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 Mouseover text: Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty. It’s an Educational Psychology joke (if such things really exist).
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Just days after Matthew Vadum of American Thinker proposed the dubious analogy that letting the poor vote was like giving crooks burglary tools, another brilliant mind pops up with similar cutting edge 18th century political ideas.
This time the mind in question belongs to John David Dyche, a Republican lawyer in Louisville, Kentucky. He wrote an opinion piece for the Courier-Journal entitled “Property rights crucial to voting rights.”
He begins with another dubious analogy — doctors this time, not second-story men.
Some bemoan Kentucky’s 10 percent voter turnout in recent primaries. But quantity hardly assures quality in making important choices.
If you had a serious disease would you open your treatment to everyone or confine it to a few specialists? A free society’s biggest decision is how it shall be governed. The Founders therefore placed prudent limits on participation in it.
After offhandedly suggesting that it was probably a good idea to let blacks and women vote, Dyche then takes us to the good old days when only the landed gentry could participate in politics or governance. You know, the situation that encouraged some demented landed gentry types to create an entirely new nation sometime around 1776.
Unlike Vadum, who draws his arguments from paranoia-scented thin air, Dyche dresses up his anti-democratic broadside with lots of quotes from historical figures — none of whom lived after the 1850s — with whom he happily agrees. Must be that law school training.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — David Barton is a loon, a dangerous loon.
I’ve blogged before about David Barton’s peculiar version of American history. He teaches that the USA was deliberately conceived as a Christian nation, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Barton misquotes the Founding Fathers, twists and quotemines historical documents, and when all else fails outright lies about history to support his cockeyed ideas.
The Religious Right adores him. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who is vainly trying to be the presidential nominee of her party, invited Barton to teach the Constitution to newly minted Representatives. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who at one point was considering a presidential run, famously said:
`“I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced–forced at gunpoint no less–to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.”
The Atlantic Monthly had a lengthy analysis of Barton’s appeal and his peculiar methods of historical research. There is no doubt that Barton’s religious belief drives his interpretation of history, but what kind of beliefs does he have?
Here’s a clue. Right Wing Watch posted this excerpt of Barton’s appearance last year on televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s “In God We Trust” video series. Barton is talking about the need for Christians to get involved in public affairs.
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The mouseover text says: “And they both react poorly to showers.”
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JISHOU, HUNAN — After writing the previous post, I came across a photo of Matthew Vadum, a blogger at American Thinker. He’s no fan of “ultra leftist” Leon Trotsky, it seems, but compare their photos. Is it me, or do they look alike?
 American Thinker (!?) blogger Matthew Vadum  Russian Thinker Leon Trotsky No wonders he knows Trotsky so well. Add Vadum to the list of suspected left-wingers. He’s a plant! A mole!
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JISHOU, HUNAN — A long time ago, only white, male property owners could vote. Then the property ownership rule was dropped, followed by the whites-only rule, followed by the men-only rule, followed by a reduction in the legal voting age to 18. So, in the USA, there is near universal suffrage, which most people would consider a really good thing.
Not Matthew Vadum of the oxymoronically named American Thinker blog. He believes we need to turn back the calendar a couple of centuries to those good old days when only rich white guys could vote. Or be President, I reckon.
Vadum says registering the poor to vote is un-American. Seriously. Because encouraging the poor to vote means they will vote for their own interests, unlike rich folk, who always vote for the poor’s interests.
Sayeth he:
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
Ah, Obama the Boogeyman again. Reading further, you will find that Vadum manages to also connect (a la Glenn Beck) ACORN, Leon Trotsky, Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney with this blight called universal suffrage.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — You’ve all heard of culture shock, but for someone who has lived abroad for some time, it works the other way, too: reverse culture shock.
It works like this. You move to a different country (hell, you could move to a different state and still feel culture shock) and live there for several months, or years. At the beginning, everything is new, or weird, and you experience culture shock. How you expect the world/society/people/friends/lovers should behave is completely different from what you have experienced in the past. Successful ex-patriates revel in the new milieu and move on. Others go bonkers and move back to the States as soon as possible.
Assuming you’re the type who stays, eventually the new cultural milieu becomes second nature to you. As a trivial example, I no longer expect to see a knife, fork and spoon alongside my plate at a restaurant. In most Chinese eateries, you get a pair of plastic chopsticks in a paper or plastic envelope and a set of ceramic dishes with a ceramic soup spoon shrink-wrapped in plastic. (Most restaurants outsource their dish washing to a third party, who cleans and sterilizes everything and seals it in plastic.) In addition, every table gets a pot of tea or hot water. And rarely, you also get a packet of paper napkins or at less upscale places, a plastic container with a roll of tissue paper inside. (Kleenex on the cob, as a former student — Emily Plant, was it you? — once described it).
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