Flags and Gated Communities

"I've got flags everywhere," boasts the 37-year-old truck driver...Including one on a 20-foot pole a few steps from the front door of his home in a Coweta County subdivision...And that's the problem...The flagpole violates the subdivision's policy on exterior structures — and must come down..."It's kind of a cut-and-dry case," said Stephen A. Winter, an attorney for the Avery Park Community Association. "The association said, 'No, we don't allow flagpoles.'"....Patriotic of illegal? Flag's both, Kevin Dufy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Already you can hear the outraged shouting on FOX. But, is the dispute here really about offended patriotism? Or is it really about how private organizations have pushed public life away from an increasingly huge segment of American real estate? Many won't remember the concept of "downtown." Downtown from the founding of the Republic until the 1970s was not very different from the Roman Forum or the Greek Agora. Downtown was both the marketplace, where you'd find everything from hardware to hair salons, and a public arena where people could meet on the street, in a store, in a park, and discuss private and public business. Downtowns were noisy, disorganized, and often dirty. In part as a tax avoidance scheme, and in part as a system of social control, "a fresh place away from dirty downtown," malls were developed. In them, at least for their first twenty years, most of the public realm was barred, from displays of national and local emblems to protests to leafletting to gatherings for any purpose but shopping. The gated community was another response, not only to noisy downtowns, but to the perceived threat of integration, the more plausible threat of crime, and an unsubtle effort to suppress any reference to public (read political) life. The visible values in both malls and gated communities were anti-political; the organizing force behind them, however, was decidedly political, an effort to create the illusion of the absence of conflicting interests, an esthetic more typical of dictatorships in the old Latin America than of an open, free society. The story itself is suggestive of how far more than a mere flag Roy Johnson's violations of this esthetic are.

Their decorating motif is Old Glory and Harley-Davidson: framed Harley puzzles, Harley replicas from the Franklin Mint, a Harley clock....(Patriotic or illegal, continued...)

How gauche! Trailer trash deluxe!

The almost new Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic parked in his garage carries a full-size flag..."I've got flags everywhere," boasts the 37-year-old truck driver...(Patriotic or illegal, continued...)

And a truck driver too...But this isn't about depicting a working class saint, because there's more. You see, Roy isn't violating a condominium contract provision; he's violating a local ordinance passed by elected officials. Further, he's no victim. He's willing to bear the expense to take this law to court, even to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Roy Johnson, in other words, is acting as if political debate mattered more than a community's idea of propriety, he and his attorney presuming that no locality has the right to abridge freedom of expression. In short, Roy Johnson is an old-fashioned, downtown American. That, more than any large flag, is likely what's put this Atlanta suburb on such a state of alert. One can almost hear the chorus: we moved here to get away from this kind thing.

Luther

Democracy: Uncomfortable Truths

The reality is that even after all possible compromises have been offered to the refuseniks, civil society is faced with a small but absolutely hostile minority that will be content with nothing but total victory...What can civil society do?...Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would be to invalidate and destroy the very principles and legitimacy of that government, and set in place a precedent by which normal political squabbles could in future be settled by genocide or the Gulag. It would be to do what Saddam did to the Kurds, what Turkey did to the Armenians, what the Soviets and Maoists and Khmer Rouge did to their bourgeoisie...There are, from the point of view of Iraq's nascent civil society, some thousands of people who, in the Texas phrase, need killing. Who is going to do it?...In the absence of government intervention, the answer is: ordinary people. Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers' relatives are....Baghdad Vigilantes and the Dark Side of Civil Society, Frederick Turner, TCSDaily.com, 10/25/2006

Frederick Turner, epic poet, philosopher, and cultural commentator, is onto something here. We know what it is, but we'd rather not. Nice narrative that American progressivism is, it has included a number of rebellions immediately after the republic was formalized under the Constitution, a stupendous civil war, and many, many bitter fights over justice, many outside the law. Don't ask about France, especially southern France, after World War II. Only one movie I've ever heard of was made about it, a bitter, black story about retribution against collaborators in the early 1950s. Another poet turned to this shadowy area of civil society. Deep into his American phase, Auden wrote a brilliant and troubling sequence called Horae Canonica, Immolatus Vicerit (sacrificed, he will be victorious) which includes "Vespers," a poem which embraces a sort of Left/Right, Purist/Centrist debate, about which Auden and his contemporaries knew a great deal. They had only recently participated in, or witnessed, the largest war in human history, one fought between legions of savagely efficient purists and clumsy but ultimately victorious democrats. It ends thusly:

