Now That’s A Dog Whistle I’ll Bark To

Apparently, Marco Rubio (and by Marco Rubio, I mean the twenty-somethings on his media team) “accidentally” included stock footage of Vancouver in a recent ad:

It’s morning again in America, eh?

At least Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio managed to find stock footage of North America while paying tribute to Ronald Reagan’s sanguine “Morning in America” television spot.

The Florida senator’s campaign used three seconds of video taken of British Columbia’s unmistakable waterfront in Vancouver for its depressing twist on Reagan’s iconic 1984 advertisement.

Or did they?

I think Marco is promising that, if he’s elected, we’ll invade Canada.

Of course, he can’t come right out and say that, but those of us who have advocated invading Canada for years know what he’s talking about.

And we vote!

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Allahpundit Gets It Two Weeks Later

On December 14, I wondered Donald Trump: The McCaskill Manipulation Goes National?

On December 28, Allahpundit wonders the same thing:

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Democrats used the same strategy to brilliant effect in the 2012 Senate race in Missouri. The GOP primary was jammed up with three candidates; Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent, wanted to do something to help Todd Akin win, believing (correctly) that Akin would be the easiest of the three to beat in a general election. The solution: Start attacking Akin before the Republican primary, knowing that a big-name Democrat’s official seal of disapproval would be a strong lure to Republican voters to consider Akin. Some of that is pure tribalism at work — Democrats are bad, therefore things they dislike must be good — and some of it is “they’ll tell you who they fear” reasoning at work. The problem is, sometimes they’re not telling you who they fear when they attack. Sometimes they’re telling you who they don’t fear and hoping you’ll fall for it.

You know, this blog was a lot more political when I started out, but I’ve drifted away from it because, honestly, I’m not sure my insights add anything and I don’t think I’m convincing anybody of anything.

I’m not even getting my insights and moments of synthetic thought out into the wild before someone else comes up with them.

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Donald Trump: The McCaskill Manipulation Goes National?

Ed Driscoll says “ANNOY THE MEDIA, VOTE TRUMP” and includes a round-up of media reactions to the Donald Trump candidacy show:

And I can’t help wonder if we’re not seeing a McCaskill Manipulation strategy at work here.

As you might remember, gentle reader, back in 2012 I highlighted a pre-primary strategy by Claire McCaskill to run ads claiming that Todd Akin was too conservative for Missouri. Her organization did this because they felt that Akin would be the weakest candidate to face Claire McCaskill in the actual election.

It worked, of course; Akin was nominated and then said something that everyone could pile on, and Akin lost and we have Senator McCaskill for a couple more years.

I said it in 2012; McCaskill admitted it in 2015 in Politico Magazine:

It was August 7, 2012, and I was standing in my hotel room in Kansas City about to shotgun a beer for the first time in my life. I had just made the biggest gamble of my political career—a $1.7 million gamble—and it had paid off. Running for reelection to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Missouri, I had successfully manipulated the Republican primary so that in the general election I would face the candidate I was most likely to beat. And this is how I had promised my daughters we would celebrate.

Now, I don’t want to go all JournoList / Conspiracy Theory here (although the mere inclusion of the word JournoList and the aforementioned boasted McCaskill Manipulation should indicate that conspiracy theories might often involve actual conspiracies), but could we be seeing something like it in the Trump candidacy?

We’ve got a lightweight candidate that the Gatekeepers of Knowledge can fulminate against, and perhaps they hope those mere fulminations will be enough to get less engaged conservative and Republican primary voters and caucus attendees to nominate Trump–so Hillary Clinton can turn him into the national equivalent of Rick Lazio or Todd Akin.

Could it be so? Given the triumphal nature of McCaskill’s article this very year, it’s not unthinkable that it was offered as a template for a national victory.

UPDATE: See also NBC/WSJ poll: Clinton beats Trump by 10 points in head-to-head matchup

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Politician Cackles, Rubs Hands Together, Explains How She Duped And Manipulated Her Constituents

Apparently, Claire McCaskill has a book coming out. In it, she gleefully explains how she duped voters in 2012:

It was early July in 2012 when Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and her top campaign strategists launched “Operation Dog Whistle,” a secret scheme designed to help arch-conservative Todd Akin win that year’s GOP Senate primary.

