Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Eugene Kane writes another of his screeds in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, this one entitled “Abuse of detainees nothing new in U.S.“:

The president of the United States of America assured the rest of the world Wednesday that images of prisoners in Iraq being mistreated by their American captors were just an aberration.

“People in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent,” Bush said on Arab television, referring to alleged abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

“They must also understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know.”

Maybe he ought to tell it to Curtis Harris, a Milwaukee man in danger of never walking again after an encounter with Milwaukee police officers last December.

Kane chronicles an aberration, an abhorrent treatment of a detainee by police in Milwaukee. I guess he equates it with the Iraq story because he’s trying to indicate that it’s standard operation of The Man whether He’s a cop on the beat or a soldier on patrol. Typical Kane.

Blech. I am sorry I bothered you with it, gentle reader.

Unlike this story, at least the media –the Cincinatti Enquirer anyway–caught a story of Bush’s common empathy:

Lynn Faulkner, his daughter, Ashley, and their neighbor, Linda Prince, eagerly waited to shake the president’s hand Tuesday at the Golden Lamb Inn. He worked the line at a steady campaign pace, smiling, nodding and signing autographs until Prince spoke:

“This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11.”

Bush stopped and turned back.

“He changed from being the leader of the free world to being a father, a husband and a man,” Faulkner said. “He looked right at her and said, ‘How are you doing?’ He reached out with his hand and pulled her into his chest.”

Faulkner snapped one frame with his camera.

“I could hear her say, ‘I’m OK,’ ” he said. “That’s more emotion than she has shown in 21/2 years. Then he said, ‘I can see you have a father who loves you very much.’ “

“And I said, ‘I do, Mr. President, but I miss her mother every day.’ It was a special moment.”

Do you think John Kerry would have given her an awkward pat on the stomach?

(Link seen originally on Wizbang!, but it’s everywhere by now.)

In his current column in the Chicago Sun Times, stings Bob Greene in a simile:

My room at the David Intercontinental looked down on the beach. The first night I couldn’t sleep, so went downstairs to slog through the Mediterranean and join what looked like about 10,000 people partying on the sand. I expected young adults dancing the hora. What I found were high school students, some falling-down drunk, clutching tequila bottles. I tried assessing the mood of Israeli youth, which seems to have absorbed our core American values. “I want to be a star!” exuded Tal Zolti, 16. Their English was good, but I started feeling like Bob Greene crashing the junior prom, and after one kid called me “Grandpa” I decided it was time to head back upstairs.

Remember, Bob Greene resigned his position at the Chicago Tribune after having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl (legal in Illinois, fellows!) whom he met on the job.

Me, I am disappointed. Not because I am a fan of Greene’s, which I am, but because I’ve been polishing my own Greene zingers since I’m reading Bob Greene’s America and will undoubtedly deploy those zingers in the online review.

Unfortunately, now they’ll seem derivative of a real writer. Thanks a lot, Mr. Steinberg.

Although this story from yesterday has been retracted, I stand upon my inferences thereupon.

Viva la economie!

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Good news: The Missouri Legislature has begun the process of eliminating emissions tests required for automobile licensing in the St. Louis area. As cars become cleaner, these tests’ burden, in terms of resident money and time spent, have not yielded that many results. The sponsor says:

Bill sponsor Rep. Jim Lembke, R-south St. Louis County, said the testing is unnecessary, unpopular and a burden to the elderly and poor. He said the program should be eliminated because 92 percent of all vehicles pass the test and the biggest polluters – motorcycles and many trucks – are exempt from the law.

Good work. Hey, I once met Lembke, back when he was running unsuccessfully for the position he now holds. He was canvassing door-to-door, and I had to hammer him a bit on conservative consistency–particularly his love of “incentives” to draw industry to Lemay, but his opposition to welfare and government handouts to individuals. But enough about me.

The bad news: opposition invokes a scattering of silly reasons to keep the program running:

Rep. Barbara Fraser, D-University City, said ending the clean-air testing could exacerbate the symptoms of allergy sufferers and would mean the loss of 250 jobs.

Got that? A slightly runnier nose and throwing 250 hard-working bureaucrats into the private workforce. Oh, the horror, the horror!

Politicians like this think you can legislate full employment by creating enough government regulations and divisions and offices. It got us out of the Greast Depression, didn’t it?