So with a passing glance we take the other's posture; already, our steps recede,
heading, incorrigible each, towards his kind of meal and evening.
Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous intersection of life-paths, loyal to different fibs
or also a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting
to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget
forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence)
on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin
Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy, are alike founded:
For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular
wall will safely stand....(W.H. Auden, Horae Canonica, Vespers, 1954)

Luther

Dodge City: Preparing for Terror Not Just a Blue State Problem

What would you do if a bomb went off at your high school? Dodge City High School found out the answer to that question when it conducted its community-wide crisis exercise Tuesday afternoon...In cooperation with the Dodge City Police Department, the Dodge City and Ford County Fire Departments, the Ford County sheriff, Ford County EMS and Western Plains Medical Complex, school officials simulated what would happen should a bomb go off on school property....Preparing For the Worst, Dodge City Daily Globe, 10/25/2006

This seems certain to arouse laughter in New York and the District of Columbia, but why? The worst terror attack on the United States before 9/11 was in Oklahoma City. Who would have believed that before 1995? More people died in that office building in downtown Oklahoma City that at the Pentagon on 9/11. Was it because the terrorists there weren't Arabs that MSM thinks it silly to worry about, and give money to prevent, terror attacks in the heartland? Actually, not a few people think that there was a connection between McVeigh and the Middle East, at least as a patsy, but this is not the place to argue a point that's played out for a decade elsewhere. The point is that bombings are still the weapon of choice of terrorists, whether individual psychopaths, or al Qaeda. The better choice is to prepare, not carry on as if only certain people were important enough to be targets.

Luther

Housing in Florida, Trend or Local Balloon?

Sales for condos dropped 46 percent in Broward and 40 percent in Miami-Dade compared to September last year. They also went down from a month earlier, by 12 percent in Miami-Dade and 8 percent in Broward...For houses, sales were down 12 percent for Miami-Dade and 24 percent for Broward from a year ago. But the picture was brighter when compared to August: Sales were up 10 percent in Miami-Dade and 5 percent in Broward....No end in sight to housing slowdown, Matthew Haggman, Miami Herald, 10/25/2006

If you have family or friends in Florida, you know that any living space within sight of the Gulf, the Caribbean, or the Atlantic was rising so fast in price that investors were buying them by the handful. Developers were putting up thousands of condo apartments on spec. Prices on St. Pete Beach rose 50% in 18 months. Why don't people pay attention? Somebody's already guessed. People love to gamble, whether the game is on a track, on a video screen, or in a real estate agent's office. More issues are involved here, of course, not the least of them the relentless use of eminent domain by local and county governments to take "poor" properties so that developers could make them "rich" properties. But, as an old craps shooter used to tell me, it's when you're on a hot streak that it's time to get out of the game. In Florida, those who have left the housing market, which in a marvelous perversity has become a means to take poor people's property in order to impoverish rich investors, may now comfortably invest in something besides empty condos. Though this looks like a local balloon popping, it could be a sign of something far worse (or better, if you've already paid off your house, or sold it).

Luther

Going to the People, or Dodging Responsibility?

Don’t be led astray by the loaded language in the meaningless advisory vote that will be on the Nov. 7 ballot..."Should the state of Idaho keep the property tax relief adopted in August 2006, reducing property taxes by approximately $260 million and protecting funding for public schools by keeping the sales tax at 6 percent?"...Vote no and send a message to lawmakers that decisions about the way we tax Idahoans and fund education should be made with care, and during the regular session....'No' Vote Will Send Message to Capitol, Editoria, Idaho Statesman, 10/25/2006

Initiatives like this are problematic. The voter initiative in California is one paradigm of what can go wrong: many are simply overturned by the courts, judicial action far less likely to happen if a legislature were to pass the same bill. The advisory vote in Idaho is another, far worse, version of this. A kind of official opinion poll, it permits a legislator to completely sever himself or herself from responsible action. Like the plebiscites so popular under Mussolini, it gives the appearance of popular approval without the bother of legislative debate and compromise. It isn't all bad of course. At least the sample isn't 47 clusters from the Upper West Side of Manhattan; it does represent the voters who show up at the polls. But republican government is about elected officials operating responsibly according to their judgment and experience, not as sock puppets to fulfill the whims of daily opinion or the dictates of a tyrant.

