As IF Times

link Randy Newman writes new satirical, political song – Yahoo! News.

It’s difficult to refute an argument about a topic if the rebuttals have no reference to basic logic.  Liberals love to demonstrate how enlightened they are by taking the sides of issues that have little logical foundation.  If one reads the argument of the artiste Randy Newman, one will get that he is trying to prove how enlightened and non racist he is.  Yet the thrust of his argument is that the President should be embraced BECAUSE he is black, not for any particular aspect of ability.   What if that same logic were  applied to his music business?  Why don’t we all buy music that’s performed by black artists regardless of their quality?  Hey wait a minute….

In our modern American Idol culture, popularity is the same thing as being legitimate.  If there weren’t sane people in the world, (a shrinking contingent to be sure ), George Clooney or Brad Pitt would be elected to lead the country.  It makes very little difference to most that neither one of those talented individuals have any genuine grounding in economics or geopolitics.  Oh sure, they may look good on TV and probably even smell nice.  However , it should not shock most people that the opinions of folks like those are considerably less illuminating than your average first year economics student. In an increasingly dumbed down society in which David Letterman is considered a source of real information, people farm out their critical thinking and merely adopt what they hear in the pop media and from pop artists as fact.  As if people who live in fantasy can give advice on reality.  An artiste like Newman may think it’s logical to support someone solely because of their ‘minority’ status, but it’s the very racism he’s trying to parody.

If we are going to appoint people solely because of their membership in a favored constituency, why don’t we elect more female leaders? They do represent more than half of the population and it would only be appropriate in an enlightened, modern society.  I recommend Kim Kardashian.  She appears to be popular.  Some may perhaps argue that a Hilary Clinton would be eligible; they had that chance.  But as we recall, the DNC thought that it was more important to install someone with no real life experience but who happened to be a person of color, than it was to embrace someone with a lifetime of political experience.  Any racism or sexism there is incidental.  Now if Hilary looked less like Hilary and more like Kim, who knows?

Like most people, when I get my car fixed, I want the guy who knows what he’s doing, not the grad student who has University credits for studying engine theory or because he belonged to a favored minority.    I’d bet  that even the socially sensitive Randy Newman doesn’t specifically ask for the black mechanic, nor would he write satirical songs about it.  We keep hearing that racism is the great issue of our society.  For people like Newman at least, it must be,  they find it everywhere.  Sort of like lawyers and lawsuits.  Americans have the largest numbers of lawyers per capita in the world.   Coincidently, they are the most litigious nation as well….lawbreakers are everywhere.  As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

link Protesters dispersed in Cairo; fury over anti-Islam film hits Australia – CNN.com.

In a long forgotten movie from 1983 entitled “Yellowbeard”, there is a scene in which a blind man is offered a roast chicken but is actually a loaf of bread.  The blind man takes a bite and says, “mmm, great chicken”.   The ongoing narrative about the uprisings in the Muslim world is an amusing parallel to this.  What we hear from news outlets of all stripes is that the rioting, shooting, setting ablaze of buildings and killings of ambassadors is rooted in anger over an obscure YouTube flick in which their religion is slighted.

Purveyors of news think that the public are just like the blind man in the movie, willing to accept the narrative as allegorical chicken when it is in fact, bread.  Think about that.  In many of those muslim nations, having a change of clothes would qualify you as middle class, yet we are to believe that because of some YouTube video, young men are willing to get their hands on RPG’s, riot and murder people.   For this kind of over reaction, you would think their hockey team lost a playoff game.

You would have to believe that on the anniversary of 9-11, in simultaneous attacks across a dozen countries,  young muslim men collectively decided to protest a crappy video.  (Imagine if they had seen any of Will Ferrell’s movies )  Somehow, en masse, they decided that freedom of expression in another country would not be tolerated.  This dubiousness is perpetuated by no less than the Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton who denounced the video as inflammatory and disgusting.  As well, UN ambassador Susan Rice also chimes in with her condemnation of the video.  So we have the entire world condemning some low budget video as being the root cause of the violence towards Americans.  Except for Al Qaeda.  They actually issued a statement saying that the violence was in response to the killing of their number 2 guy.   http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/africa/libya-attack-jihadists/index.html  Of course, Al Qaeda doesn’t have as much credibility as the New York Times or the Huffington Post.

Because of this narrative, subtly but surely, a free western world has to be on eggshells worrying about what words  may or may not invoke anger among  otherwise peaceful and tolerant muslims.  This of course is an extension of an entire generation of people in the west being fed the bs of ‘root causes’, as in “the root cause of the axe murderer’s rampage was being denied candy at the age of 5”.

Let’s hope that the muslim world doesn’t catch on to the new Wendy’s triple bacon burger.  The very idea that people can consume something like that has to be offensive at some level.