Clipping blog

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – Giving the President His Due Saturday Edition Posted: 17 Sep 2011 03:10 AM PDT I am quick to criticize the President when he does what I think are foolish and misguided things, so I should be eager to praise him when he does well. He did well yesterday when he awarded the Medal of Honor to Marine Sergeant Dakota Meyer for his actions under fire in Afghanistan (via memeorandum). Sgt. Meyer saved the lives of several American and Afghan troops who had been ambushed by the Taliban on September 9, 2009. Meyer and SSgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, acting against orders, took five trips into heavy fire to rescue 13 US Marines and 23 Afghan soldiers and to retrieve the bodies of the fallen. He is a hero and I am glad President Obama gave him the tribute he richly deserved. Take a few minutes to read the story at the link and the official citation. And if you happen to be a Hollywood producer, well, you might find a pretty good movie therein. I bet you’d make quite a bit of money out of a story of selflessness, bravery, and loyalty. And now, links! Have you heard of Solyndra? If you haven’t, there’s a very good chance you will soon. I plan to do a roundup post on the story to get you up to speed, but the story is moving very quickly and, from where I sit, it’s likely to turn out very badly for the administration. I did not know America was the #3 oil producing country in the world, even though the Democrats have done their very best to knock us farther down the list. Imagine how much oil we could produce if we could drill in places where we know we have vast reserves? No, Vodka doesn’t really give you the ability to see the future. Stephen Green is just smart, that’s all. According to Democratic member of Congress Jan Schakowsky, you don’t deserve to keep what you earn. See, you can’t be trusted to do good things with it, so smart people like Shakowsky have to take it from you to make sure you pay your “fair share” of “things we’ve decided are our national priorities”. If you’re wondering who “we” are in that sentence and how “we” decide such things, well, turn yourself in to the nearest AttackWatch reporting center. If you suspect that the administration is intentionally slapping regulations on us to drive the cost of energy higher, you’re not alone. At this point, I find the argument persuasive, though you could still make a case for epic-level incompetence. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is one of my favorite movies and yet I did not know that Tippy Hedrin’s character received as much attention as she apparently did.

Pat Robertson, Cheap Advice Columnist Posted: 16 Sep 2011 12:01 PM PDT If I held any regard at all for Pat Robertson before today, I hold none now after he told his vast television audience that people with Alzheimer’s are “kind of dead”. "I know it sounds cruel, but if he's going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but make sure she has custodial care and somebody looking after her," Robertson said. "If you respect that vow, you say 'til death do us part,'" Robertson said during the Tuesday broadcast. "This is a kind of death." This is wrong, and not just a little wrong, but 100-feet tall, flaming letters in the sky wrong. Marriage is more than an arrangement of mutual convenience and benefit. It is a solemn promise and when you swear “to death do us part”, you had darned-well be ready to commit to whatever that promise entails. Sometimes it means that you deal with a few rough patches and sometimes it means you carry a heavy burden on your back for the person you love for years. That is hard, and it’s certainly not fair, but it’s the deal you make when you stand before God and man and swear that oath. If you can’t make that promise, then modify it. Say “to kind of death do us part” or “I’m with you until it gets really, really hard, then I’ll find you a nurse or something”. I realize that it’s easy for me to talk about hard commitments because I’m not faced with the choice the person who asked Robertson for advice is. If you want to ding me on that point, fine. I can’t honestly tell you how I’d handle the situation if I was in that man’s shoes. I like to think I’d live up to the highest ideal, but I’m human. I could well fail; that is, after all, what humans do and I will not claim to be anything but a horribly-flawed human. But if we don’t have high ideals, how in the world do we excel? How do we transcend our brutish, lazy natures to become better? It’s easy to offer convenient escape hatches to hard decisions. It takes real effort of will to say we will carry burdens that will break our backs and fill our hearts with sorrow. It takes something else, something I don’t believe we humans do not carry in ourselves, to pick up that burden, load it on our shoulders, and walk with it every day. Pat Robertson claims to represent that something else. If he won’t refuse the easy rationalization, then he’s not fit to be God’s messenger here on earth, and we should feel no obligation to regard him as anything more than a cheap advice columnist.

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