As I just told my wife, easy for you to say when he’s not on your foot.
Raebert’s squashing my foot.
I’m not yelling. But Ow.
He’s heavy. Ow.
Ow.
We all know poetry’s a young man’s game. This time an old man borrowed it for a bit. How’s it feel young’uns?
Well, maybe. Have you known any other dog who has his own reading lamp?
We were premature in announcing his return to health. But he rose to the occasion of Father’s Day. Go figure.
He looks exactly like this puppy pic from his breeder, only 50 pounds bigger. Sorry we haven’t been able to get a really good picture of him yet. He’s been sleeping a lot and it still pains him to lie down and stand up. They were too severe on the inside of his hind legs. Last night, he slept from 10 pm to 11:59 am, blowing off breakfast entirely.
But he has this thing he does, where he comes out to the couch, slides past Lady Laird and backs his butt onto the cushions between us. Hasn’t done that since the haircut. Three times today. The last time he did his signature move, where he follows some ecstatic rump scratching with a turnaround that curls him up on the couch between us.
Then he does a little kissing of us and the signature deerhound groan of contentment. Stillness and peace.
Sorry. It’s complicated. I’d let it go, but this is his site. And it’s Father’s Day.
Happy Father’s Day to all of you dads, especially the ones with human bairns. I know you have it immeasurably tougher than I do.
(I’m not responsible for the racist-looking cartoon. Just
wanted you to have the best possible audio recording.)
Meaning my wife. And Barbara. And Edna. And all the others who are just good of heart. I love you. It’s not a sexual thing per se, although (she’ll kill me for telling you this) Lady Laird was running around bottomless this morning, and I’m so old my first thought was how cute that is. Time to turn the old stallion out to pasture, I guess. (Well, we’ll see about that when she gets home.)
I’ve been obsessed with my boy Raebert. I really thought he might die. But did I do the heavy lifting? No. Lady Laird did. Like she always does. I suffered and she did all the work. I woke her up when Raebert was having a trembling fit. Because I didn’t know what to do. Women know how to be moms. Almost invariably. Men suck at that.
The only thing I’m good for is writing obituaries.
Which I don’t have to write one of today. Because I have a good woman in my life. See?
We, meaning men and me specifically, tend to take too much for granted. It never occurred to me that my peremptory abandonment of this site would cause anyone to lose sleep.
It never occurred to me? No. Because I’m an egotistical jerk. Who is continuously forgiven for being so by a good woman. A good woman all other men of my acquaintance are terrified of. They admire her, love her, and all that. But they shrink and hide when she gets that look in her eye. Nobody who knows her can believe she puts up with me. I don’t either.
I love Raebert. He loves her more than me. As he should. As we all should. She knows exactly where to stroke the place that hurts.
The Lady Barbara made me feel guilty, the way good women can do.
So I am going to do a real not a fake apology.
I was wrong to leave so quickly. I know I offended people who have been loyal for years. I was being selfish. I value everyone who reads my words and it’s wrong of me to interpret silence as uninterest.
The fault is all mine. Please forgive me.
I will post here again. As soon as Raebert can lie down again without a painful interlude of wondering how to do it.
He’s better now, but it’s been six days of fear and general hell.
Just a note to explain why RFL has been so cross. Raebert finally got his haircut on Thursday, despite his daddy’s constant balking and irrational paranoia.
He seemed okay when I brought him home, but then he collapsed on the way up the stairs. There followed days of not eating, immobility, random body-trembling anxiety attacks, and emotional rejection of both of us.
RFL hasn’t said “I told you so” in so many words. I believe him when he says the worst he was anticipating was an onset of itching and accelerating scratching that could leave Raebert as nearly naked as a flea allergy once left Psmith. But that probably doesn’t explain all the unreasonable dread. It must be a Scottish thing.
Like the switch that suddenly flipped when Raebert went down and sent him away from here to “Instapunk Rules,” where he is still working and posting.
I just thought you all might want to know at the end of this diary that the deerhound is almost back to 100 percent. Almost.
He looks beautiful. We keep reminding him of SNL’s Fernando, who famously declared “It is better to look good than to feel good.” He’s starting to come around. Now if his daddy would follow his example. Maybe when his knees stop hurting from sitting on the floor with Raebert for so many hours.
sláinte.
[Disregard the post signature. I don’t know much about WordPress. But this is me, known here as Lady Laird.]
Thing about being a prophet. You can just go. If you’ve a mind to, try to find me.