Luther

Government-Supervised Gambling, Still An Issue

“It’s so destructive; the longer we have this, the more people (there are) who know someone who has been affected by video lottery,” said Dan Brendtro, a Sioux Falls area attorney who is leading the fight on behalf of Forward South Dakota. His group gathered enough signatures to put Initiative No. 7 on the Nov. 7 ballot...But Larry Mann of Vote No on 7 says gambling opponents far overstate the social cost of video lottery and that the video-lottery industry is weary of going through repeated elections.....Video lottery to face fourth vote, Dan Daly, Rapid City Journal, 10/26/06

The arguments surrounding votes on this issue, which lingers despite decades of government-supervised gambling in many states, have not gone away. On the one side, those of serious moral convictions argue that gambling loots the poor by offering an unreasonable hope for gain. On the other side, a position that has not varied in the change from gangster-supervised to government-supervised gambling, proponents claim that what people do with their money isn't anybody's business, and that people who gamble will do so regardless of the law. This has had some ironic consequences. As mentioned in a recent post, the Offtrack Betting Corporation in New York, created to generate income for New York State schools, has been a perpetual money loser. Why? It's not hard to figure out. OTB became a source of patronage jobs, and the beneficiaries ate up the profits. Picking up the tab for your friends was always frowned upon by the old gangster management of local bookies. If you expected to be protected, never mind made, you were supposed to be an earner. As to the argument, as familiar from gangsters as from the government, that people would bet on whatever they thought worth playing regardless of the law, it's undeniable. And as to the argument that gambling soaks the poor and makes a few people rich, that's also undeniable. As always, the issue pits moral convictions against cynicism. Most likely the latter will win again in South Dakota. But it's good that the issue is still being debated; we need to be reminded daily that there are still substantial numbers of people who prefer idealism over cynicism, who still think of future consequences, not just immediate satisfaction.

Luther

Maryland's Michael Steele: Political Video of the Year

In this age of vicious, Democrat-led attack politics, here is perhaps the nicest political video ever, courtesy of Maryland Republican Senatorial candidate Michael Steele.



This guy deserves to win, though the odds may be against him. He's undeservedly an underdog in this massively blue state. To learn more about him, link here.

Mitt Romney Teaches Civics to MSM

This delightful snippet from PowerLine:

There was a revealing exchange the other day when a reporter from the Boston Globe asked Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney a rambling question about removing some tolls from the Mass. Turnpike. Eventually, Romney interrupted by joking, "Do you have a point of view on this?" The reporter responded, "I represent the people, governor." To which Romney said, "No, I represent the people, you represent the media."

Absolutely perfect.

Check out the video here at PowerLine or here for more commentary and ripostes from RedState.

Harassment a la Foley In South Dakota?

Gov. Mike Rounds agreed Tuesday to call the South Dakota Senate into a special session to look into allegations that a senator acted inappropriately earlier this year with a high school student who served as a legislative page...Senate leaders had asked the governor to call the special session, which will start Nov. 27...Rounds said he received a letter signed by Senate leaders from both political parties, and he decided to honor their request and call the Senate into a special session...The father of the former page has accused Sen. Dan Sutton, D-Flandreau, of misconduct during the past legislative session....Governor Calls Special Session, Chet Brokaw, Rapid City Journal, 10/25/2006

Things must be changing. Sexual harassment in a state known for Mt. Rushmore and the Corn Palace seems about as likely as sexual harassment in the Oval Office or in the United States Congress. Whoops! Out of date again...I must have been out of the country for the past eight years. But seriously, is there something about elective office that makes chasing after teenagers attractive to middle aged men? A better solution to those strange changes of middle age is to buy that Corvette you've been looking at for the past forty years. It will teach you just as much about how much things (and your driving skills) have changed since 1965 and you won't get arrested (or canonized, if you're a Democrat) except for speeding.

