Being the Best in the World at What One Does
For everyone, that is being the person one is -- and discovering what that is, all one’s life. Political leaders are one kind of leader -- but it is possible to be a world leader in anything one does, if one is doing the right thing -- for oneself. That is the secret of success.
I believe that to be true for Linda Lingle as governor of Hawaii, and George W. Bush as president of the United States. I never voted Republican before 2002, and was glad I had the opportunity to vote for President Bush in 2004, after dropping out for several years. I just didn’t like the partisanship -- being more important than the leadership.
In 2000, I thought Al Gore should have no problem winning the presidency -- as it was his to lose, but lose it he did -- and then he tried to blame it on George Bush, which became fixated as the only idea in the Democrat Party to this day. In exploiting that hatred, it poisoned the remaining thinking persons in that party -- but drove most of them out, as thinking people cannot tolerate hate -- and particularly the blind unquestioning hatred of political correctness. We know it as mob-think -- which is the terminal stage of group-think. Then there is no leadership that does one’s thinking for the group anymore but only this blinding hatred that overwhelms for nobody knows what reason anymore.
One sees it in the perpetual sneer and contempt of many politicians' and commentators' faces -- in the painful look of being pulled in a thousand different directions at once. How people can be around people like that all day without being totally poisoned is wonder to me. That kind of cynicism and pessimism I happily only occasionally encountered on the campaign trail, made me tentative in thinking I wanted to be the representative for people like that. Elections cut both ways.
People can decide they don’t want to be the representative -- as much as the people also make that decision, so it is a happy mutual one that both can abide, and see the wisdom of. I wondered at times, if an elected official truly had more power -- than a private citizen does, who cannot be reigned in by the caucus and protocols. Because every individual has the ultimate highest right to speak their own truth -- for themselves. Speaking as a representative for the people, limits that -- especially these days when “other people’s opinions” is on a rampage.
I don’t think that it is a “disturbing” fact that less than half the people eligible participate in the outcome of elections. What of those other people? How do they feel and how are they represented? What part of their lives are really impacted by government -- or is that simply the news that is easiest and most convenient to report on?
Otherwise, the newspapers have to send reporters out to find out what is going on out there -- rather than sitting back and letting the lobbyists come to you, with their finely prepared statements ready to add one’s own byline. One only has a glimpse into that world as a losing candidate -- because the hold one has on the winning candidates seems to overwhelm, if not destroy many -- as far as the world of sanity is concerned. I never liked people telling me what to do and what to think.
People who aren’t lawyers, don’t like to argue all the time.
posted by Mike Hu @ 9:34 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Of course the news media is in denial. It's not just everybody's imagination as their ombudsman or public editors will demand we believe! They should be shaking up the management for "damage control," but it's too little too late.
How can any intelligent, fair minded person not see it?.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2007-01-26T223441Z_01_N26396581_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-FATHER.xml&src=rss&rpc=22
Bush's Father Complains of News Media "Hostility"
Fri Jan 26, 2007 5:34pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's father accused the news media of "personal animosity" toward his son and said he found the criticism so unrelenting he sometimes talked back to his television set.
"It's one thing to have an adversarial ... relationship -- hard-hitting journalism -- it's another when the journalists' rhetoric goes beyond skepticism and goes over the line into overt, unrelenting hostility and personal animosity," former President George Bush said.
The elder Bush, the 41st U.S. president, had a relatively collegial relationship with the press but things turned sour during his losing 1992 re-election campaign. He got so fed up with media coverage that supporters at the time circulated hats with the slogan "Annoy the Media -- Re-Elect Bush."
"I won't get too personal here -- but this antipathy got worse after the 43rd president took office," the former president said. He was speaking at a reception for a journalism scholarship awarded in honor of the late Hugh Sidey, White House correspondent for Time magazine.
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"And so bad in fact that I found myself doing what I never should have done -- I talk back to the television set. And I said things that my mother wouldn't necessarily approve of," Bush's father said, according to a transcript of his remarks.
The current President Bush's approval ratings have slumped to the lowest level of his presidency -- around 33 percent -- amid anger over the Iraq war and opposition to his plan to increase troop levels in Iraq. In an election widely seen as a referendum on Bush, Democrats in November captured both houses of the U.S. Congress.
In the weeks immediately leading up to the President's State of the Union speech, the pollsters and other mass media manipulators, were coming out with poll after prejudiced poll trying to convince the nation and especially the President himself that there was no confidence in him -- hoping for those Nixon moments in which he'd stumble and act like a person imploding under the pressure.
To everybody's surprise, the President was calm and masterful throughout every moment of that event -- and then the Democrat response was so muddled and ineffectual but they (the mass media) had preplanned to anoint this guy as a beacon of clarity in contrast -- even while it was obvious that he was just rambling from one overworn cliche to the next. Once again, they were caught trying to promote the mediocre as the "greatest on earth," while downplaying and disdaining what had true merit. but there are people who can see these things for themselves.
So a lot of people who tuned in thinking to see the fall a president, instead had a chance to witness with their own senses that not only is this guy not stupid as they like to proclaim him, but probably has more intelligence than all of his detractors combined.
Intelligent people don't go around proclaiming themselves the smartest person in the world, while calling everybody else "stupid." That's what stupid people think intelligent people do.
Some great wit used to say, "You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
It's harder to fool "all the people" now that more people have access to "all the information," but that doesn't stop the Old Guard from trying more spectacularly and obviously backfiring in the modern version of the Pyrrhic wars.
You can't educate people just to respect the existing intellectual hierarchy -- without ever challenging that authority; a few will be good enough to supersede it. One can't get a Ph.D. in a field in which they are creator. That's why Bill Gates or Steve Jobs could not obtain a Ph.D. in "computers" before creating the field; there was nobody to teach or supervise them about it.
Their professors would have told them that it was "impossible," and told them to learn what they knew to be true -- and the only reality possible. "What you are talking about is nonsense and every expert will agree with me." Many such teachers would even proudly proclaim that "everything that could be discovered, was already discovered," and that was the despair of contemporary life and prospects.
Many societies don't have a provision, language or culture for creating the new -- only for transmitting and repeating the old for all eternity, familiar to all as bureaucracies that exist to perpetuate themselves and the status quo.
Such were the (Polynesian) people of Easter Island -- who long ago vanished from the face of the earth, leaving only gigantic, identical stone statues of unvarying expression as the only evidence of their existence. There are no other traces of life -- or how they lived.
That's not enough to be a vibrant, viable culture and society -- just repeating the traditions and precedents year after year, even as they've become entirely obsolete as a response to the challenges of living fully in the present times. That is the value and measure of any society and culture -- how it responds to the challenges of life in the present, and not just revering life a hundred or a thousand years ago.
That is the society and culture of death -- and extinction.
While much is made of the 3,000 lives lost in Iraq, what is never pointed out, is that not one more life has been lost to terrorists in six years in the United States homeland -- since 9/11/01 when 3,000 people lost their lives in a single day -- for doing nothing more than living their lives.
This kind of selective memory, is not the Big Picture of the truth and reality. Yet those distortions seems to be the only ones the mainstream media is intent on shoving down our throats.
The mainstream media's non-discrimination policies worked too well: they have nobody left capable of exercising "good" judgment.
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