Requiem for Lightweights

by Ed Cobb

Gonna change my way of thinking,
Make myself a different set of rules.
Gonna put my good foot forward,
And stop being influenced by fools.

When times are flush you suffer lightweights. When times are hard you do not. When the living is easy you have the luxury of attending to lightweights and their foolish concerns. When times are hard you do not. We stand just across the threshold of hard times. We will go back through that doorway one day but it will likely take a while. It is time to cut the lightweights out from the herd.

We have lived through flush times and the lightweights - fools and foolish ideas - have held sway too long. That time is past. The free world is locked in a mortal struggle with what has been termed Jihadistan, a virtual nation bent on total war. Life and prosperity are threatened. The lightweights and fools are no longer entertaining but dangerous and expendable. It is time for serious people to call a spade a spade and a fool a fool. Here are some personal favorites.

The collectivists at the New York Times are no better and not much worse than the empire lovers at National Review. The armchair generals in both editorial offices would have other people fight and die in a total war between their Empire of America and Islam. The very war the terrorists are trying to start. Fools.

The pampered pea brains in Hollywood and the tenured big brains in academia are equally clueless. Both exist in cocoons of unreality; one of fiction the other of theories stranger than fiction. The next time Streisand or a Baldwin or Ethan Hawke (who?) expresses an opinion on anything more weighty than the gown Cher wore to their last self aggrandizing awards ceremony they should be conscripted into a USO troupe and sent off to entertain in the refugee camps along the Afghanistan - Pakistan border. And the only academics who should be allowed to express an opinion off campus are Camille Paglia and John Lott. The rest of them should be confined to their department offices where they can sip Chardonnay and let graduate students do their work for them. Lightweights.

Take a close look at our political leaders. John "Loose Cannon" McCain is not much less a fool than Barney Frank. Not enough to matter, anyway. And how much real difference is there between John Kerry and Tom Ridge, anyway? In their world, letting people keep their own money is spending while letting the government spend that money is investing. Foolish doubletalk. The governing class and their love of power and empire is, in large part, what got us into our current situation. Let’s not forget the damage done by these lightweights once it is all over. OK?

Then there is Allen Greenspan and his Fed loving groupies. With a once, if artificially, sizzling economy teetering on the brink of a corrective recession they want to bail out every failing business in the U.S. and every failing region on the earth. With the habit of saving nearly squeezed out of us they continue to print money, making what savings we have worth less and making the very concept of saving suspect. Good thinking, boys.

Speaking of fools, Teddy Kennedy. ‘Nuff said.

In his day, Bill Clinton was Lightweight Prime. A grifter from the sticks who flimflammed his way onto the big stage. A man with no core beliefs beyond really liking the job of President and really wanting to keep it. When an American embassy or an American ship or high rise buildings sheltering Americans got bombed, and all got bombed during his watch, his response was to stage a TV special. Launch missiles. Blow something up. Pretty much anything. He usually did it by night because the exhaust trails and the explosions looked so much cooler on CNN that way. Clinton was a lightweight in the ring with heavyweights. They recognized that he was not a serious man. That led them to conclude that America is not a serious country, Americans not serious people. It led them to conclude that we are all lightweights. The bill has come due for electing and reelecting a lightweight. For being influenced by a fool.

Dismantling the Second Amendment is a favorite of lightweights. You don’t need weapons, they have told us for years. You might hurt yourselves. Or hurt the children. Let Nanny State take care of you. Too many people listened. Still do. They bought into the statist vision of a utopia where guns are made to disappear and where there were no evil people. Fools. It does not work out that way and it does not work precisely because it is a lightweight idea that ignores the real world. Serious people know that we are each charged with our own self-defense, the defense of our families, our friends and our communities in this life. It is part of the deal you enter into at birth. Turning that defense over to someone else, especially a state, is irresponsible.

Where good people are unarmed bad guys win with box cutters. A few armed citizens could have stopped the terrorists just as armed citizens stop domestic bad guys every day. If the next terrorist attack is stopped that is likely who will stop it. That lesson should not be lost. Only fools go through life expecting someone else to protect them. If you are really interested in homeland security, support the Second Amendment and exercise your Second Amendment rights. Today. It is time for America to stop being influenced by lightweights like Chuck "Where’s the Camera?" Schumer, Sarah Brady and the Million Foolish Moms.