Luther

Qualifications for Office

The race for [Nevada] state treasurer is one of those down-ballot contests that traditionally receive little attention from the press, let alone voters...But this year, voters have two major reasons to reflect on the low-profile but consequential constitutional office that's responsible for overseeing the state's money: the candidates themselves...Mark DeStefano...is a Las Vegas business consultant who has declared bankruptcy, sued the U.S. government for discrimination, was kicked off the ballot on a residency issue in a run for university system regent and booted from a Nevada charity after he hired away a key employee...Kate Marshall, the Democrat, is a Reno lawyer who has spent much of her career working in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, but has virtually no experience in finance or investment....'Uninteresting' Job Draws Interesting Candidates, Michael Mishak, Las Vegas Sun, 10/25/2006

Ah, come on! In New York, a combination like this, a bankrupt and an antitrust lawyer, would probably yield an unbeatable fusion ticket for governor and lieutenant governor. But seriously, qualifications are a sticky issue in democracies. Becoming an elected official isn't like becoming a doctor or a history professor. If it were, we'd have nothing but malpractice suits and Marxist rhetoric. And, as noted in the story below, qualifications in the United States too often mean access to money, friendly relationships with the national committee of either party, and a willingness to tow the line with those interests deemed valuable by the party chair, whether at the county, state or national level. Maybe Nevada is onto something new.

:-)

Luther

Miami's Oppenheimer On Historical Hysteria

Last week's bizarre scenes of violence in Argentina during the reburial of former populist President Gen. Juan Domingo Perón, who died more than three decades ago, raise an interesting question: Is Latin America too fixated with its past and not focused enough on its future?...It's not an academic question. Wherever you look in the region, you see passionate -- sometimes violent -- national debates over historical issues. It's something that is not seen, at least with the same virulence, in much of the rest of the Western world....Latin American Too Obsessed With Past, Andres Oppenheimer, Miami Herald, 10/25/2006

It's not so strange, Andres. Semi-religious devotion to the avatars of bad ideas, which the Peróns represented for Argentina, is a rite widely observed on the Left. If it were not so, most on the Left would be satisfied to be academic antiquarians, scholars in the study of dead worlds, going to lunch with classicists and historians. But, though Leftists rarely engage in the kind of shooting rallies seen in support of the ghost of Juan Perón, they are as fiercely opposed to both historical precedent and challenges to their ideas. As such, they are just as blind to the future as worshippers of Peronism in Buenos Aires.

Luther

Campaign Finance Reform?

The most lavishly-funded campaign for local public office on the Nov. 7 ballot is being waged by St. Louis County Executive Charlie A. Dooley...What he doesn't have is an opponent with a legitimate shot at beating him...Republican Joe Passanise...has raised less than $15,000 for his campaign...A community college teacher and a former county highway engineer, Mr. Passanise entered the race on his own, without the support of the county Republican Committee...Mr. Dooley...has built on the Democratic political machine...He tapped the same source of campaign contributions, mostly developers and law firms...and has carpet-bombed Mr. Passanise with nearly $1.2 million in spending....For County Offices, St. Louis County, 10/24/2006, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

If you want an example of the fraud of campaign finance reform, this is a pretty good example. A non-incumbent, independent-thinking politician, rather like John Spencer running against Senator Clinton, has no chance before the campaign ads start to run. And look at the list of this incumbent's contributors: "law firms, developers...", the kind of folks, in other words, for whom a county executive can do a lot of favors...The incumbent is outspending his "opponent" over 500 to 1. In New York State, Senator Clinton's committee to re-elect has raised $40 million, more than ten times what former Mayor John Spencer has been able to dig out from under those rocks not owned by friends of the RNC. The more one looks, the more it seems that campaign finance reform, whether McCain-Feingold, or any other legislation, is chiefly aimed at obstructing non-incumbent, independent thinking office-seekers from a chance at victory, to make holding an elective office as permanent a career as being an agency bureaucrat in the District of Columbia. In such an environment, elections can get perilously close to meaningless, as in St. Louis County. This is not intended as a comment on either candidate, but on the system that restricts the one while rewarding the other, in each case without regard for their qualifications or for the voters.

Luther

Luther Rules

Wonk is up to the old eyeballs today, so light to nonexistent blogging is the result. But may I direct you just below to a series of brilliant posts by colleague Luther? The dude is on fire today!!