Hmm, no, I think that was the techno-military-industrial complex gearing up for WWII, not the CCC. But hey, I was less alive than the Baby Boomers were to experience it first hand. What would I know?

Command Post reports:

The LA Times is reporting that presidential campaign spending in this cycle may exceed $1 billllllion dollars. (Thank God we have campaign finance reform.)

Hot digduggity! So that’s a billion dollars of excess wealth drained from willing participants in the political process to be spent and redistributed to print and broadcast media, creative agencies, and in bars and restaurants where sales are struck. God bless America, and it’s not compulsory. Unlike tax money for social programs, which are too often spent the same way.

Via Snopes.com, a story about President Bush jogging with an injured serviceman:

Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton. He stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital. He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would go on a run together. True to his word, he called Mike every month or so to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on the run, 1 mile with the president. Not something you’ll see in the news, but seeing the president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life. It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God bless him.

You think John Kerry would trip over him and call him a son-of-a-bitch?

It’s hard to tell if the author and the sources for this piece in Time are helping Kerry, or damning him. Explaining why John Kerry sounds like an unprincipled opportunist when he’s just the opposite:

Kerry’s verbal meanderings are partly a reflection of a mind that sees complexity in almost every issue. The son of a diplomat, educated partly in boarding schools in Europe, Kerry learned to look at current affairs from multiple perspectives. Says an adviser: “It’s not like he’s trying to shade the truth. He overintellectualizes his explanations.” Asked by TIME in a March interview whether the Iraq war would be worth the costs if no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, Kerry replied, “No, I think you can still — wait, no. You can’t — that’s not a fair question. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn’t mean [transforming Iraq] was the cause [that provided the] legitimacy to go.” Kerry may in fact be right when he argues that a successful outcome does not justify an illegitimate war, but a listener has to work hard to understand his point.

You got that? No? Put a little effort into understanding it, and you’ll come away with the message that John Kerry is too smart for you to understand.

Perhaps the Kerry campaign should not deploy senators whose understanding of nuance match Kerry’s own:

“If you look at his public career, it’s been just the opposite. He’s not been unclear on the environment, on labor and education issues,” says former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. “His reputation in the Senate is that you can trust his word. If he believes in something, he’ll fight for it.”

Got it?

• Kerry’s not been unclear.
  This does not say that he has been clear. Just that he is not unclear.
• His reputation … is that you can trust his word.
  This does not say that you can trust John Kerry’s word. This says his reputation is that you can trust his word. He’s got Senate cred, werd.
• If he believes in something, he’ll fight for it.
  This does not address whether Kerry says what he believes, nor whether he will fight for what he says he’ll fight for, or anything, really.

Thanks for not being a cartoonish or obfuscating character, little Kerrey. No, that sort of babble conveys precisely the slippery meaning the speaker intends, and both Kerry and Kerrey know it. They just have to tell the American people that they don’t, sort of, know it or mean it except when they don’t not.

More from the Brian J. Noggle “Capitalism: It’s All Good” School of Economics. Take this story, which says:

High gas prices are forcing families to shop in cut-rate grocery stores, a food industry analysis finds.

“High oil prices, both at the pump and for home heating, depress consumers’ ability to spend more,” said a report by the Food Marketing Institute released at its annual trade show in Chicago yesterday.

“It is not surprising that more shoppers are buying food today in discount stores and other low-price venues than ever before,” the study said.

It’s all good. As rational consumers, those who allocate their resources to fuel and to food discount stores are acting in their own best interests. The free market at work.

What about the grocers out there? Well, people are choosing low price over….what is it again a full grocery offers?

You see, the Brian J. Noggle “Capitalism: It’s All Good” School of Economics sees through every little ping of “bad” news as a net positive. When the man on the radio says copper prices are going up, that’s good for the miners and it’s good for the people who make alternatives to copper. Copper prices going down? Good for people who want to buy or make things with copper. Gas prices going up? Good for refineries and Big Oil, as well as for people who make hybrid automobiles, mass transit, and pastimes close to home. Gas prices coming down? Good for transportation companies, consumers, and tourist destinations.

Keep that in mind when these reports come out. The news is typically bad for whomever is releasing the report (well, probably good fro whomever got paid to prepare the doomsday scenario), but it’s good news for someone else, and it’s probably not zero sum. It’s better news for everyone when capitalism is unfettered.