Oops! I forgot. They won and I need to give up. I don’t have to wait for the fariness doctrine to be reinstated and extended to personal blogs–I expect this any day now. Fine! Geithner can stay, and while we’re at it, shouldn’t all FOO (Friends-Of-Obama) Fighters get a pass on taxes? After all, these are really fine people and are better than us/me, and need to be given special rights so that thay can save us from ourselves. Sounds Hobbesian.
Moron Watch: Channel, surfing, as usual, I noticed Richard Belzer (actor, comic) out of his depth during the panel discussion on Hannity the other night. Seems he has access to Wikipedia because he pointed out via rhetorical question that Hannity must be a Hobbesian!? [To be fair, Wikipedia actually has a pretty good synopsis of Hobbes, so maybe Belzer can't read.] Hannity wasn’t sure what a Hobbesian (Thomas Hobbes) was exactly [Who would, generally, or was he just as confused as I was by the allusion?] and answered as much stating that he was at root a conservative, that he was on the conservative side. That’s okay, but then little Ricky went on to tell him that a Hobbesian was a bad someone (conservatives) who believed that the nature of humans was primarily evil and needed to be controlled by the state as opposed to all those good Lockeians (John Locke) like Obama and Belzer (implied) who believed in the inherent good of mankind.
Hobbes might best be summed for sound bites by just saying “social contract” where the belief is that the state is probably the best mechanism for delivering peace, harmony, and good health to the nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives of the huddled masses (hardly a conservative notion, more of an ObamaNation notion, if you ask me) and Locke more of the “natural rights”, “government by consent” classical liberal (sounds more conservative to me, and most certainly Hannity’s default position). I think Belzer probably meant to call Hannity–or would have been better served, at least, to call Hannity–a Calvanist (i.e., John Calvin, who did believe in the total depravity of mankind) if he wanted to link him to someone that believed in the inherent badness of man, instead of Hobbesian vs. Locke (who, if I remember correctly, probably did believe that man was born ‘good’ or at least neutral, tabula rasa-wise). But comparing Hannity to Calvin wouldn’t have worked very well either because Hannity’s a Roman Catholic!
Given the context, what a weird thing to be coming out of the mouth of some dope like Richard Belzer. I guess he wanted us to all know that he’s not just an actor but rather a real brainiac [despite Hulk Hogan's shutting off blood to his brain once: Thanks, Wikipedia!]. Well, maybe he went to college, but who knew? It must have been a bad college [Dean Junior College, Franklin, MA--Belzer was tossed out after two semesters majoring in PhysEd because he attended too many student demonstrations: Thanks, Wikipedia!] because he got it wrong [come to think of it, if he had only gone to Wikipedia...]. Why’s it so hard for pinks to admit that the left is more naturally aligned with the devine right of kings and absolutism. If Belzer understands Hobbes and Locke well enough to use them in a complex debate environment then I’m the lost Dauphin of France.
I surfed over to NCIS and felt a lot better.
