taxes get raised again -- unlikely given the mood of the voters -- or big cuts start being put in place.

Shoot, the Gun Grab Threats are Toothless

Facts -- they just don't matter like they used to.

Neither does the Constitution, if you listen to Joe Biden, New York Governor Cuomo, and other politicians grabbing the microphones to take advantage of the low information voters' short attention span by proposing a series of unconstitutional restrictions on gun ownership (or Nancy Pelosi on the 14th Amendment).

Kimberly Strassel explains very clearly why any sweeping gun reforms being bruited about will be dead on arrival:

On the other side is the reality that any of these proposals must, in the normal course of things, pass Congress. A few quick facts about that body. 1) More than half of its members have an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association. 2) The few members today calling for gun control are the same few who have always called for gun control. 3) The House is run by Republicans.

Despite the press's exuberant efforts to cast congressional gun supporters as having changed their minds, there has been no actual movement. Senate Democrat Joe Manchin caused a media sensation when he declared, immediately after Sandy Hook, that nobody needed "30 rounds in a clip." Less reported was that it took the Democrat about the time necessary for your average West Virginian to drive to a ballot box to clarify that statement and to add that he's "so proud of the NRA." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, even with the press's best efforts to parse his remarks, has committed himself to nothing more than a "thoughtful debate."

Montana's Jon Tester and Max Baucus, Alaska's Mark Begich, Arkansas's Mark Pryor, South Dakota's Tim Johnson, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu -- all are quiet on that red-state Democratic front. North Dakota's brand new senator, Heidi Heitkamp, declared proposals mulled by the Biden task force as "way in the extreme" and "not gonna pass." Unlike Mr. Obama, all of these members still face elections.

Over in the House, when asked recently what was more likely -- passage of gun control or Speaker John Boehner becoming a pagan -- a senior GOP leadership aide told Buzzfeed: "Probably the latter."