The Bike-Path Left

On 19 Dec 2003 09:15:24 -0800, Jym Dyer wrote:

Ken (NY)
Chairman,
Department Of Redundancy Department

=v= This has absolutely nothing to do with California, New York
City, New Jersey, or even Rush Limbaugh. Not even much to do
with bikes, except for a sort of moronic coinage that doesn't
even deserve 15 minutes of fame.

=v= I know you're into redundancy and all, but mass crossposts
are rotten things that overwhelm newsgroups, especially when
they start off with ranting flames like that column.
_Jym_

P.S.: Also, didn't somebody suggest you change your .sig
to the more-redundant (NY, NY)? Heck, why not get an email
account at thecityofnewyorkcity.com while you're at it?

Dear recipient:

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Ken (NY)
Chairman,
Department Of Redundancy Department
___________________________________
email:
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"How can anyone take this country seriously
when we take the time to celebrate the birthday
of an imaginary rodent?
- George Carlin, on Mickey Mouse's birthday

Q: What the hardest thing about rollerblading?
A: Telling your parents you’re gay.

Ken [NY) wrote:

On 19 Dec 2003 09:15:24 -0800, Jym Dyer wrote:

=v= I know you're into redundancy and all, but mass crossposts
are rotten things that overwhelm newsgroups, especially when
they start off with ranting flames like that column.
_Jym_

Dear recipient:

You have reached the automated troll help line.

and so on

Uh, Jym's not a troll here in our *bike* group, is he? And his point is
WELL TAKEN.

--
-------- Scott Eiler B{D -------- http://www.eilertech.com/ --------

"It seemed an unlikely spot for a sensitive songwriter from Greenwich
Village... She ordered the 20-ounce steak."
-- Lin Brehmer, Chicago DJ, describing his meeting in a steakhouse
with Suzanne Vega.

Could you please stay on topic? I subscribe to this list to participate
in discussion regarding bicycles and bicycle politics, not to deal with
reactionaries articulating poorly conceived legislation about the voting
rights of youth. Please refrain from trolling, or at least remove this
newsgroup from your list for such rants.

DC


On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:40:03 -0800, Dave Simpson wrote:

Ken in NY quoted:

The Bike-Path Left
Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!

If people actually say that and they are over age 25, they should be
shot.

No, say the Dim-O-Crats! We must save the children (of all ages)!
We can't hope to manufacture all the votes we need, after all.

(These days, it would be a good idea not merely to raise the age of
majority for everything, including voting, to 21 years, but even
stricter measures, while unpopular to the kiddies [of all ages], would
improve the nation -- ban the vote for those under age 25, and test
people of minimum age or more for the suffrage based on minimal
criteria appropriate for voting, including questions that these
"whatever, dude" losers cannot answer, such as "Who is the Vice
President of the United States?" The qualification test scores should
be used to weight the votes. Get the junk voters out of the polls,
even if it will destroy the Democrats' Ignorant-Vulgar Vote bloc!)


[Reposted below -- good reading.]

The Bike-Path Left
Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!

BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, December 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at
putting a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power,
the Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When
Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do
not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to
be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he
congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory
and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy
eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is
thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed
over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the
prize, too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the
governor seem, well, ordinary.

It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic
candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert
what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot
out their lame clichés, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by
which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians,
but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister,
all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before
the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do
any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary
line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy
coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying,
"Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions
roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have
speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in
New Haven.

There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews
asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American
court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference,"
said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't
make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think
what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave
floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But,
just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on
American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would
have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been
less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he
said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.

So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor
was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd
left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I
had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I
hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over
gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire,
this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was
not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay
controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked
Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to
the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group,"
he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's
Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World
Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to
convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you
down wherever you are.





Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame
very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry
peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting
out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that
it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty,
milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich,
has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but
he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say.
The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be
his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site
to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear
this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in
his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he
turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out
of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from
Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of
anger.
But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the
president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign
policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews.
David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually
became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the
quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart
guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of
politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics.
Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern
Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the
left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's
what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was
over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy
bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even
more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean
represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.

Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican
governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as
liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's
understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms
punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to
wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns
are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned
with angry "Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green
Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to
the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are
irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a
shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the
only way up the hill is by the bike path.

Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic
on the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar
types held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the
Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help
noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20
below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have
snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy
the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light
demonstrating out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were,
metaphorically, wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because
you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all
micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for
that--education, environment, "social justice." For hard-core
Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large
numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics.
When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry
about the war, so much as having to talk about the war.