McCaskill knew that Akin, then a St. Louis County congressman, would be her weakest opponent in the general election, someone easily portrayed as extreme and prone to controversial statements.

The centerpiece of McCaskill’s unconventional strategy? A TV ad blitz that appeared to attack Akin as a fringe candidate but also promoted him as a “true conservative.” She wanted the message “pitched in such a way that it would only be heard by a certain group of people” — conservative voters most likely to turn out for the GOP primary, hence the dog whistle reference.

Swell. I said as much at the time (probably because I read someone smarter than me on the Internet).

I suppose people who actually buy copies of this book will lurve how the savvy Senator tricks the Republican primary voters into doing her will. I wonder how often those who applaud the politicos’ and leaders’ gulling the unwary fail to think that the same people might be gulling them. Probably not a lot, because they think they’re on the same team as the elected officials, and they’re often not. The elected officials are on their own team.

I, on the other hand, find it a bit frightening how easily a Senator will reveal her tricks in deceiving some of the people she represents–although not her voters–and how pleased her voters will be with her advisors’ ploys.

It demonstrates an overt lack of respect for fellow citizens that might eventually lead to a bad, bad end.

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The Wheels Within Wheels Come Off

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has ties to an organization to defend Republican Paul Ryan:

The arm of the Mark Zuckerberg-backed immigration reform group that focuses on conservatives is going on air in Milwaukee with a pro-reform spot defending Rep. Paul Ryan, POLITICO has learned.

Americans for a Conservative [sic] Direction bought roughly $350,000 worth of TV time targeted toward Ryan’s district, a source tracking the air wars said.

Now notice the subtlety here: The pro-immigration amnesty group has the name Americans for a Conservative Direction to fool the simple mouth-breathing conservatives into thinking the group is conservative. You know, sadly, the same kind of low-information conservatives who turned out for Todd Akin in the primary when Claire McCaskill said Todd Akin was too conservative for Missouri.

So this CINO organization is helping Ryan out to bolster him because he might or does support the immigration reform thing going on in Washington.

But, unfortunately, some low-information liberals who nominally support the effort that the Americans for a Conservative [sic] direction support don’t see the ruse as demonstrated by a tweet:

Mark Zuckerberg is funding GOP asshat Paul Ryan through a shell group. Yet another reason you should not use Facebook.

Unfortunately, even though Zuckerberg is not a conservative, his action here does a two-fer: It helps a Republican through supporting a nominally liberal cause, and it makes out like big business through shell corporations and corporate money is helping the Republicans, which is an illusion that gins up the liberal base. So even if it hurts Facebook or Zuckerberg in the short term, it still helps the liberal cause.

* I include [sic] with the description conservative in the name of the organization because there’s no way this reform ‘conserves’ anything. As with many ‘conservative’ policies, I disagree with some of the loudest, most self-appointed guardians of the Conservative Flame in thinking that the immigration reform is A Very Big Deal. No, it’s a small deal that exacerbates existing problems in the country–namely, too much public spending on social programs, the immersion of the individual into the tribe, too much centralized control through the Washington machine. But it’s a symptom, not the cause, and the rifts this particular Hill to Die On creates in the country and in the Republican Party are far more damaging than the particular legislative package.

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Science Continues Todd Akin’s War on Women

Instapundit links to a study with the titilating name of Female mediation of competitive fertilization success in Drosophila melanogaster. What does the study investigate?

“Because females of most species mate with multiple males within a reproductive cycle, intrasexual competition and intersexual choice can continue in the form of sperm competition and cryptic female choice,” says Pitnick. “Our investigations have demonstrated that the morphology of the female reproductive tract, which is rapidly divergent, determines how females bias paternity in favor of particular sperm morphologies. In fact, complex ejaculate-female and sperm-female interactions are emerging as more the rule than the exception.”

Remember when Todd Akin said:

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

In other words, the female reproductive tract, which is rapidly divergent, determines how females bias paternity in favor of particular sperm morphologies. Well, maybe. If my interpretation of the summary of the article of a study based on a limited data set and some mind reading on Todd Akin’s part are accuratish.

