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Patty and Osama
There’s only one possible explanation for everything: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) says the reason Osama is so popular worldwide is that he’s into day care centers. In the meantime, the reason “[t]here are crises in every one of our schools in this country” is that there’s not enough Federal money to go around. Where does this kind of statement come from? Is it a Pacific Northwest thing? A women-in-politics thing? An American
everybody-must-be-just-like-me thing? Whatever the answer, the statement adds to the impression that the
incapacity for self-government the current system fosters can’t be restricted to the populace but seeps into the highest
government positions.
Comments
When I read this sentence in the beginning of the article, I knew I was going to have shall we say some difficulty with Sen. Murray’s point of view: “What is behind terrorist Osama bin Laden’s popularity in some parts of the world, and should the United States adopt his nation-building tactics?” Come again? “Should the United States adopt Osama bin Laden’s nation-building tactics?” You mean the way he knocked down two of the biggest buildings in the country with thousands of people inside them? The rest of the article isn’t much better. What can one say? Among the choices Mr. Kalb offers as a partial explanation, I’ll pick the “women-in-poitics” factor — that’s got to be playing a role here. The same kind of woman who cannot perceive any differences between men and women in general likely won’t grasp why ninety percent of what Sen. Murray said to the students is drivel. This woman controls one one-hundredth of the United States. It isn’t a Pacific Northwest or women-in-politics thing. The example of Rep. Jennifer Dunn (WA) disproves both hypotheses. It is, however, a Seattle thing. Cf. Rep. Jim McDermott. aka “Baghdad Jim”. He represents Capitol Hill and other radical leftist sections of the city. Seattle dominates Washington state politics, and Democratic candidates usually win statewide office by piling up huge margins in the Seattle metro area. (There is also a large blue-collar Democratic vote in Tacoma and Everett.) The part of the state east of the Olympic mountains is far more conservative, as is eastern King county, but they’re outnumbered. Sen. Murray was originally a candidate favored by the state teachers’ union. She’s not too bright, in the opinion of most people out here, but she can be counted on to parrot the party line. I’ll be voting against her (again) in 2004. I think what you have in the Northwest can be partly explained as the combination of New England Puritanism cum liberalism (resulting from the great New Englander migration across the Northern tier of the U.S.) with West Coast nuttiness. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 20, 2002 2:20 PMAt a distance it seems that people are very comfortable there and can’t imagine that anyone else could want anything but just the kind of life they have. Posted by: Jim Kalb on December 20, 2002 2:45 PMRight after posting my comment on this thread (above) at lunchtime I happened to be in my car listening to the radio. Roger Hedgecock, filling in for Rush Limbaugh on Rush’s radio show, also noted Sen. Murray’s crackpot comments to the Canadian high-school group, and he very reasonably called for there to be a firestorm of protest against her, and called for her resignation. Right on, Roger! I mean, whose comments were more off-the-wall and totally sickening, hers or Lott’s? But of course, we’ll never hear a peep from the mainstream media or the Dems OR THE REPUBLICANS about Sen. Murray. She’ll walk away from it intact while Lott gets boiled in oil. So once again, what’s sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for the gander in this pathetically-managed country of ours. Posted by: Unadorned on December 20, 2002 6:01 PM |