Don't Worry; Be Happy

George F. Will's column today cites a Pew study showing that conservatives are happier than liberals. He claims that this is because liberals are waiting for government to make them happy while conservatives are going out and getting it themselves. George F. Will is a moron. This from a moderately happy liberal who has a good job, earned a Ph.D. without financial aid (paying out of state tuition) and is far more astute than George F. Will. Or any of the other conservative blowholes who tell conservatives how they're supposed to think.
Conservativism is all about fear. The taxation-is-theft crowd are fearful that someone else will get the benefit of their money through some program like Pell grants or Head Start. They don't particularly care that at some point, they benefitted, directly or indirectly, from some similar program. (And by the way, every baby boomer benefitted from the money that the government poured into education after Sputnik.) The national security crowd are terrified that someone is about to attack them. Among nations, probably only China has the wherewithal to launch a credible attack on the US, but the Chinese are too astute to attack their principal trading partner. Terrorists? Sure they're out there, and they'll almost surely strike again. But the only way they can do (have done) lasting damage is by causing Americans to reconstruct their lives around fear rather than hope. And the Bush Administration feeds the fear of the terrorists for its own gain. Social conservatives are afraid that someone who is different might be recognized as a human being and thereby diminish them. They can only be positive about themselves if they have someone to be negative about.
Surveys can give bogus results, particularly when they get into questions of happiness. It's too bad that conservativism has been so weakened by association with the dim bulbs of the Bush family that it has to sell itself by claiming that its adherents are happier than others.

I Wonder What Would Happen

Okay. Let's say that I go out quail hunting with some friends of mine. I know it's a stretch because most of my friends aren't hunters, let alone quail hunters. And let's say that at lunchtime, we decide to have a beer. My friends and me drinking beer isn't a stretch; some of my friends drinking just one beer is a different story. So we finish the beer and start hunting again, and it's getting on toward seven o'clock in February. But one of us somehow leaves the group for a few minutes, and when he comes back, one of us shoots him. We all know some first aid, and we've got cell phones with us, so we start treating for shock and bleeding and wait for an ambulance, which soon arrives and hauls him off the to hospital. We go back to thehome of the person who owns the property where we were hunting. A bit later, a sheriff's deputy shows up to ask about the ambulance, but we explain that we're all cool and he leaves. Next morning, somebody decides that maybe we need to make an official report, so we call the sheriff's office, and the deputy comes back. We answer his questions, and he goes away, even though the guy who did the shooting doesn't have the right stamp to be hunting quail. Sure. That's believable, isn't it?
I think Dick Cheney should come clean with America. I might cut him some slack for not having the right stamp and for not making sure of his target the way I was taught to do when I was a kid. I might give him the benefit of the doubt for hunting at dusk, when visibility is terrible. But he needs to tell us how he got the cop to leave him alone. I want to do that if I ever get pulled over for speeding again.

Feeling Safer?

The Judiciary Committee Hearings on NSA Surveillance aren’t producing much information. It seems that anything important is an operational detail or a hypothetical, and Attorney General Gonzalez doesn’t do those. But there’s an important point that Sen. Kennedy made: Bush had better hope that none of the evidence gained under this program is ever used in any way to arrest or prosecute anybody. It’s incontrovertible that there’s a question about the legality of the program, and that means that if any of the information is used in court, it provides, in and of itself, grounds for appeal.

What this means is really simple: Bush could have Osama bin Laden himself on trial for all of the acts against America in which he has participated. And bin Laden could even be convicted. And then his attorney would have a legal obligation to appeal, arguing that illegally obtained evidence was used to convict. And we could all hold our collective breath while waiting for the case to make its way to the Supreme Court and while Bushie’s appointees tried to figure out how to make the conviction stick. And let's not whine too much about people "getting off on technicalities." Those technical requirements exist because the Founding Fathers intended to protect people from the kinds of abuses they had seen under the King George who lived in London.

As much as I understand why terrorists want to act against the United States, I detest the terrorists and their actions. I’d like to see them rot in a super-max prison until they rot in hell. Unfortunately, Bush, who has made a big deal out of keeping Americans safe, may have made it harder to stop terrorism.