Of course, those who felt Akin was waging a war on women lit into him for legitimate rape, which implies that some rapes are illegitimate. What he meant to imply, as far as I can guess, is legitimate claims of rape. This, you see, implies that claims are not legitimate, and copulation outcomes where those claims might not be true might not have the same impact on how females bias paternity, and that in cases of legitimate rape, the female might bias against.

It’s science, so it’s tricky and full of doubt and “we thinks” and room for error.

But politics is less so. Especially when flocks of low information workers linger around politicians’ every appearance like a flock of nightingales around the house of the dying. If they catch onto a phrase they can use, they shriek and caper all night as they work themselves up over it without considering the words and meaning of it. If they don’t, they calm down quickly and wait for the next appearance.

So the truly thoughtful and skeptical will at the electoral mercy of the “thoughtful.”

Which reminds me of a proverb: Do not be wise in your own eyes.

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Congress Is Salvation Or Something

I don’t know how election to the United States House of Representatives represents salvation, return to righteousness, or proof of repentance and proving one’s return to goodness in spite of one’s past sins, but I am not a political reporter for Gannett:

Disgraced ex-South Carolina governor Mark Sanford won his bid for redemption on Tuesday night, defeating Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch for his old seat in Congress.

Me, I would have used the term election or office in this case, but I am an old fashioned fellow who doesn’t see theological or apotheosis implications in mere service as a representative of one’s constituents.

(Link seen via Instapundit.)

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A Bi-Partisan Debt Ceiling Limit Proposal

If the United States government hits its debt ceiling, members of Congress and elected and appointed members of the Executive branch must sell plasma to fund further spending.

And they don’t get to have cush doctors brought into the halls or office buildings of the capital to take their plasma while our ruling class sits in leather chairs getting foot massages from corporate and nonprofit lobbyists. No, they have to go to the same weather-beaten places downtown where all the other tapped-out citizens go.

And, as befits them as members of the ruling aristocracy, they are exempt from limits imposed on ordinary citizens. To whit, they can sell as often as they like.

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I’m Not Paranoid; I’m Just Imaginative

Now that a senator has proposed sweeping gun legislation in response to the recent events on the east coast, everyone’s calling for people to write or call their senators to oppose this legislation (see Jennifer, Robb (who once gave me advice for improving my tinfoil hat, werd), Say Uncle, Instapundit, and so on).

Uh huh.

How’s that letter go? I am a gun owner, and I want to voice my displeasure at is not very far off from I have a gun, and here is my demand.

How close?

Close enough for government work. That is, all it takes is a poorly turned phrase, a staffer getting the vapors, and suddenly you’re threatening your senator and there are some very blackly clad government employees no-knocking your house to neutralize you.

No, thanks. I’m just going to send money to the NRA-ILA and various organizations that can fight on my behalf.

The rest of you choose your words carefully. Very carefully.

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Only Journalists and Their Readers Are Surprised

Anyone who knew how insurance coverage works expected this: Surprise: New insurance fee in health overhaul law

Your medical plan is facing an unexpected new fee. It’s to help cover people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

The $63-per-head fee — buried in a recent regulation —will hit health plans serving an estimated 190 million Americans, mostly workers and their families. It’s payable starting in 2014.

Of course, the $63 fee levied by the government doesn’t cover the actual cost of the new mandates, which is why insurance premiums have already gone up before this fee takes effect.

But baby steps, reporters. Baby steps.

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Teaching The Children Lessons of Daniel Webster and Rober Heinlein, Accidentally

Neo-neocon offers some quotes about governance:

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” – Daniel Webster

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. – Robert A. Heinlein

It brought to mind questions my children often ask me about the cartoons and superhero things they encounter regarding the motivations of the villains: Why does Megatron do that? or What does Loki want?

My simplistic answer is always the same: Because he wants to rule people/humans/Autobots. I explain that some people want to just tell other people what to do because they think that they, the tellers, know better than other people, and the other people better do it or else.

I think the oldest boy, in first grade, can understand that from his experiences with his peers. Hopefully, he will learn that acting to compel your peers according to your sense of what the others should do is generally wrong except in limited circumstances (harm to others, Because I’m the daddy and whatnot).

