Old Time Radio at OTRCat!

Monday, August 24, 2009

The Dread Dormomoo keeps the yoks coming:



Q: How are the American people like Astroturf?


A: Neither of them needs government healthcare.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, arrived in Tripoli to a hero's welcome. Playing the strings of (very) nominally Christian Scottish sentiment won him his freedom. Confronted with combined Brit and American ire at Al Megrahi's being released on compassionate grounds because of his terminal prostate cancer, Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice secretary grumped about Scotland not having a "vigilante" justice system. Al Megrahi was convicted and sentenced by a Scottish court, not exactly what I would call vigilante justice. His release is blamed on "compassion". Read: he is dying of cancer, so he should do so in the bosom of his family. Not to release him would be mean, not compassionate. It is kindergarten reasoning. Likewise, the retort thet "He didn't show any compassion toward the victims of Pan Am Flight 103.". Well, DUH. Of COURSE he didn't, and the sky is blue, and water is wet. Kindergarten again.

The feelgood fairness of releasing the bomber is a foolish shadow of Christian justice. When you remove a culture and justice from the direct influence of Biblical teaching and discipline, as is evident in the UK and Europe, all that remains is silly sentimentality in the guise of moral certitude. His malady does not exonerate him. It does not mollify any of the victims' families, nor resurrect any of the dead. His having prostate cancer changes nothing, beyond the actual duration of his sentence.
Shucks, I'll bet that NHS Scotland offers better healthcare than does Libya, except that the Libyan reaction of Local Boy Makes Good might bode for preferential end-of-life care for the Hero Come Home.

Frankly, the Scottish justice minister makes me, a MacLeod, want to hang up my kilt.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Finding their inner bigot.

Your Aardvark has been a civil rights proponent all his life. (It is rumored that the placards he waved about in utero were responsible for his premature birth. That, and the auto accident.) Thus he looks askance at the race-baiters and Klan types alike, if for no other reason that we all of us have sinned, and are in need of rescue, whatever one's hue. But it remains difficult to maintain a pristine reputation of Tolerance (what an awful thing, to be merely tolerated ...) when one disagrees with the President, and opinion has it that ANY disagreement is base bigotry: "You just don't like him 'cos he's BLACK!".

Perhaps your Aardvark should consider a run for the Maison Blanc, campaigning as the first 'Varky President. Mr. Obama's fans certainly raised the bar with the hosannas over the first black president, or African-American, or somesuch. I thought that Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed the ideal of content of one's character, rather than the color of one's epidermis, but then, Mr. Obama is from Chicago politics, so the character issue may be moot. Certainly much of the bigotry charged by his followers against detractors of his blatantly ruinous and unConstitutional programs is imputed rather than inherent in "them wot disagrees wiv 'im". While there are sheet-wearers and cross-burners out there, for the most part they do little more than hang around each other and indulge in paranoid conspiracy talk. ("If it ain't the blacks, then it must be th' Joos!")

The biggest problem is this imputed bigotry thing. If you are unjustly accused of being intolerant or bigoted for your disagreements with the first President of Color, is there a point where one throws up one's hands and says " if everyone says it, it must be true" and dons the figurative hood for oneself? Perhaps finding one's inner bigot is possible because others helped put it there.