I Woke Up to This

I woke up early this morning to a typically gray, Pittsburgh day; poured myself some coffee to help counter some of the less desirable effects of this astonishing beer and got started on the news.

Unfortunately for my worldview, the first article I opened up was this one about Dr. John Tanton who's largely responsible for dismantling the DREAM Act as well as whipping up xenophobic hysteria against immigrants. I have to confess that I came close...very, very close, to saying that I am glad that he has Parkinson's Disease. I am not. And it weighs on my conscience that I even considered saying such a thing. That said, the man is a pure bigot and monstrous statist. In his own words:

“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he wrote. “And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less. Who is going to break the bad news to them?”

Read them and literally weep.

The fact that he comes from what currently passes as "liberalism" is troubling but I don't think particularly surprising. The sad fact is that both the Right and Left sides of the political divide aim for a "great society". The urge is towards a collective purity, a collective success and a collective cohesiveness in which the individual is retained as merely a quaint afterthought.