It looks like I was too hard on John Mackey, the transgressing Whole Foods dude, and not nearly hard enough on the shopping liberals. In the regrettable context, which this most certainly is, the liberal venom towards him could, hypothetically, make things much worse for a lot of people. They have once again rejected a lesser evil for a much greater one. Fortunately, the shopping liberals are so miserably feckless that their boycott threats won't amount to shit. They'll still make things worse in other areas, for example, Kabul, Baghdad and Colombia, but it looks like this one is beyond their ability to ruin. Because it requires something more than passivity and spite.
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The pettiness and idiot grandiosity of the shopping liberals is way over the top. The stock market is not the real economy. Corporate management can be punished for doing something half-decent and rewarded for doing something that destroys the company.
Only the yuppie lynch mobs of shopping liberals could find a way to get a corporation defended by the left.
And
A few words to clarify. If single payer were on the table, things would be different. But it's not. If a broad public option were on the table, things would be different. But it's not. Solicitude for the worst of the worst is on the table. And it's staying there, no matter what. Mackey does stand to be hurt, as it happens, if he intends to keep providing employee health care. In these circumstances, the boycott threatened by the shopping liberals is egregious vanity and spite.
Comments (9)
Ya know, I'm having a hard time coming up with a way to describe this situation. The Pwogs, as mealy-mouthed a bunch of whining jellyfish as ever there was, are flailing about because they're not going to get a health care bill which was shit to begin with.
"I'm not going to kick you in the teeth." says God-Emperor Barak.
"But...but you said you would!" chorus his personality cultists.
"Git offa mah lawn!" shouts an elderly Bircher to a dozen or so network news crews.
How am I supposed to satirize something like that?
Posted by AlanSmithee | August 19, 2009 11:14 PM
Posted on August 19, 2009 23:14
It really is too ludicrous. Even efforts at handling it straightforwardly get unnerving.
Posted by Al Schumann | August 19, 2009 11:31 PM
Posted on August 19, 2009 23:31
As Kevin Phillips notes, all empires go insane as their power structures lock up and collapse.
What other explanation could there be of the ultra-crazed bread and circuses before us?
Whole Fooders think they ARE the ruling class, and that choosing one's own lifestyle (something they also fancy themselves as doing) is the quintessence of modern power and democracy and merit-expression.
Beneath that veneer is a mass of middle-class fear and phony-baloney mantras sitting where education might have grown, if it had ever been sought or provided.
The sad, sad truth is that these WFers remain convinced that poor old Obie really wants to change things, but just can't find any allies.
Posted by Michael Dawson | August 20, 2009 12:25 AM
Posted on August 20, 2009 00:25
Thanks for the link, brother. An additional irony, as if we needed it, is that Mackey's whacko plan for a national system of high-deductible insurance programs and interest-bearing HSAs would be far, far less friendly to the existing insurance industry than The Obama's. It wouldn't work, but insofar as it would more quickly and effectively steer the Titanic to the iceberg, it is worthy of our respectful consideration.
Posted by IOZ | August 20, 2009 7:57 AM
Posted on August 20, 2009 07:57
You're welcome. Hey, thanks for posting that. There's no end of jawbone-hurting hilarity in this. Within recent memory, there was a context in which anything remotely like this could be easily characterized as sell-out CEO-hugging. No anarchists, lefties or even the dinosaur New Deal liberals would touch it. But the hyperactive champions of the Overton Window, those sedulous progressive crackpots, have made incremental greater evilism their life's work.
Their next triumphant maneuver should include an effort to rehabilitate Joe the Plumber.
Posted by Al Schumann | August 20, 2009 10:40 AM
Posted on August 20, 2009 10:40
Or at least Joe Isuzu.
Posted by AlanSmithee | August 20, 2009 6:04 PM
Posted on August 20, 2009 18:04
i grew up in a tough neighborhood, everybody wasn't dead was an insurance adjuster. we used to say, "don't hate the payer, hate the claim." word.
Posted by hapa | August 21, 2009 4:28 AM
Posted on August 21, 2009 04:28
That must have been before the hipsters and shopping liberals and healthy young yuppies boycotted the insurance gangs and broke their power. But yeah, I can imagine it was tough. You don't mess around with people who can raise your deductibles. Much easier to target the boutique snack salesmen.
Posted by Al Schumann | August 21, 2009 7:38 AM
Posted on August 21, 2009 07:38
there was one bully used to boycott the weak kids' lunch money just like you say! she was an amnesiac in borrowed armor. every morning she'd come to school on a different white horse. she said it gave her a distinguished look. her insanity was the glue of our salvation and our ruthlessness -- in our day, we amortized the city....
Posted by hapa | August 22, 2009 4:24 AM
Posted on August 22, 2009 04:24