SmackBack - Michelle Malkin Throws Herself On The Starbucks IED
January 9th, 2006
For years now I’ve been a Michelle Malkin fan. I’ve read her column and her blog for a long time now, and I’ve always been struck by her even tempered style.
She’s one of those conservative voices that you can always count on to be well-researched - and have her facts in order - especially if she’s going to appear on a panel on any of the nightly news shows.
Count on Michelle Malkin to make the Right look good.
Most of the time.
So when I read her latest blog entry covering the discovery of what appears to be a bomb at a San Francisco Starbucks - I can’t tell you how disappointed and saddened I was to find her doing what so many of those on the Right just can’t seem to help themselves from doing and throwing themselves in front of Corporate America.
As I’ve so often blogged about here - Corporate America is absolutely no friend of the Right - and it always breaks my heart to see conservatives knees jerk so involuntarily where corporatism is concerned.
To be very clear here - bombing a Starbucks and endangering human lives in any way is absolutely criminal - and whoever left the device in that bathroom should be tried for attempted murder and shown no mercy - regardless of their political affiliation or motivations. Period.
But Malkin can’t just leave it at that. She has to go on to take the aluminum baseball bat to anyone who might think that Corporate Greed isn’t an American Value.
Bay Area moonbats have quite a history of Starbucks-bashing. See here, here, here, and here. Apparently, they don’t think the left-leaning corporation is guilty enough about its profits
Respectfully Ms. Malkin, there are a lot of people on the right who don’t care for the way Starbucks does business either.
Local, independent businesses are the true Beating Heart of the conservative base in this country, and when respected voices like Michelle Malkin’s jump to throw themselves in front of corporations that use predatory business practices that are detrimental to that Beating Heart it’s a shame… a crying shame.
With the whole of Capitol Hill in a tailspin over corporate and special interest influence on our elected officials - and the entire country poised to turn away from it in the coming critical election cycles - now is the time.
Now is the time for conservatives to educate themselves and realize that the conservative ideal is about the success of individuals. Corporations are not individuals. And they don’t vote. People do.
The sooner the Right learns that - the better off we’ll be.
I only hope they learn it in time.
Entry Filed under: SmackBack
3 Comments Add your own
1. Thomas | January 10th, 2006 at 12:20 am
I agree with you about small business, but I don’t think that Michelle was particularly going out of her way here to defend big corporations; merely pointing out the leignths the anti-corporate crowd are willing to go in order to achieve their goals.
2. Mac | January 17th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
I’m sure you’re right. I know MM to be an intelligent and wise voice from the Right.
But… I’d like to ask you “Why?”
Why would she bother to (even remotely) defend a soulless corporation - that is absolutely no friend of the Right or of Conservatives and which in all probability actually does more to hurt conservative constituents that you might imagine.
Why?
That was the point of the entry really… and to point out that conservatives often do this “knee-jerk” thing when defending what it sees as the “free market” and which is often no such thing.
3. Ranj Niere | January 22nd, 2006 at 7:50 pm
The Ready, Fire, Aim problem…
which I credit to Rove/Atwater/Segretti worship among elements of the neo-conservative community, stands, pants down, in a clear bright light here.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/01/13/starbucks.no.bomb.ap/
When, after a lot of verbiage down the drain, it was discovered that the ‘IED’ was, in point of fact, a flashlight.
This arm flapping hysteria over a deranged bum in a Starbux, while the ports of the United States remain essentially unguarded shows how out of touch, how xenophobic we have become on what constitutes security for the *American people*.
The Iraq fiasco, in concert with a staggering off-shore deployment of military resources anywhere we feel the need to strong arm our economic interests, puts America at far greater risk than Saddam and Osama combined (which of course, we never were from the combination, at least).
And make no mistake, we are using the insanely bloated American military to protect and engross corporations, not American citizens.
Our corporatist administration is comprised of failed capitalists– people who could not find oil in Bahrain, not run a oilfield supply industry without taking on the radioactive albatross that was Dresser industries, people who punish Amtrak for working, while pumping obscene amounts of corporate welfare into the airline industry. They hate the free market, and do not believe in competition. Why else would the Iraq occupation be a no-bid contract operation?
In the early 1990’s, in a class on the politics of ‘developing nations’ I talked for a class period on globalization and asymmetrical warfare. I predicted then, as I still do now, that if a nuclear device is ever detonated in the US by a hostile, the delivery system will be FedEx or UPS. Note that the most damaging bio-terrorist attack in US history was delivered by the USPS– and the perp remains uncaught. Worse, I see no serious effort to mitigate these vulnerabilities. Instead, we are given a non-functioning return of the idiot son of SDI.
The current corporatist administration aside, ‘they’ do not hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we talk freedom while economically enslaving (or supervising the enslavement) of a large segment of the world. Before the AIDs epidemic ravaged africa, there was Nestle. Watch South and Central America to see blowback for 30 plus years of evil policy in action.
We ‘champion’ democracy while supporting horrorific dictatorships, or creating client states with the look of democracy, but the feel of militarist puppet states. We don’t do that for the safety of Jane Smith in Springfield Missouri. We do that for Enron, Westinghouse, Bechtel, General Dynamics and other corporations that collectively thrive with their foot on the throat of a soi disant free market.
We cannot spread democracy with willy pete, it didn’t work in ‘Nam, it won’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan. We spread democracy by supporting education, open government, fair distribution of wealth, honest, well regulated business, and by respecting the state motto of Missouri, even for the citizens of places far removed from Missouri. ‘Let the good of the people be the supreme law.’
And while I am on the left side of the political spectrum, it is to be noted that no less a conservative than Kevin Phillips, author of Nixon’s southern strategy makes many of the same points I make here. And well, Dwight Eisenhower’s final speech as president… says it all for me.
Having said all this, I am heartened to see pockets of clear thinking among members of the Republican party. I doubt you see it my way on universal healthcare, or free public education to the baccalaureate level, but there is not a lot of daylight between some of our concerns if not our solutions.
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