In defense of failure.

And wouldn't you know it would be Weasel Boy who would commend abject and total failure as being some sort of virtue? One now understands why he's such a Commander Chimpy fan.

(I think one can safely say that WB is missing the point. As usual.)

AFTERSNARK: There's just so much idiocy in this new "failure is a virtue" meme that it demands a more thorough evisceration. Glad to oblige.

We've all heard how we learn from our mistakes so we don't make them a second time. What complete rubbish. Personally, I would rather learn from other peoples' mistakes so I don't even make them the first time. For instance, I'm not about to pour my life's savings into a high-tech startup company to develop an alternative office suite for Microsoft Windows. That way lies madness and certain financial disaster. Other people have tried that, and I can adequately learn the lesson by picking my way through their corporate corpses. I don't need to do it myself to know it's a bad idea.

Even more, some things are so obviously stupid that they need no example. I don't need to put my hand under the running power mower to know it's probably a dumb thing to do, if you catch my drift. One would think other people were similarly clever enough to figure out things like this all by themselves. (Commander Chimpy: "Well, gosh, guys, I guess it was a bad idea to populate the top levels of FEMA with political cronies and good ol' boys with no disaster recovery experience at all. Go figure. Who knew, huh?")

The comparison to Michael Jordan is similarly lame-brained. As a basketball player, Jordan was expected to miss a certain percentage of his shots. I mean, how much of a nitwit do you have to be to try to draw an analogy between someone missing basketball shots whose mistake might cost them a game, and the leader of the free world whose fuck-ups cost thousands of lives? I mean, Jesus, how pathetic is that?

One also wonders just how serious Weasel Boy is about this whole idea of "Hey, mistakes happen, forgive and forget." From his profile, Weasel Boy has apparently degraded the gene pool with two young'uns. One wonders what his reaction would be if, having left them with the sitter while he and Mrs. Weasel spent a rootin-tootin evening down at the monster truck rally, they returned home to find that the sitter had decided to dry off Weasel Jr. in the microwave oven after his bath?

Would Weasel Boy, as most of us would, explode in anger and rage and sorrow? Or would he, as he would like us to believe, take the high road: "Well, yes, I wish you hadn't microwaved little Weasie to death but, hey, 'Failure is a part of life. The only people who don't fail are the ones who don't try. Consequently, they don't succeed, either. They just exist.'" Sure, and I'm convinced he'd be the epitome of charm and understanding. It's amazing how forgiving some people can be as long as it doesn't actually affect them personally.

But the best part is this whole new meme of forgiving failure. Here we are, well into George W. Smirky's second term and the best his supporters can say about him is that, hey, failure is a part of life. Well, that's just fucking ducky if you're in grade school and your screwups don't affect the rest of the world and cost the lives of who knows how many other human beings.

"Failure is a part of life." This is what the Republican revolution and Bush's agenda of compassionate conservatism have turned into. A defense of failure. I'm pretty sure expectations don't get much lower than that, do they?