So both motorcycles are down this week – one needs a battery (will fix it today) and one needs new tires (on order), so I commuted to work in the car yesterday.
My current project is in Hollywood, about 30 miles from home, and there is, flatly, no good way to get there by car. So on the way home last night, I was highly interested in the traffic news, which took me to AM radio in search of traffic information and left me gobsmacked by my first exposure to major talk radio.
I haven’t sat and listened to Rush Limbaugh, or even Hugh Hewitt (who seems like a nice guy in person) before. And what I caught was the opening of the Michael Savage Show.
What a f**king poltroon. Every time I get irritated at something stupid a blogger says, I now have to remind myself that “at least Blogger X is smarter and saner than Michael Savage.”He made four points while I was listening:
1. He’s really smart and successful (and, I presume, good in bed).
2. Condi Rice is the worst Secretary of State in the modern era, and we should have brought in an Arabic-speaking male Middle East expert instead.
3. We should have launched a conventional strike on all the North Korean missile facilities before they launched this week. (Actually, his comment was “Why do we have all these great aircraft carriers if we’re not going to use them…”)
4. He’s got some minor health issues caused by the stress of his show, and he thought about quitting, but once he thought about the F-18 pilots on the carrier he just visited, he realized that they sacrifice, and so he has to sacrifice as well.
Here are my quick comments:
1. No, he’s not (smart). I can’t speak to his success, but he’s not as successful as Paris Hilton…and as to his prowess in bed, his tone reminded me of nothing so much as this.
2. I’ll skip over the notion that all the Arabic-speaking diplomats are typically Arabists – and thus have the pro-Arab biases typical of the class – and I’ll point out that Rice has actually done a brilliant job of dealing with reassembling the Western Alliance. And that as a conservative who is opposed to Islamism, he ought to be thrilled at the frisson of discomfort the Arab males must face when they sit across from a black woman who has the power to give or deny what they want.
3. He’s out of his fucking mind. We’d have handed the Chinese a huge diplomatic victory, accomplished very little – given the state of the Nork missile program, put Seoul at risk, and handed the Arab countries a great talking point on how unilateral and trigger-happy we are.
Wimps pick fights. Strong, smart people choose them. There’s no reason to go military with North Korea today, except to relieve the humanitarian crisis that the Gulag Nation represents. It will collapse sooner or later – and our goal should be to see that it collapses sooner.
And I love the “we own them, why not use them?” We own a bunch of ICBM’s too…and I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply as well, if your brain is as small as his is.
4. This is perfectly in keeping with the rampant ego we see in #1 – of course he’s sacrificing as much as the troops by collecting his half a million while fighting the brutal case of hemorrhoids or shingles or whatever brutal stress-induced disease he’s battling. I can’t imagine a more arrogant, thoughtless, brainless position to take. That’s like me saying that the cut in pay I took to work with Spirit of America was the moral equivalent of serving in Iraq. Hint: no it wasn’t and no, his suffering isn’t either.
Writing this, I just recalled who it is that he really reminded me of:
It’s a useful image to keep in mind for dealing with arrogant fools.