Big Army At It Again

In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team, our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda's media arm is called al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies have "journalists" crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their successes and our failures, we have an "embed" media system that is so ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq....Censoring Iraq, Michael Yon, National Review Online, 10/30/2006

Robert Kaplan in Imperial Grunts, On the Ground with the American Military, Vintage, 2006, recorded an interesting conversation in Afghanistan. A Special Forces commander complained at length about how successful his operation had been in his area of command until "Big Army" showed up. The meaning of Big Army hasn't changed much. Whether in the recollections of raconteur Jean Shepherd or in the memories of almost every veteran, Big Army means "hurry up and wait," a bureaucratic tangle whose battlegrounds don't range from Normandy to Iraq, but from Repple-Depple to the current malaise in the Pentagon. What Kaplan described was an organization more devoted to paperwork and theoretical formations than to action in country. Apparently, according to Yon's disturbing article, this has not changed for the better. If no one is reporting your successes, the rest of the world may often assume that you haven't had any.

Luther

Evolution Passing Harvard By?

The enquirer would next come to the important point, whether man tends to increase at so rapid a rate, as to lead to occasional severe struggles for existence; and consequently to beneficial variations, whether in body or mind, being preserved, and injurious ones eliminated. Do the races or species of men, whichever term may be applied, encroach on and replace one another, so that some finally become extinct?" -- Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species

Darwin has never been much loved for that kind of remark, often borrowed by racists and other adherents to political pathologies, but, of late, such thoughts have gotten a lot more resonance.

What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future. What I mean by "transcendent" is some ideal or love or hope or faith that rises above the interests of the self, the practicalities of expected income, the security of predictable outcomes, and the lifetime of the individual. What I mean by "future" is that it is an ideal, love, hope, or faith that extends beyond the present and is not satisfied with an instantaneous and eternal reward in the now….Culture & The Demographic Crisis, Frederick Turner, TCS Daily, 8/7/2006

One has only to look at Italy, where the native-born population is declining and has been for so long that, in the future, Italians will look a lot more like Moroccans and Algerians than Romans. Italy, after many years of being the poor slob of Europe, is now a hugely successful economy, with a standard of living as good as any in Europe. But, the fruits of these labors aren't going to the children of Italians, but to those of immigrants they've brought in to do the work. I'll bet that's really surprising. What is the posture of what proposes to be our intellectual future?

With no more GapKids, my trips to Harvard Square will be less frequent. Instead, I’ll have to throw all the kids in my big, gas-guzzling, liberal-infuriating Suburban and drive out of Cambridge to where people still have kids and still want them…By and large they are high-immigrant areas and poorer areas…Children are still the wealth of the poor in Massachusetts…Harvard students are more interested in sex — or in feeling sexy — than in kids. Feeling sexy, however, often leads to sex, and sex often leads to kids. Ahem. Or at least to pregnancies. Which is why blue America sweepingly (and coercively) supports choice. They want the sex, but not the kids. The kids are much too costly. To the pocketbook, yes, but most of all to a particular lifestyle more interested in today’s consumption than tomorrow’s production…. Feeling Sexy At Harvard, and The Gap is here to serve, C.R. Hardy, National Review Online, 10/24/2006

Sounds like Italy has come to Harvard. Perhaps in the future they'll describe Cambridge as the tarpit for intellectual dinosaurs.

Luther

Leadership in Democracies

The conventional wisdom is that we would be better off if politically powerful leaders were less mediocre. Instead, my view is that we would be better off if mediocre political leaders were less powerful....The Leadership Myth, Arnold Kling, TCSDaily.com, 10/24/2006

Generations miss this time and again. Boomers missed this in the late 1960's when, pursuing the charismatic excellence of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, they found themselves with Richard Nixon after Senator Kennedy was assassinated and Senator McCarthy vanished to another planet. Nixon, to the rage of liberals ever since, was pretty effective. He ended a war that the Democrats had started; he aligned the U.S. with China, to the chagrin of the USSR; and, almost unnoted then and ever since, he instigated the Department of Justice to do what it had failed to do under Lyndon Johnson, integrate American public schools. But, Nixon, rarely if ever described as anything but a mediocrity by commentators of the time, also did what Kling warns is still the primary issue in democracy: he overstepped; he attempted to take powers which were not his to wield. Though it is historic fact that both of his immediate predecessors had done the same thing, Nixon was the first Chief Executive to pay the price. He was forced out of office. Setting the various mythologies about this event aside, which include some so grandiose as to suggest Nixon was the Devil, and some so bizarre (though interesting) as to suggest that the Watergate process was a kind of public burning (see Robert Coover), the wary regard reserved for Nixon should be reserved for all politicians. Why? With very few exceptions in the entire history of the Republic, most politicians have been mediocrities. Sadly, a great portion of those politicians have had one area of excellence: their will to power. Democracy is not just about choosing one person over another for an office; democracy is also about making sure that will to power doesn't get out of hand, that politicians don't take a brief electoral mandate as an excuse to overturn the Constitution and the precedents established from it. And, in those rare instances where we pick a real star, a Lincoln or an FDR, we have to be even more vigilant because, as sure as death and taxes, a politician who thinks his or her personal charisma is sufficient to permit violation of the law will go right ahead and do it. Read Kling's fine essay in full.

