Happy St. Patrick's Day to all. Just in case you want to know more about the real St. Patrick, here's a LINK.
If all you want to do is enjoy yourself with a few adult beverages, might I suggest a lovely Irish whiskey - The Irishman*. Enjoy the parades, wear green so you don't get pinched, and just relax.
Trust me, it could be worse politically speaking. I know it looks crazy now and we still have a long way to go, but it will be over in November.
If anyone has any jokes they want to tell to lighten the mood, please feel free.
Here's an Irish saying to keep you going:
*Though I am not a great connoisseur of fine whiskeys, I went to a whiskey tasting last weekend and The Irishman whiskey is quite smooth especially the higher the price.
If all you want to do is enjoy yourself with a few adult beverages, might I suggest a lovely Irish whiskey - The Irishman*. Enjoy the parades, wear green so you don't get pinched, and just relax.
Trust me, it could be worse politically speaking. I know it looks crazy now and we still have a long way to go, but it will be over in November.
If anyone has any jokes they want to tell to lighten the mood, please feel free.
Here's an Irish saying to keep you going:
May there always be work for your hands to do,I am out of pocket today, but will join later...
May your purse always hold a coin or two.
May the sun always shine warm on your windowpane,
May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near you,
And may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
*Though I am not a great connoisseur of fine whiskeys, I went to a whiskey tasting last weekend and The Irishman whiskey is quite smooth especially the higher the price.
Carson is learning from the man he hopes will be his future boss. Having previously stated he was reluctantly endorsing Trump because that he had been promised a job, now he is stating there was no such discussion.
ReplyDeleteCarson is literally a brain surgeon (before he entered politics both my daughters wrote book reports on his very impressive career and personal life) so he is brilliant in some contexts, but politically he tends to come across as a pandering dunce.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/carson-backtracks-trump-and-i-did-not-discuss-any-quid-pro-quo-for-my-endorsement/
Carson sat down with CNN’s Erin Burnett tonight, and she asked him exactly what position he and Trump talked about him having in a potential Trump administration.
“First of all,” Carson said, “we did not discuss any quid pro quo. There seems to be a great desire by many people to try to make it seem that way.”
The National Review is further alienating the Trump wing of the party by talking about personal responsibility.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432796/working-class-whites-have-moral-responsibilities-defense-kevin-williamson
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
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These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say. My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim. For generations, conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best. Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement. And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs. At our local regional hospital, it’s become a bitter joke the extent to which the community is hooked on “Xanatab” — the Xanax and Lortab prescriptions that lead to drug dependence.
Happy St. Patrick's Day, us Irish are just like everyone else; except, better looking, wittier, and more fun...
ReplyDelete...and modest.
Drugs, prescription and home-made meth are destroying our Ozark culture. We lose 3 people a month in our county to prescription drug overdose. Families are devastated by these drugs, our state spends millions trying to do something about it..but it's not working..more than a few of the students in my wife's school are severely handicapped due to mom taking drugs and alcohol while carrying the baby..yesterday in our Veterans Treatment Court our judge had to send 2 people to jail for 48 hours and one back to prison...He was almost in tears afterwards. We work hard to keep them sober, but some just can't do it. I don't have any answers, but I sure as Hell don't think legalization will make it any better. There was a murder last week in our county, a man, high on drugs, got a car to pull over for him. He attacked the driver and killed him. Then sat in the dead man's lap and drove the car another ten miles to town..when he was arrested he was laughing at himself. A bullet to the head would have helped everyone concerned...
ReplyDeleteAnthony, interesting article, and I note that the folks in the comments section refuse to hear it.
ReplyDeleteWhat Williams and French fail to point out is that "working class" is a misnomer when applied to folks they are talking about. I chalk it up to them both being too classy to bring themselves to call anyone white trash.
The point about a U-Haul is spot on! The Great Depression spawned a mass migration. There's nothing like that today, even while large swathes of the country (including where I live) have virtually no unemployment. Whistle-stop towns where there are no train tracks don't make any sense. Anyone too lethargic to move to greener pastures is partially culpable for their own straits.
Critch, funny how one side wants to legalize drugs and ban guns while the other side wants it the other way 'round. I say, legalize both and the problems will sort themselves. I kid, of course, but you have to admit there is humor in the contrast.
ReplyDeleteAnthony, I've seen that too. That describes West Virginia perfectly... and Kentucky and rural Tennessee and rural Ohio and probably other places too. Unfortunately, our right and left both ignore the reality.
ReplyDeleteThe right wants to see these people as "reel 'merikans"... salt of the earth types who represent "HARD (grrr) working America." //spits They are the kind of people country music glorifies. The kind of people Harvard elites want to destroy. These noble humans are pining to work if only liberals would stop giving their jobs to lazy Mexicans!!!!
The left wants to see them as working class America, the people who lost out when corporations came along in the 1980s and when Reagan and Bush used the military to destroy the unions and then sold all the jobs to China. Booo!! These noble laborers are pining to work if only someone would offer them a living wage of more than $15 an hour and would stop giving their jobs to the Chinese!!
Of course, neither group is even close to the truth. The truth is that they tend to be drug addicted, sex addicted, welfare-addicted petty criminals. Kids with different baby-daddies. No moral values whatsoever. Racist. Happy to fall for anyone offering a free lunch.
Critch, Meth is a nightmare and should never be made legal.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I suspect that drugs are a demand side problem, and can only be fixed that way. At this point, the only answer that I think can solve this is better parenting, better schools and intervening with kids while they are still children to make sure they have real goals in life.
I'm w/ Kevin D. Williamson and David French. In fact I'll add to it. The worst thing you can do is tell these people that it's GOP elites, the Mexicans, and the Chinese (or the Jews) keeping them down. Because it's a lie.
ReplyDeleteIt's as dishonest and destructive a lie as telling the blacks of the Harlem ghetto that the sole cause of their miseries is the "White man keeping them down."
I concur, Kit.
ReplyDeleteWish me luck! I'm off to Disney on Ice tonight with two insanely excited pre-teen girls.
ReplyDeleteRubio seems to be giving up politics. Tearing up about it is a little weird.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mediaite.com/online/marco-rubio-emotionally-announces-he-will-not-seek-senatorial-reelection/
Appearing to choke back a tear or two, Rubio said the following:
I’m not gonna be anybody’s Vice President. I’m not interested in being Vice President. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. I’m not gonna be Vice President; I’m not running for Governor of Florida. I’m gonna finish out my term in the Senate and over the next ten months we are going to work really hard here — we have some things we want to achieve — and then I’ll be a private citizen in January.
Have fun Andrew.
ReplyDelete