You picked and I accept your verdict.
The last polar bear on the last ice floe? Uh, no. Just a pic of another DC pundit wondering why his ass is so cold at night.
This is in response to an existential question posed by the ultimate conservative pundit Erick Erickson, who asked the other day, “Why Are You So Angry?”
I stepped away from the internet for a while. Hopping on I see sniping and fights between allies and friends. On twitter, I see conservatives enraged over this prisoner swap and more. There is a lot of anger and that is just the conservatives.
The liberals are always in a state of anger. When you’ve decided boy and girl are options, it’s rather a normal thing to define deviance as normal and normal as deviance and anger as good.
For conservatives though, it sometimes surprises me that there is so much anger — at each other, at the other side, etc. People, life is not fair. This several billion year old ball of hot magma, water, and rock is hurtling around a giant radioactive ball of burning plasma as it circles a cell crushing black hole through a vacuum of space. We are, in the whole expanse of space, a speck smaller than the smaller grain of sand on a beach. The slightest tilt in our orbit could kill us. Life is not fair. The universe is not fair. It all rather sucks if you think about too much.
And we are surrounded by people who are like us save for their faith in creation instead of the Creator. When left to their own devices they are “filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”
That we are not left to our own devices and consequently not like those who are should make us smile, not scowl. Conservatives, particularly those with faith, read 2 Chronicles 7:14,
if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land
and they get all bent out of shape. “This is about America. The nation must repent,” they think. Bull. That passage is not about America. That passage is about us. We should be humble and pray, and see God’s face. We should not be angry. We should not turn the country into an idol. I get the frustration. I do. And I understand why there is anger. I do. It is hard not to be angry sometimes. But stewing in the anger like so many on our own side are doing is neither healthy nor productive.
He offers bland, Biblical-sounding nostrums for the rest of the essay, too, but his essential argument (highlighted by me in bold) recapitulates a pragmatically nihilist explanation offered by the old baseball reliever Tug McGraw (singer Tim McGraw’s late dad for you youngsters) when he was asked how he could remain so calm with men on base in the ninth inning of a one-run game in the playoffs. He called it the snowball in space theory if I remember correctly. We’re so small, the universe is so big, and so in the final analysis it doesn’t matter if I give up a walk-off home run. Be in the moment, not in the artificial context of others. Great sports psychology. Rotten philosophy. (And, by the way, not Christianity either.)
So Erick the Wise wants us to calm down. Why we can’t. Professional political pundits whose hole card on the rest of us is that matters which affect us in every possible way are reducible to a game in which the outcomes ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter at all. Why professional political pundits can make pompous assertions an hour or two of real research would expose as ludicrous.
Exhibit I. A column by the chief political correspondent of the Washington Times, Timothy P. Carney.
Yes, the climate is changing. Now shut up and be reasonable.
In his fight against global warming, President Obama has issued new regulations on power plants’ emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.
Republicans blast the rules as “job destroyers” and a “war on coal.” Democrats attack Republicans as shills for Big Coal and “science deniers.”
Both sides need to grow up, and the climate debate needs to be shifted to reasonable grounds. In short, Republicans need to stop denying that climate change is real, and liberals need to admit that they don’t have all the answers.
There are things we know with a good level of certainty, and conservatives should grant these:
In general, the Earth’s atmosphere is getting warmer. Of course, there is no single temperature of the atmosphere. Even speaking of an “average” is a bit tricky, because our temperature stations are irregularly spaced, and of varied reliability and longevity. But the aggregate of the data shows a general upward trend in temperatures on Earth.
We know that carbon dioxide, methane and some other gases will (all else being equal) increase atmospheric temperatures by trapping heat. This is the infamous greenhouse effect.
We also know that human industrial activity – such as burning coal and oil – adds to the concentration of greenhouse gasses.
Predicting the future is much harder, despite the certainty with which alarmists promise 20-foot sea-level rises, the death of bees and rising beer prices due to climate change.
Climate has always changed. Climate will change. Climate is massive, insanely complex and inherently unpredictable.
We do know that greenhouse gas concentrations are rising pretty rapidly, indicating that the warming trend will continue. Not all change is bad, but in general, rapid change in complex systems is disruptive and bad. While plants and animals can adapt—and have always adapted—they’re better off adapting slowly to gradual change. While human society can adapt, it will cost money and lives.