Another thought for the election....

Luther

Not So Sunny In Western NY, Senator Clinton

As a discussion and debate topic, the upstate economy finally is getting its due. Statewide and local candidates and residents are talking about it — and occasionally going overboard, as seen and heard in a speech from a local businessman last week....Upstate's decline seems more stark as nation forges ahead, Editorial, Democrat & Chronicle, 10/23/2006

If you don't live in New York State, you haven't seen the sunny advertisements for Senator Clinton, which talk sweetly about the jobs and the money she's "created." If you live in western New York, or travel there often, as the writer does, the beautiful New York changes her ad campaign depicts are pure fantasy. It's not surprising she wouldn't want to talk about this much, though she did in 2000 when she first ran for the Senate. Tax policies in New York, as noted below, have worked powerfully against any hopes of redeveloping both small and medium cities. People can't afford the property taxes and don't want to move there. For companies who might find the truly beautiful landscapes, not to mention the easy availability of tens of thousands of college graduates from the area each year, the tax problem in New York State is even worse. The most likely corporate campaign for the past thirty years has been to move elsewhere. Even Kodak, a stalwart in Rochester for a century, has outsourced almost everything it sells, especially since the dramatic decline of sales for cameras that use film. Kodak, which financed a huge portion of the arts scene in Rochester, including its symphony, has been withdrawing corporate grants that had been assumed as normal procedure for fifty years. If the attitude among Albany legislators, not to mention two very liberal, tax & spend liberals as U.S. Senators, is that sharing wealth is more important than making it, decline is what happens to any area. This won't help John Spencer, tax-cutting, budget-cutting, and very successful former mayor of Yonkers, who's running a futile campaign against Senator Clinton, not only in the estimate of voters but in that of the RNC. Spencer has become the unacknowledged Republican presence in the election. What a pity. But this won't change as long as New York State voters give credibility to a press and to a political elite that won't acknowledge a simple fact: the larger a government's share of economic activity is, the less wealth will be generated. A thought for the coming election....

Luther

Democratic Debate in Grand Island

"Though I will be bashed for my opinion, calling Bush a tyrant is an overstatement. No I don't agree with everything he's said or done, but that alone does not make someone a tyrant...If he truly was a tyrant, with absolute power, he could arrest anyone for making critical comments about him. (Freedom of speech) Haven't seen any mass arrests lately. The media still is able to criticize him as much as they choose. (Freedom of the press)." The Capt_Morgan29 in Independent Forum, Grand Island Independent, 10/24/2006

What's sorrowful about this terrific post by Capt_Morgan29 is that the looney responses below it are more typical of the editorial stances of major press outlets than his. Setting opinions inside observed reality counts for little in MSM. Opinions about fantasy rule the nest more often than not.

Luther

New Orleans and Absentee Voting

The convenience of absentee voting may please the average citizen, but some elections experts find its growing popularity worrisome...There's little evidence that absentee voting increases turnout, and it opens the door for voter coercion and fraud, they say. "There is virtually universal agreement that absentee ballot fraud is the biggest problem," a recent U.S. Election Assistance Commission report on vote fraud concludes....Absentee voting fosters trickery, trend's foes say, Chuck McCutcheon, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 10/24/2006

We know about Chicago and dead voter precincts (see the Presidential election of 1960), located somewhere offshore at the bottom of Lake Michigan. We know about Mexicans voting in California (see the elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004). We know about 102% of voters voting in Philadelphia (see the elections of 2000 and 2004). But let's think twice about absentee voting in New Orleans. Exactly how else are two thirds of New Orleans residents supposed to vote? They have nowhere to live in the city. Two thirds of the Crescent City's voters, without absentee ballots, would have no voice in the future of the city. But wait! They didn't have any voice in the city's present before Katrina either, else they would never have been chased away by a flood that the Army Corps, chief contractor for the levees, promised would never happen.

