Open Threads

Sometimes Sully’s more Randian than Burkean:

The new cultural divide will not be on guns, gays and God. It will be between the makers and the takers, the producers of wealth and the recipients of redistribution. And it will be about tempering the over-reach that the Democrats will be unable to resist.

(A) Why not just call the Democrats “moochers and looters” and be done with it?

(B) If the divide really becomes the rich versus the poor — the top 10% versus everyone else — how can that not benefit Democrats?

(C) Anyone who thinks that Republicans will ever stop using the three G’s with at least some success is out of his mind.

Update. Good point from JGabriel in the comments:

Well, the producers of wealth are the people who make things: the workers. And the wealthy are the recipients of redistribution.

How the opposite became such a common assumption that we automatically know Sully is saying the opposite, that the Democrats are the “moochers and losers” is really, when you think about, quite strange. And, yes, I know it’s the result of nearly a century of GOP and upper class propaganda, but doesn’t make it any less strange.

Makers and takersPost + Comments (97)

Some of my best friends are from the small West Indian nation of Guyana (although Guyana is on the South American continent, its history and culture are much closer to that of Trinidad than of, say, Brazil) and they emailed me the obituary of Janet Jagan, a woman from Chicago who became president of Guyana and who died a few days ago at the age of 88. It’s an interesting story:

Born Janet Rosenberg in 1920, she was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital in Chicago when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern University and the eldest of 11 children of an Indo-Guyanese family of sugar cane workers. His grandparents had arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured laborers.

They married, despite the fierce opposition of her parents, who were Jewish, and in 1943 they moved to British Guiana, where he established a dental practice and they both became involved in radical politics. In 1950, they founded the People’s Progressive Party, and in 1953, in elections under a new Constitution providing greater home rule, Dr. Jagan became chief minister. But the Jagans’ Marxist ideas aroused the suspicions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent warships and troops to topple the new government. The Jagans were jailed.

[….]

Dr. Jagan returned to power in 1957, and Mrs. Jagan became labor minister.

Again, their politics, along with their admiration for Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, caused alarm in a foreign capital — this time, Washington. According to long-classified documents, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Central Intelligence Agency in 1961 to destabilize the Jagan government. The C.I.A. covertly financed a campaign of labor unrest, false information and sabotage that led to race riots and, eventually, the ascension of Forbes Burnham, a black, London-educated lawyer and a leader of the People’s Progressive Party who had become a rival of the Jagans. He became president and prime minister in 1966.

[….]

After her husband died in 1997, she ran for president and won. At campaign rallies, her followers respectfully called her “bhowji,” a Hindi term meaning “elder brother’s wife.” But her government was plagued by street protests and tension with the opposition People’s National Congress.

It’s a typical story, in a way, for a poor country in the Western hemisphere buffeted by failed Marxist ideas and murderous Euro-American interventions.

On a lighter note, how can it be that no Merchant-Ivory style movie has been made about Janet Jagan yet? This has Oscar written all over it.


Update. From the comments, there is this PBS documentary about that Jagans.

Random historical notePost + Comments (18)

The title says it all. I spent the afternoon at the DMV dealing with driver’s license stuff, then the rest of the day on the phone with insurance agents and AAA.

Long story short, I am in a pissy mood.

Here is a virgin thread.

I’m CrabbyPost + Comments (54)

I’ll be napping. You kids behave.

Tournament Open ThreadPost + Comments (136)