Conservatives need to come to grips with these facts. Too many Republican politicians simply declare, “climate change is a hoax.” This is a bad habit partisans and ideologues on both sides display: If the other side proposes an undesirable policy response to a problem, just deny the existence of the problem.
He goes on to lecture the left in similarly condescending terms, but as an avowed conservative, he is clearly only reaffirming his bona fides with this gambit. To him, as with Erickson, the prime issue is politics, and we’re supposed to take his authority — avuncular or arrogant — as a lesson about the nature of the game.
What’s most interesting about this obnoxiously patronizing piece is how thoroughly the Washington Times commenters take him to the woodshed. Politely for the most part, but in detail and with facts Carney clearly knows nothing of. So the most important part to read is…
Comments (and take the link to load more)
Never mind that in the big post here nobody wants to talk about I linked at least four previously published articles on this subject that make a mockery of Carney’s bombast.
Why so many of us are so angry. Who is in charge of what constitutes being reasonable? Compromising with the intellectually, morally, and culturally corrupt is not reasonable. Not even to Christians who know the inside of their Bible and not just the cover. We’re not meaningless specks in space. We’re accountable for what we do with our lives. All of us matter, all of everything matters, and there is no chapter and verse which tells us to fight for right only to the point where it might cause rancor or open conflict within families, cliques, or the community at large.
The fight is not about this or that. It’s not a game. It’s not an existential experiment. It’s not about careers, putting on a good show, striking bargains with people who want us dead or imprisoned or worse. It’s about everything. It’s about the meaning of life and our own lives, each and every one. If you can’t get angry about that, you’re as much of a loquacious bystander as our moral cipher of a president.
Here endeth the lesson, Master Erick.
All hail our commander-in-chief and his latest Mission Accomplished.
I didn’t think there was any way this president could disgrace our country even further on the world stage than he already had. I was wrong.
The Blitzkrieg is on. Maybe you’ve missed it with all the talk that the administration is at low ebb and taking mortal shots every day. Poppycock. Der kampf is right on schedule.
I know you’re busy, have personal travails of your own, have political and cultural issues you follow because they hit your hot buttons. And so you’re probably missing it. We are in the midst of an all-out assault on the America we grew up in, and the weapons we have available in our defense have about as much chance of succeeding against the enemy as the Polish horse cavalry had against German tanks in 1939.
We’re in the bowels of the second term. The time when boredom and lassitude and cowardice and personal distractions make it easy to overlook the systematic and deliberate scheme to destroy the United States of America once and for all.
In the last two weeks, there is no aspect of our values and beliefs that has not been subjected to continuous assault, either directly and provocatively or cynically and seditiously.
They’ve taken sports away from us. They’ve taken entertainment away from us. They’ve taken our universities away from us. They’re trying to take our moral and biological convictions about sexuality away from us. (Not to mention life.)
Yeah. Suck it, Sarah. You’re the joke here. Half conscious jester ordinaire.
They’re trying to take our freedom of expression and other constitutional liberties away from us. They’re taking our hopes for the future away from us. And they’re winning on every issue but guns.
It’s all more than I can summarize. Too many links, too much explanation to quote.
All I can do today is hyperlink the names of writers who are talking about the lightning attack in its various dimensions. Which should work out okay, because everybody’s really way too busy to feel the groaning of the ship as it sinks. Less angst that way, don’t you know?
Jordan Schachtel and Raheem Kassan.
Laura Barron-Lopez, and er, Brian McNoldy. Also, Rowan Scarborough.
Kevin Williamson.
Heather MacDonald.
And just because I can’t quite bring myself to fly the white flag, here are two little essays designed to put some spine in your spine.
And this one, which I’m actually minded to quote from, at length, because I’m feeling so pissed off.
The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.
Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.
What you are not going to get is an argument. An argument is a collected series of statements designed to establish a definite proposition. Arguments involve the presentation of facts and evidence from which one draws a conclusion. Implied within the concept of an argument is the potential that one might change his conclusion. But liberals start with the conclusion.
They don’t change their conclusions based on the facts and evidence; they change the facts and evidence based on the conclusion they want. This is why a 105 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming, while a 60 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming. As is a -20 degree day.
Liberals are only concerned with argument, or what superficially appears to be argument, as a rhetorical bludgeon designed to beat you into submission. They aren’t trying to change your mind. They don’t expect you to agree with them. They don’t even care whether or not you grow to love Big Brother.