Luther

Religious Wars, 21st Century Version: Not Exactly What You Might Think

If you ever want to get a lefty riled, just tell him that his or her watered-down version of Marxism is nothing more than a secular religion. You'll be lucky if you don't get assaulted on the spot, so touchy is the left about this issue.

Which leads to an interesting point taken up in today's Belmont Club. After discussing Afghan President Karzai's increasing difficulty with the Taliban, who keep popping up like the endless brooms in Disney's version of "The Sorceror's Apprentice," moves into territory we've tried to explore before in HazZzMat: the current religious wars, which have gotten far more serious, and ironic, than ever, since one of the warring religions—guess which one—won't fess up to its own supremicist intentions. Quoting from the UK Times, Belmont's Wretchard explores this interesting turn of events:

Recently the UK Times described the growing realization that terrorism was already in the UK; already a component of the landscape in part due to the collision between the "sacred space" of Islam and the secular space of post-modern Europe. The solution advocated by some to the problem is to make the secularism mandatory. Religion was to be banned from public life altogether and tolerated only if it consented to be a harmless superstition, remembered on occasions like Halloween or Friday the 13th.

Cute. We've seen this tried, particularly in France to some extent, but suppressing ALL religions in public is really a "cave," an attempt to sweep away the underlying cultural problem by fiat. Furthermore, just who is suppressing what? Wretchard quotes directly from the UK Times piece:

The only equitable answer, say the secularists, is to turn the way of France and America and cleanse public life of all contact with faith and superstition. ... Professor Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism, has been spurred by the rise of religious fundamentalists to write The God Delusion, an “attack on God in all his forms”. Dawkins wants to take religion not just out of the state but society — and his book has become a bestseller. “If this book works as I intend,” he writes in his preface, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” ...

Hmm. Just like a professor. Listen to your academic "betters" and all will be well. Except that if we follow the good professor's simplistic dictate, we'll have succeeded, Muslims included, in bowing to Dawkins' secular (and no doubt Marxist) religion of atheism, right? Which would suit the prof just fine.

Karen Armstrong, quoted in the 5th page of the UK Times article, notes this explicitly: "There have been five major missionary movements in the world — Christianity, Marxism, Islam, Buddhism and secularism. Secularism can be as lethal as any religion. Our society is very secular but, in the Middle East, where modernism is new, secularism is seen as lethal and invasive." Sayyid Qutb [an Islamist who, after visiting the U.S. in the 1940s, concluded that Islam would have to battle the West in order to survive.--W] would probably agree. Al-Qaeda's ideology was precisely a Muslim response to the perceived menace of secularism during its heyday in the late 1940s. Proposals by European "intellectuals" to banish Christianity and Islam would probably founder on the objection that the priests of one sect — namely Marxism and secularism — should not have the right to outlaw the votaries of other rites. In other words, any solution to remove "belief" from public life is itself be founded on a normative belief. But embracing this contradiction is easier than to accept the alternative proposition that politics and society have historically been not only about systems of belief but about the dominance of one system of belief over another. That all wars are ultimately wars of religion. Viewed in this way, the debate over banishing "religion" in Britain is really the old one of avoidance versus confrontation in another guise. We twist and turn in an effort to avoid the War, but attempts to define the War out of existence may ultimately be unsuccessful.

This of course, now comes round to one of HazZzMat's central premises: Infected by a subversive Gramscianism, the left in the West is using cultural and judicial institutions to manipulate Western traditions out of existence in a sort of bloodless coup, using as its most important tool, the manipulation of language itself to define the opposition out of existence. This, of course, has ranged in our times from relatively benign manifestations, like the improper use of the "unisex" pronoun "their" to capitulate to gender agitation while destroying grammar in the process; to more Byzantine strictures like banning the use of the "N" word by white people while permitting it for blacks.