In my Tea Party Republican world, I’m a hero fighting against the forces who would use the government to compel action or behavior from citizens. I know some people think the Republican Party would like to force some behavior on citizens, but it’s not the Republican Party in the legislature nor in the bureaucracy that’s doing things like banning incandescent light bulbs, upping government standards to limit choice (as in CAFE standards for automotive performance), and so on. And where elements of the Republican Party pursues its excesses in this regard, I oppose them, too.

Because I’m a political philosophical superhero, or at the very least someone who agrees with Heinlein and Webster. And hopefully, my children will, too.

Some people

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Like An Old Man Driving With His Blinker On

The whole left-right thing continues to lose meaning as journalists continue to use “right-wing” to mean pretty much any political belief they disagree with. Case in point:

A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk”, stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust.

You see, a German fascist who wants to round up the Jews is right wing. Just like small government types in America:

America’s left-wing Occupy movement and right-wing Tea Party are just two examples of the world’s new wave of activists, a diverse and dispersed collection of movements that also includes Spain’s Indignados (the “Indignant”) and the rebellious youth of the Arab Spring.

The smearing of the term to equate Republicans and Tea Party activists as fascists works. In 2004, I remember a friend whose political leanings differed from mine (and, as I surmise it, is no longer a friend because of it) telling me that George W. Bush was going to round up the Jews. He’s not a dumb guy. But he believes it because the convenient, meaningless journalistic shorthand reinforces it.

This just in: As a Republican, I am not a monarchist.

The political term right-wing originates from the French Revolution, when liberal deputies from the Third Estate generally sat to the left of the president’s chair, a habit which began in the Estates General of 1789. The nobility, members of the Second Estate, generally sat to the right. In the successive legislative assemblies, monarchists who supported the Ancien Régime were commonly referred to as rightists, because they sat on the right side.

If there’s one political disposition to centralizing authority in a single government leader, it’s not from my branch of the Republican Party.

Republicans need to make it clear that the whole “right-wing” thing is inaccurate and historically ignorant when it’s applied to contemporary politics, and maybe the journalists and commentators will drop it.

Link breadcrumb trail:
View From The Porch > The Munchkin Wrangler > Hit & Run

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Depends On What “Bellwether” Means

I hate essays and articles that start with a definition from the dictionary. So, in a fit of self-hatred, here’s the definition of bellwether:

1. a wether or other male sheep that leads the flock, usually bearing a bell.
2. a person or thing that assumes the leadership or forefront, as of a profession or industry: Paris is a bellwether of the fashion industry.
3. a person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend; index.
4. a person who leads a mob, mutiny, conspiracy, or the like; ringleader.

Now, square that with an article entitled Missouri slips from political bellwether status this fall:

Missouri has been a bellwether state for more than 100 years, with presidential candidates lavishing attention on Show-Me State voters and spending millions on field operations, glossy campaign mailers, and TV ads. But this election? Not so much.

Roy Blunt’s 13 percentage-point victory in a U.S. Senate race led a strong Republican wave in Missouri in 2010.

This year, Missouri isn’t on the list of top swing states — those vote-rich battlegrounds that political experts and campaign strategists say will determine who wins the White House on Nov. 6. Most political handicappers instead have Missouri in the “leans Republican” column.

Somehow, to this professional commentator, “bellwether” means something like “toss-up,” “swing state,” “independent,” “contested,” “battleground,” or “undecided.” None of these are true.

Either the commentator is ignorant as to the meaning of the word and the implication that Missouri is leaning Republican–as the nation in the aggregate did in 2010, or the commentator wants Missourians to, I dunno, straighten up and fly tight to get more ad dollars (evil, I thought, unless I guess they’re spent in your market, maybe) to fill the airwaves with irritating, offputting, and often marginally mendacious approved-by-the-candidate messages.

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Cracked Joins the War on Wealth

What would Sylvester P. Smythe say? Cracked magazine takes an unsympathetic (and unfunny) look at 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.

I’ll sum up the list:

  1. “Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I’m Hardly Rich.”
  2. “Hey, I Worked Hard to Get What I Have!”
  3. “If I Can Do It, So Can You!”
  4. “You’re Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn’t!”
  5. “You Shouldn’t Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!”
  6. “Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!”

