{"id":213,"date":"2003-10-09T15:25:37","date_gmt":"2003-10-09T15:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:22","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:22","slug":"we_are_the_bear_flag_state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=213","title":{"rendered":"We Are the BEAR Flag State…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I talked about the astounding, blind, arrogance of the California nomenklatura below<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Then last night, over at Dan Weintraub’s ‘California Insider’ I read an interview<\/a> with Sheila Kuehl<\/a> (State Senator from Beverly Hills and Santa Monica) that sets a new high-water mark for it. You’ve got to read this one… and my bear story too:<\/p>\n

DW: How are you feeling?<\/p>\n

KUEHL: I am really sad. I’m more angry than anything. And I haven’t even started thinking about what the Senate will need to do in order to save the state. <\/p>\n

DW: Save the state from what?<\/p>\n

KUEHL: From ignorance. This guy has no idea how to run a state. One of two things will happen. He’ll have his own ideas and no way to carry them out. I mean he has already proposed three things that the governor cannot do. He wants to roll back the car tax on his own by fiat, which he can’t do. He wants to tax the Indians, which he can’t do. He doesn’t know anything about running the state. So either he will propose a lot of stuff he can’t do and we’ll have to govern, or he’ll be pretty well manipulated by people who have an agenda, very much the way I think the president of the United States has been handled by people who are really telling him how to do these things. In which case we may have to counteract things that are worse than things he proposed on his own. His handlers will probably be more conservative than he is, or in the Republican Party line. Convince him he’ll bring businesses back to the state by cutting more benefits to workers, by unraveling anti-discrimination statutes which they call job killers.<\/p>\n

DW: Will he be received civilly by the Democrats in the Legislature?<\/p>\n

KUEHL: He will be received civilly. We have received everyone civilly. I don’t know if everybody is going to go to the State of the State (speech). Because frankly I don’t think there is going to be a lot of content that anyone\u2019s interested in. What\u2019s this guy got to say to us about the state of the state? Nothing.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve had a few other interactions with the more-liberal part of my team, and one characteristic I’ve noted is a certain…arrogance.<\/p>\n

The conservatives are arrogant too, but they simply think that we liberals ‘re delusional or traitorous. They give liberals the respect of being people responsible for their own actions The Democrats have this kind of sad, kindly, ‘we know better than you and we’re gonna make you do the right thing’ attitude. I’ve been burned by it twice in my old blog: First, in a post commenting on an email<\/a> by Avedon Carol I said:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve talked in the past about the \u2018liberalista\u2019 (I’m looking for a word for the high-profile liberals who I believe have hijacked the leadership of the liberal movement and the Democratic Party – that will do until I come up with something better) attitudes, and the underlying position of obnoxious superiority.<\/p>\n

Avedon Carol<\/a> posted a couple of times a response to my MESS OF CRACKPOTTAGE post below; I noticed that there were multiples, and that she had clarified her point and wasn’t trying to link me to Ann Coulter (ick), and thanked her. <\/p>\n

I was too quick on the \u2018send\u2019, because this is the email that crossed mine:<\/p>\n

(here’s the money graf:)<\/p>\n

BTW, if the kind of support I was getting for my writing was of the caliber of the comments you got to this post, I’d definitely ask myself what I was doing wrong.<\/b> <\/p>\n

Avedon<\/p>\n

(emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gosh, there are so many things to talk about here\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026the first is that my team, the Democrats does in fact elect fools as well. <\/p>\n

Cynthia McKinney, anyone?<\/p>\n

\u2026the second is that marvelously perfect tone of self-righteousness in the last paragraph.<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then there was this<\/a>, in response to a post by Dave Yaseen:<\/p>\n

Dave Yaseen, of the usually smart blog A Level Gaze<\/a>, posts what I pray to Woodie Guthrie is a slip of the liberal tongue<\/a>. His post concludes:<\/p>\n

Yes, this debacle of an election is the media’s fault. But it’s our fault as well, and we need to drastically change the way we do things in the Democratic party, not diddle around with how to phrase things to make them palatable to the electorate. If we have to drag American voters, kicking and screaming to chose their own interests, so be it.<\/b><\/p>\n

(emphasis mine)<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, damn. That’s<\/u> the way to reach the poor uneducated voter and get them onto your side…<\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve seen the problem elsewhere. I’m back helping out a prominent charity here in L.A. (one of the two that I actively – too actively, sometimes, given the state of my calendar and checkbook support), and met with the board president and executive director the day after the election. Their attitude was sadly an exact mirror of Sen. Kuehl’s; the lumpenproles had been suckered. I gently suggested that until the Democratic leadership could learn to respect that lumpenproletariat – even when disagreeing with on matters of policy – we had a lot of time outside on the porch to look forward to.<\/p>\n

Here’s the deal; I think that facing reality is the way to go. You can ignore it for a long time, but eventually it catches up with you.<\/p>\n

Up in Alaska, we’ve all read about how it just happened<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A California author and filmmaker who became famous for trekking to Alaska’s remote Katmai coast to commune with brown bears has fallen victim to the teeth and claws of the wild animals he loved.<\/p>\n

Alaska State Troopers and National Park Service officials said Timothy Treadwell, 46, and girlfriend Amie Huguenard, 37, were killed and partially eaten by a bear or bears near Kaflia Bay, about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage, earlier this week.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

U.S. Geological Survey bear researcher Tom Smith; Sterling Miller, formerly the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s top bear authority; and others said they tried to warn the amateur naturalist that he was being far too cavalier around North America’s largest and most powerful predator.<\/p>\n

“He’s the only one I’ve consistently had concern for,” Smith said. “He had kind of a childlike attitude about him.”<\/p>\n

“I told him to be much more cautious … because every time a bear kills somebody, there is a big increase in bearanoia and bears get killed,” Miller said. “I thought that would be a way of getting to him, and his response was ‘I would be honored to end up in bear scat.’ ”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In politics as well, when you ignore the bears, you are likely to wind up as bear scat.<\/p>\n

A big part of my hammering away at the Democratic Party is because I perceive a sense of disconnection from reality as strong as Treadwell’s, who “routinely eased up close to bears to chant ‘I love you’ in a high-pitched, sing-song voice<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

I think that there is an equally strong disconnect from reality within the core circles of the Democratic Party – and that the results will be equally ugly until that changes.<\/p>\n

— UPDATE —<\/b> <\/p>\n

I can’t believe I forgot to connect this dot as well. Arrogance in place of thoughtfulness figures in another recent post of mine<\/a>, about Columbia. The key event? the response of the intellectually arrogant managers to the suggestion by some low-level engineers that the Air Force use it’s ultra-high-resolution reconnaissance satellites to take a picture of the damage on Columbia’s wing – pictures that almost surely would have shown the damage and allowed for the possibility some outcome other than the one spread across the Texas sky. The official position?<\/p>\n

bq. “A NASA liaison then emailed an apology to Air Force personnel, assuring them that the shuttle was in “excellent shape” and explaining that a foam strike was “something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem.” The officer continued, “The one problem that has been identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels.”<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve talked about the astounding, blind, arrogance of the California establishment. Then last night, I read an interview with State Sen. Sheila Kuehl that sets a new high-water mark for it. It’s a symptom of a broader problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}