And not all fools are white. You can be dark skinned and be a lightweight. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are two truly breathtaking fools to whom America has given way too much attention for altogether too long a time. I like to imagine them ending their days touring in all black repertory company of "The Odd Couple," forever bickering about top billing. It makes me smile.

Jesse says the Taliban asked him to come talk to them so that he could help bring an end to the current tensions. The Taliban says, "Jesse who?" and I know which one I believe. It takes a lot in post 9/11 America to be less credible than the Taliban. Leave it to Jesse, the man who got rich by helping poor people. Makes you wonder where Mother Teresa went wrong. If it weren’t for Al Sharpton, Jesse would be the most transparent fraud in America.

A few days ago, Al Sharpton told us he gave Rudy Giuliani no credit, saying that New Yorkers, "would have come together if Bozo was the mayor." Do you think that was a trial balloon for his own candidacy? It does set a standard by which he is qualified. Big Al overflows with the milk of human kindness. Now he is worried about the civil rights of Arabs. Yeah, I believe that Al Sharpton cares about Arabs. Don’t you? He cares about Arabs like he cares about Jews and whites and, for that matter, other blacks. Like he cared about Tawana Brawley. He cares about how they can contribute to the level of media attention to which he has become accustomed. We just don’t have time for this pair of fools anymore.

Ted Kennedy. ‘Nuff said.

Neither the NAACP nor the KKK has had an original thought in thirty years and both should be considered irrelevant due to their extreme foolishness. Most Americans are past the whole discrimination based on race thing and have been for years. There is opportunity in America for anyone willing to do the work it takes to excel. Anyone. That’s as good as it gets in this life. Meanwhile, these fools try to keep alive a past that is dead and gone. One does it to foster their entitlement agenda and the other the fear of that agenda. Get over it, fellas. We have.

Hillary Clinton is likewise a lightweight, a foolish and petulant prima donna. Her performance during President Bush’s address to the nation should have proven it to everyone once and for all. My daughter knew better than to behave that way when she was four. Her staff says she was tired. Poor thing. And Hillary, the junior lightweight from New York, says she knows what it is like to look terrorism in the face because of what she went through during her attempted coup of our healthcare system. Talk radio was mean and people said rude things. Idiot.

Animal rights, PETA and that bunch, is another stupid idea whose time to go has come. Listen up, people have rights - not animals. I love my little dogs. I feed the birds. I’ve been known to stop my car to move a turtle off the road in my time. But one person is worth more than all the animals that ever were and it’s time to tell the fools who say otherwise to take a walk. Risking people to save animals and considering it a good bargain is as lightweight as it gets.

Their brother lightweights, the enviro-socialists, likewise devalue human life. And I am not talking only about the clearly radical groups like the Earth Liberation Front but also the seemingly more reputable, Sierra Club class environmental whackos. Lightweight thinkers all. Not one person should

go a night without home heating oil so that a caribou has a nice tundra to roam. Sacrificing the prosperity that improves the lot in life of real people for the sake of a butterfly is dumb with a capital duh. Sacrificing firefighters because fish need the water is criminal. Members of these extreme environmental movements have been guilty of causing pain and loss and practicing terrorism. Of course, none of it elicits condemnation form the lightweights in the establishment media. More fools.

I am reminded of the great line in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Realizing that he is standing in the midst of the fortune he has been seeking without knowing it, the old prospector tells Fred C. Dobbs, "You’re so stupid there’s nothing to compare you to." Ted Kennedy. ‘Nuff said.

The list of fools and foolish ideas we have put up with seems endless. The feminized military with co-ed barracks and pregnant grunts kind of redefines gunner’s mate, huh? The condemnation of the Boy Scouts because they refuse to tell eleven year old boys to sleep in tents with men who want to sleep with eleven year old boys would be ludicrous if not for the fact that it is so utterly reprehensible. The characterization of simple good police work as "racial profiling," is classic lightweight thinking as is the idea of additional punishment for "hate crimes" as if there were some other kind. Does it ever end? It had better.

We have let it go on too long. It is time to be serious, to think seriously. It is time to defend the core American value of liberty and oppose anything - anything - that threatens it. Time to speak truth to power, including the power of public opinion. Time to toss the lightweights, their lightweight ideas and the whole lightweight culture out on their collective ear. Time to stop being influenced by fools.

October 8, 2001

Ed Cobb [send him mail] is a printer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. He is a northerner by birth, a southerner by choice, and a Catholic by the grace of God.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com

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