What follows each point in the list is What we hear, which drifts into a bunch of nonsense. Let’s take a look at them briefly:

“Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I’m Hardly Rich.”
It’s all about the cash flow, brother. The rich get into bigger houses, have more expensive cars, and pay more–dare I say it?–taxes than the non-rich. When I was working at a startup and had dreams of stock option wealth, I watched the multi-million dollar homes in the St. Louis area. Many of them had annual property tax bills exceeding my salary at that time (and the worth of my stock options by a factor of tens of thousands). I know, I know, you’re saying you don’t have to live in a house like that, but in some cases you do, because you have to throw parties and have the right people over to show your status. Fair? No. But $500,000 a year in salary–cut down to, what, $300,000 by income taxes and then bitten by property taxes, sales taxes, and whatnot. Suddenly you’re living well, but not Larry Ellison well.

“Hey, I Worked Hard to Get What I Have!”
You know what? A lot of them have. Read The Millionaire Next Door and learn how most millionaires make it over a lifetime. I don’t care what this “humor” writer “hears.” It’s not true.

He also goes on to mention millionaire football players, as though NFL players don’t work. The author lacks insight into the NFL experience. Those guys have lots of meetings, film to watch, things to study, and workouts to attend. (Remember the content of Run to Daylight.) To say nothing about going out on Sundays for almost half a year and getting hurt. It takes talent, but it also takes a hell of a lot of work. More than it takes to write an Internet humor column.

“If I Can Do It, So Can You!”
I don’t know many who say that except the ones selling DVDs and books about how to do it, too. It takes moxie, tenacity, intelligence, and a heaping helping of luck. You might not be able to do it, but you can try. Just don’t expect your attempt to succeed if it involves writing a column on the Internet or writing manuals for an enterprise information integration start-up.

“You’re Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn’t!”
The rich should definitely not say this because it misuses the word jealous when they should say envious. But the author and his thoughtless ilk are envious, even though they’re blessed with Internet connections and a standard of living better than 99.99% (est.) of humans who have ever lived (and maybe ever will).

“You Shouldn’t Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!”
That’s a very blanket statement. The .05% calling themselves the 99% aren’t that surgical in their punishment. I’ve seen this sentiment expressed elsewhere, and it confuses the hell out of me. People expressing it often haven’t started businesses and/or hired people. They haven’t invested in corporations that have hired people. They just expect jobs and whatnot to materialize. Or maybe they expect the government to print jobs the way government prints money. I don’t understand.

“Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!”
You know what? This is crap. It conflates help with government help, which is different. Charity comes from voluntary contributions. Government wealth redistribution comes under the penalty of death, ultimately. The author then goes into luck (poor station at birth), family obligations (your parents fed you! That’s help!) and a bunch of other crap that pretty almost goes so far to say that the worm that makes the rich loam you grow tomatoes in HELPS YOU YOU HYPOCRITE! But he might not have thought of that.

It very conveniently smears the bright line between government-enforced extraction of wealth from those who make their own and the giving to those who do not and pretty much everything good in life.

Which, frankly, is the type of intelligent argument that one expects from the people fighting the War on Wealth.

I know, I know, it’s Cracked. It’s a humor magazine! But it’s not funny, and it makes a political argument. An unsound and invalid set of political arguments, in fact.

However, here is one thing the rich should stop saying:“I feel that it’s okay because I mean, I have no income and I have bills to pay. I have two houses.

(More also at Hot Air.)

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For People Who See Nuance, They Sure See Some Black and White When Convenient

Evil Republicans hate veterans!

Paul Carroll, an 86-year-old World War II veteran who has lived in the same Ohio town for four decades, was denied a chance to vote in the state’s primary contests today after a poll worker denied his form of identification, a recently-acquired photo ID from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The poll worker rejected the ID because it did not contain an address, as required by Ohio law.

You see? The Republicans (the ones who favor voter ID laws) hate the military!

Except this fellow tried to vote with a photo ID that was not approved by the voter ID law. Like most student IDs.

This incident mirrors one almost exactly like it in Wisconsin. Almost like it’s a coordinated assault on voter ID laws.