A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal,
the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on
a Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main
foreign-policy experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest
Iraqi émigré community and on Sunday night the streets were full of
honking horns celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far
to see the world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but
it's farther than most Dems are willing to go.

Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a
time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of
Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared
to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full
metal jacket, it's no contest.

Mr. Steyn is a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph and Spectator.

I read Steyn's column on the "bike path" left, and found it right-on. I say
that as an almost daily bike commuter in Milwaukee, winter and summer. On
any given local "bike-path" issue I might happen to agree with them ("them"
in Milwaukee is exemplified by the local alternative newspaper, the Shepherd
Express.)

But there's a practical transition from day to day issues to secualr
theology that leaves me in the dust. A good local example is the mantra
that bike paths are a substitute for freeways, and other good roads.
Nonsense! On cold and other bad weather days, there aren't enough bike
commuters to make a dent in the other traffic. If there are 3 bikes out a
1000 workers in the building I work in, that's pretty good on a bad weather
day. The "bike path" left will at least look serious when they have their
"bike to work" week in January instead of June. Doing what they do now is
just sappy sentimentalism. If Gov. Dean were a rabid bike commuter, I would
at least understand his leaving th Episcopal Church over a bike path. As it
is, I can only scratch my head.



"Dave Carroll" wrote in message
news
Could you please stay on topic? I subscribe to this list to participate
in discussion regarding bicycles and bicycle politics, not to deal with
reactionaries articulating poorly conceived legislation about the voting
rights of youth. Please refrain from trolling, or at least remove this
newsgroup from your list for such rants.

DC


On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:40:03 -0800, Dave Simpson wrote:

Ken in NY quoted:

The Bike-Path Left
Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!

If people actually say that and they are over age 25, they should be
shot.

No, say the Dim-O-Crats! We must save the children (of all ages)!
We can't hope to manufacture all the votes we need, after all.

(These days, it would be a good idea not merely to raise the age of
majority for everything, including voting, to 21 years, but even
stricter measures, while unpopular to the kiddies [of all ages], would
improve the nation -- ban the vote for those under age 25, and test
people of minimum age or more for the suffrage based on minimal
criteria appropriate for voting, including questions that these
"whatever, dude" losers cannot answer, such as "Who is the Vice
President of the United States?" The qualification test scores should
be used to weight the votes. Get the junk voters out of the polls,
even if it will destroy the Democrats' Ignorant-Vulgar Vote bloc!)


[Reposted below -- good reading.]

The Bike-Path Left
Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!

BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, December 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at
putting a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power,
the Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When
Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do
not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to
be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he
congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory
and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy
eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is
thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed
over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the
prize, too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the
governor seem, well, ordinary.

It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic
candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert
what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot
out their lame clichés, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by
which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians,
but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister,
all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before
the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do
any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary
line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy
coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying,
"Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions
roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have
speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in
New Haven.

There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews
asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American
court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference,"
said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't
make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think
what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave
floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But,
just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on
American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would
have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been
less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he
said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.

So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor
was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd
left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I
had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I
hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over
gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire,
this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was
not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay
controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked
Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to
the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group,"
he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's
Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World
Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to
convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you
down wherever you are.





Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame
very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry
peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting
out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that
it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty,
milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich,
has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but
he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say.
The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be
his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site
to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear
this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in
his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he
turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out
of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from
Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of
anger.
But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the
president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign
policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews.
David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually
became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the
quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart
guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of
politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics.
Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern
Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the
left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's
what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was
over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy
bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even
more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean
represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.

Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican
governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as
liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's
understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms
punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to
wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns
are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned
with angry "Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green
Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to
the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are
irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a
shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the
only way up the hill is by the bike path.

Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic
on the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar
types held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the
Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help
noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20
below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have
snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy
the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light
demonstrating out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were,
metaphorically, wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because
you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all
micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for
that--education, environment, "social justice." For hard-core
Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large
numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics.
When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry
about the war, so much as having to talk about the war.

A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal,
the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on
a Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main
foreign-policy experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest
Iraqi émigré community and on Sunday night the streets were full of
honking horns celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far
to see the world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but
it's farther than most Dems are willing to go.

Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a
time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of
Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared
to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full
metal jacket, it's no contest.

Mr. Steyn is a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph and Spectator.

Uh, Jym's not a troll here in our *bike* group, is he?
And his point is WELL TAKEN.

=v= Thanks, and I do think my point stands. My followup
was to-the-person as well as to-the-point, so perhaps he
thought that was trolling, but I was trying to make that
light-hearted. Oh well.
_Jym_
The City of New York City, New York