Human Nature

Life is full of trade-offs. One stays another 15 minutes on the exercise bike in order to work off last night’s dessert. Or, one spends an extra $10 to drive to work instead of taking the bus in order to listen to the drive-time news.

And trade-offs are even more complex when weighed by governments. Can citizens tolerate much higher utility bills in order to reduce the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity? Or can road maintenance be short-changed so that retired pensioners can continue to be paid?

These are economic trade-offs ... but there are also social trade-offs. Can abortion be encouraged at the cost of having to hype immigration to maintain a nation’s population? Or, more topical, can a city insult its minority population with a stop-and-frisk policy in order to save many of their lives and many more wounded? Would one rather be insulted or shot? Strangely, today, many politicians maintain that their minority populations prefer the latter.

So, kind reader, when one sees political trade-offs being made, be they economic or social, that seem illogical ... one can assume that there are other motivations beneath the surface that are influencing these silly decisions.

Such is human nature.

Hear No Evil

I guess it’s human nature.  When we are confronted with information that crosses our ideological grain, we cut short the speaker or stop reading the story.  I, myself, must confess that I have done this … and, I suspect, so have you.  More and more frequently these days, when the subject of one of Obama’s scandals comes up (generally not brought up by me), many of my liberal friends respond, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

What does this mean?  To me, this avoidance indicates the seriousness of these moral breaches on the part of our current administration.  This can be measured by the number of unanswered or unanswerable questions that linger like a miasma around Jay Carney and those other unfortunate Obama spokespersons. 

Just this last weekend, Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama senior political adviser, went on five Sunday talk shows (shades of Susan Rice), trying to hold back the tide of negative disclosures about the multiple scandals enveloping his boss … see: National Review Story.  He did not do a very good job … even saying at one point, “the law is irrelevant,” when ask about White House dissembling … see: Townhall Story

I’m actually somewhat surprised that Pfeiffer didn’t put his fingers in his ears … but maybe this asinine statement was the equivalent.