Why do the ACLU and Think Progress hate election integrity?

See what I did there?

Whenever Republicans and the like oppose something, say mandatory contraception coverage in insurance plans because it eliminates the freedom of the individuals (or their proxies) to select insurance benefits they want or need, suddenly the nuance gets sucked right out of the stance so that it can be falsely painted in a tweet OMG PL RT REPUBLICANS HATE WOMEN!

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Takers, Makers, Moochers, Fraggles, Doozers

Glenn Reynolds’s column “It’s takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning” appeared on the Washington Examiner site on Sunday, and it discusses Charlie Sykes’s new book A Nation Of Moochers: America?s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.

As some of you probably know, the term moochers is prevalent in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

At any rate, Reynolds says:

In today’s America, government benefits flow to large numbers of people who are encouraged to vote for politicians who’ll keep them coming. The benefits are paid for by other people who, being less numerous, can’t muster enough votes to put this to a stop.

Over time, this causes the economy to do worse, pushing more people into the moocher class and further strengthening the politicians whose position depends on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Because, as they say, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be pretty sure of getting Paul’s vote.

But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, “In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.”

“We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.”

I think they’re spot-on with that bit of epistemology that some people, particularly legislators, demonstrate: People who work hard and succeed will always work hard and succeed, regardless of the obstacles, because they like the struggle. The profits and benefits they receive from that struggle are secondary. They produce because they have the ability to produce. And the rest of society can simply, indeed has some moral right, to tap into those benefits.

But instead of takers and makers, I think we’ve got a different paradigm here: Fraggles and Doozers:

Within Fraggle Rock lives a second species of small humanoid creatures, the pudgy, green, ant-like Doozers. Standing only 6 inches (150 mm) tall (knee-high to a Fraggle), Doozers in a sense represent anti-Fraggles; their lives are dedicated to work and industry. Doozers spend much of their time busily constructing all manner of scaffolding throughout Fraggle Rock using miniature construction equipment and wearing hard-hats and work boots. No one but the Doozers themselves seem to understand the actual purpose of their intricate and beautiful constructions.

Often they accompany their building with marching songs and various Doozer chants. To ensure that they always have a steady stream of work to do, Doozers build their constructions out of an edible candy-like substance (manufactured from radishes) which is greatly enjoyed by Fraggles. They actually want the Fraggles to eat their constructions because “architecture’s supposed to be enjoyed” and also so they can go on to build again. This is essentially the only interaction between Doozers and Fraggles; Doozers spend most of their time building, and Fraggles spend much of their time eating Doozer buildings. They thus form an odd sort of symbiosis. In one episode, the flavor of the Doozer sticks is augmented by adding other flavors, such as tomato and mustard.

This symbiosis becomes integral to the episode “The Preachification of Convincing John” where Mokey calls upon the Fraggles to stop eating the Doozers’ constructions—because they spend so much time making them. Fraggle Rock quickly fills with constructions and the Doozers have no space left in which to build. After running out of space, the Doozers finally decide to move on to a new area because the Fraggles won’t eat their constructions, and there is even a tragic scene with a mother explaining to her daughter that Doozers must build or they will die, and so they must find a new place to live where they can build and hopefully find Fraggles who will eat their constructions. Overhearing this, Mokey realizes that she has inadvertently disrupted a vital symbiotic relationship through ignorant good intentions. As a result, Mokey frantically rescinds her prohibition and encourages the Fraggles to gorge on the structures — just in time to persuade the Doozers to stay.

If making money, doing business, and hiring people were some psychological compulsion, wouldn’t we see it continuing in the face of the modern mixed economy system? Wouldn’t those capitalists, like Boxer in Animal Farm, just work harder, more compulsively?

I’m not sure how someone would square the circle that Doozers have to build, I mean, Capitalists have to entrepreneu and exploit the working man with the decline of the economy in the face of too much government Fraggling, but I think a lot of people are just fine with round quadrilaterals in the right circumstances.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Hey, take a minute to check out my other blogs about Missouri people, places, and politics (Missouri Insight) and software quality assurance (QA Hates You). And check out my novel John Donnelly’s Gold and my plays The Courtship of Barbara Holt, both available for Kindle for .99.

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