They just want you to shut up and let them run rampant. If you understand that, you’ll be fine…
…This is why I prefer to counterattack. When you counterattack, you ignore the proposition offered by the liberal and refuse to respond on the liberal’s preferred terms. In fact, you don’t even need to address the same subject the liberal is talking about. Your goal is not to undercut the liberal’s assertion. You’re going to counterattack to undercut the liberal himself.
There are many good reasons to choose the approach of treating the liberal like he is a terrible person with terrible ideas who seeks to impose a quasi-fascist police state upon America, including the fact that it’s all true.
Let’s try a counterattack battle drill. Some doofus with a “Capitalism Is a Patriarchal, Cisnormative Hate Crime” t-shirt starts babbling about “privilege.” The undecideds start listening, their jaws drooping slightly. Some of the more conservative ones are silent, not wanting to be labeled racist by some geek whose grandfather came from Oslo. You need to act. So you causally inject the question, “Hey, why are you an eager and active member of a political party that made a KKK kleagle a beloved Senate Majority Leader?”
Then you mention that you’re a member of the party that fought slavery and didn’t turn hoses on civil rights marchers. Then you finish by announcing, “Well, I’m going to stand with Dr. King and judge people by the content of their character.” It’s optional whether you then get up, scream that the liberal should have issued you a trigger warning about his racism, and leave.
But be careful – the liberal may totally spit in the next latte he sells you.
Some people might question whether this kind of Alinsky-esque tactic means we are stooping to the liberals’ level. Except the liberals’ level is six feet underground, where the victims of collectivism lie buried. Anyone not willing to take the fight to them simply empowers their liberal fascist fantasies.
I’m pretty sure this has been a total waste of time. Where I am right now.
Sorry. Some things, as I’ve always known, are too big to see.
Left and liberal are no longer terms that have anything to do with one another. The left in this country is totalitarian. As the essay quoted above declares, they are terrible people. If you can’t see that and battle it tooth and claw, there is no hope for us whatsoever.
P.S. Okay. Since I know you’re too busy to read, I’ll give you a hint about what’s going on. The ObamaCare and VA screwups are not an accident any more than IRS targeting was. It’s about shearing off big chunks of inconvenient traditional populations. The scheme has always been about death panels for the inconvenient Americans. Old folks who once learned about the constitution get squeezed subtly out of life. Veterans who have a patriotic love of American exceptionalism need to be trimmed down in numbers. Middle class achievers need to be forced down, down, down into a simple fight for month to month survival until they too are government dependents.
Black people. The powers that be in the lefty world never regarded them as anything but chips on the table. Now they’re valuing Hispanics at 1.2 to 1 over blacks, not as people, mind, but simply a higher denomination of gullible losers. So far it looks like they’ve done their calculus right. Nothing sadder than Democrat politicians pushing for illegal alien amnesty when the first jobs lost will be those of their most loyal constituents.
And so it goes… until all that is left are the government schooled morons of all the motley sexes and races who know no history and have no allegiances except to the first person offering them a check for simply being there.
Congratulations, Brizoni. Your rational, godless universe is being born. The smart guys have made a shrewd deduction. Transfer America’s wealth to the rest of the world, pauperize the producers, and trust that there will still be enough money to fund a class of aristocratic American plutocrats who flit from Paris to Dubai to Monte Carlo while their kids learn tyranny at Harvard and Yale. (I first learned this from an MIT guy from a union family who exclaimed constantly about the Brits: “They’ve committed every economic mistake in the world and just LOOK at how much money there still is in the U.K.!” As if money were the point. Union values.) The best of all possible worlds? Sure. Absolutely. As long as our own kids can go to Sidwell Friends before they’re old enough for MIT.
Why am I so tired? Some few outlier intellectuals are acting and writing as if they discovered the phenomenon of lefty hatred of America. God bless their perspicacity, but I identified it 40 years ago. I specified its sources and how it would remake the world. Now, having been right so early, I’m not sure how to make it new again. But you’re all dying day by day from my failure to become more than a crackpot.
That’s what galls me. I thought you needed to know what was going on and how it happened. Never thought you needed to learn how to fight in the first place. My bad.
But I give up. YOU pick which one of me you want.
Well, I wanted “Fight” from Dirty Work (N/A on mobile devices??) Would have made the choice easier. So be it. You can’t always get you want.
But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. On your wife’s laptop. :).
Don’t be high fiving or fist bumping just yet. I know how to fight for civilization. Do you? Think before you answer. If you don’t know how to fight to the death like a cornered wolf, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide?