An American businessman’s letter to Obama

Mr. Obama,

Given the uproar about the simple question asked you by Joe the plumber, and the persecution that has been heaped on him because he dared to question you, I find myself motivated to say a few things to you myself. While Joe aspires to start a business someday, I already have started not one, but 4 businesses. But first, let me introduce myself. You can call me “Cory the well driller”. I am a 54 year old high school graduate. I didn’t go to college like you, I was too ready to go “conquer the world” when I finished high school. 25 years ago at age 29, I started my own water well drilling business at a time when the economy here in East Texas was in a tailspin from the crash of the early 80’s oil boom. I didn’t get any help from the government, nor did I look for any. I borrowed what I could from my sister, my uncle, and even the pawn shop and managed to scrape together a homemade drill rig and a few tools to do my first job. My businesses did not start as a result of privilege. They are the result of my personal drive, personal ambition, self discipline, self reliance, and a determination to treat my customers fairly. From the very start my business provided one other (than myself) East Texan a full time job. I couldn’t afford a backhoe the first few years (something every well drilling business had), so I and my helper had to dig the mud pits that are necessary for each and every job with hand shovels. I had to use my 10 year old, 1/2 ton pickup truck for my water tank truck (normally a job for at least a 2 ton truck).

A year and a half after I started the business, I scraped together a 20% down payment to get a modest bank loan and bought a (28 year) old, worn out, slightly bigger drilling rig to allow me to drill the deeper water wells in my area. I spent the next few years drilling wells with the rig while simultaneously rebuilding it between jobs. Through these years I never knew from one month to the next if I would have any work or be able to pay the bills. I got behind on my income taxes one year, and spent the next two years paying that back (with penalty and interest) while keeping up with ongoing taxes. I got behind on my water well supply bill 2 different years (way behind the second time… $80,000.00), and spent over a year paying it back (each time) while continuing to pay for ongoing supplies C.O.D.. Of course, the personal stress endured through these experiences and years is hard to measure. I do have a stent in my heart now to memorialize it all.

Paul Lake’s astonishing Cry Wolf

Fables of Fragility
James Matthew Wilson – 05/08/09

By the time George Orwell’s Animal Farm appeared in August of 1945, its readers were well prepared to sift the animals that constitute its cast of characters for their real-life analogues. The atrocities of Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime had come sufficiently to light that even leftist sympathizers and card-carrying Communists like Orwell could no longer ignore them. Orwell’s fairy story, as he subtitled it, depicts the revolution of the animal “class” on Manor Farm. They seize the state by sending their master, Jones, into permanent exile and in their jubilation erect a communistic state founded on egalitarianism. The intellectual architects behind this largely spontaneous revolution—the pigs on the farm—naturally take positions of leadership afterwards. And here, of course, begins the decline of a wonderful unrealized socialist utopia into a corrupt tyranny worse even than the days of Jones. Napoleon, the most politically astute pig, rules with an ever more ferrous fist and, as importantly, manipulates the axioms and rather fuzzy collective memory of the animals to transform an egalitarian society into a terrorized fiefdom. The chilling closing scene shows the animals looking in the kitchen window of the farm house to see Napoleon playing poker with neighboring—human—farmers: it has become impossible to tell the difference between pig and man.

Orwell’s delightful, brief narrative acts as a fable: its animal characters allow us to see afresh well-worn and conventional truths. The fable warns us of what we already know, but must learn again and again if we are not to be fooled into historical optimism. Furthermore, a fable’s warning comes primarily through the brief, easily recounted actions of personified animals, so that we see the consequences of foolishness, vanity, and greed in a manner that convinces us as the most well-reasoned and systematic eloquence may not.

I was just thinking

Time to Play “Who is the Rube?”

Some interesting logic

So, why aren’t leftists upset at Obama for holding the same beliefs on gay marriage as Carrie Prejean? [h/t Instapundit]

Easy, they assume that he is lying. They think his Christianity based justification for opposing actual marriage for gays is simply a lie to fool the rubes on a hot-button issue. They know he might have lost critical support from left-of-center religious conservatives if he had really stated his true beliefs on the matter, so he just lied about his real beliefs to bamboozle the rubes.

Their comfort with this assumption that Obama is lying reveals a lot about contemporary leftists’ mores and their systematic contempt for their fellow citizens. They’re so full of themselves that they believe that the important thing is for them to have power, and that it really doesn’t matter how they get it. If Obama has to lie about his real beliefs about gay marriage then that’s acceptable in the cause of the greater good.

The only question for the rest of us is whether the leftists know the real Obama better than we do. In other words, who are the rubes? Are they the people who believe that Obama was stamped by a gay-leery African-American Christian community in Chicago, or are they the people who believe he was stamped by the far-left Northside intellectual subculture that supported his rise to national office?

Time will tell, I suppose.