What They Say Says Something About Them

Years ago I was watching Thomas Sowell hawking his latest book on C-SPAN. In response to a caller or perhaps the host, Sowell went off on a mini-rant extolling the virtues of a competitive free market. He lamely argued by analogy that "it's like the immune system, in which white blood cells attack and compete, helping to maintain a healthy body" or something along that line.

I was stunned by the ineptitude of this. His choice of analogy actually completely undermined his argument against presumably "socialistic" cultural and market controls in the public interest, because the immune system is a fantastically intricate system of cooperation between various kinds of cells and chemical responses to things that don't well serve the body.

What a lousy example he chose. If that's how he portrays his own thinking on television, I vowed then and there that I would never reward his creepy apologetics by ever paying money for anything he wrote. What a maroon.

A revealing mental slip-up; it inadvertently told me more about Sowells' sour thinking than he likely wished me and other C-SPAN viewers to know.

Which brings me to a recent post by Eli at Deep Thought:

My own Rick Renzi story from that barbecque [sic] is this: I asked him whether he supports continuing to maintain a selective service registration data base. He said he did. I asked about his opinion on gays in the military (knowing that he wouldn't be for it.) He said he supported the current, 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. So then I pointed out that if both policies were in place and there were ever a draft, people who wanted to dodge it could claim they were gay. Renzi obviously was surprised, having not considered that before. He stammered around, and said 'the recruiter could tell.' I asked on what basis, and then mentioned that in a draft there is no recruiter, you just show up and if you pass the physical you're in. So then he suggested a polygraph. I answered that I finally got it, that these young men and young women would all show up for the draft, and the first thing we'd do is hook them up to a machine and ask them questions about their sex lives. Renzi turned purple. I didn't think that such an idiot could possibly be elected to Congress so I let him go.

The idiot Eli verbally skewered was now-disgraced Arizona District-1 congressional representative Rick Renzi, who really lives in Virginia.

Such people just aren't very smart. They can only be motivated to put a few coherent thoughts together by large amounts of money, power, and perverse gratification. Otherwise they can't be bothered to think methodically.

Even then sometimes they do not manage their thinking in a logical and respectable way. Why not?

Perhaps they can't.

Eli, who blogs from the northeastern corner of Arizona, also posts at the venerable Night Bird's Fountain.