Wretcherd here charts the trajectory of leftists who are taking language manipulation to a much higher level as a way to finesse the Global War on Terror out of existence by redefining terms. It's about what one might expect of the snarky so-called intellectuals who so thoroughly dominate Western academia. Comfortable in their armchair superiority, they are long on theory and very short on practical application of theory. From this position, the lazy left now proposes to outlaw all religions. In addition, as a special bonus instead of a second set of ginzu knives, the Dawkins proposal get rids of Christianity—ever annoying to atheists—by tarring it with the Islamofascist brush. By banishing all organized religion from the public sphere, these armchair faux working-class heroes of the West will thus win the War on Terror (which they don't recognize) and wipe out the bedrock Western culture, all the while basking in the glory of being the New Redeemers. They envision winning the conflict against the Islamofascists by defining them, and all other religions, out of existence and making their own the Religion of the State, which of course will wither away. You may think this is a stretch. But tortured logic like this is so is much of what the Marxists do to undermine our culture, which is why no one follows the bouncing ball until it's too late. It's just too complicated and exhausting to try to understand the dialectic.

Wretchard sums it up quite well, although we are going to help him a bit with a pronoun reference that may not be clear on first reading:

After Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by Harry Truman's America he was later brutalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser's prisons. It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda's ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world's system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are [the United States'] most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda's pet hates [ —the culturally liberal— ] that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it.

As Wretchard accurately notes, this is perhaps the greatest intellectual irony of our time. As I have often told Hate Amerikkka First liberals (i.e., leftists), who foolishly engage me in battle on this issue: Don't bitch at me. If the Islamofascists ever get hold of us, the first throats to be slit will be yours. I am at least a monotheist. You don't believe in God at all. In the hierarchy of Islamofascist hatred, you, the true infidels, are at the top of the hit list. So don't blame me or Chimpy BushMcHitler. We already told you. But you never listen.

Autumn Election Urban Legends I: The Women's Vote

Although Wonker is not about to lay odds on who's going to control Congress after the November elections—the Repubs have tended to damage themselves far more effectively than the Dems' scurrilous, saved-up, and often phony scandal-mongering—he is beginning to get the picture that reports of the GOP's certain demise may be greatly exaggerated. From Democratic crowing a week or two ago that the election was in the bag for the loony left, we moved last week to a virtual coronation of San Francisco's own Queen Botox (aka Nancy Pelosi) as Majority Leader and High Priestess of All Things Redistributionist in the House. (Talk about giving Dems a "lift!")

However, the latest meme, which we've seen in a number of places now, indicates that things may be sobering for the Dems, who, by rerunning the same speculative journalism that failed them in the 2002 mid-terms and in 2004, may indeed be living in the Land That Time Forgot. Our friends at PowerLine have certainly had that thought:

I love reading, as elections draw near, about how the "women's vote" is going to be crucial in this or that close race. Since they will represent about half of all voters, I reckon that how women vote will be pretty important in close races. About as important as how men vote.

Funny someone should have to note the obvious. The "women's issues" meme is yet another way that the MSM, schooled in a kind of passive Gramscian desire to subvert everything in American life into some flavor of class struggle propaganda, should roll out yet again this old saw, which has never really worked for them in the past.

Statistics have demonstrated repeatedly over the years that married women's votes tend to mirror the votes of their husbands. (Or if you're a feminist, we're fine with this observation the other way around, too.) Single women are less predictable, but have generally slid to the Dems. But there's never exactly been a chasm here separating the two genders. Another old saw the press trots out again and again rather than reporting actual news (other than the latest Iraq body counts from Al-Reuters) or admitting that the gleefully anticipated Democratic landslide may not occur.

More evidence that the press has become not only predictable but despicably lazy as well.

One the Republicans Missed

1st District Rep. Butch Otter, a Republican who says he’s running for governor, in part, because he’s frustrated by the divisiveness on Capitol Hill. "We haven’t gotten that much done," he said last week...Idaho voters can’t replace 435 members of Congress. However, 1st District voters can elect a successor to Otter with the temperament, the intellect and the maturity to focus on complicated issues from Iraq and Iran to immigration to the deficit...Democrat Larry Grant would be that kind of congressman....Grant Has Focus, Intellect for Congress, The Idaho Statesman, October 23, 2006

Grant's positions, carefully annotated in this Idaho Stateman editorial, sound almost exactly like the positions of the Bush White House. Somebody at RNC ought to have paid attention.

Luther

Collision of Culture and Politics

Sister Rosa Gonzales says she can count on receptive audiences when she knocks on doors in Latino neighborhoods to urge a "yes" vote on Proposition 85, the parental notification initiative on abortion....Latino votes seen as key to Prop. 85, Peter Hecht, Sacramento Bee, 10/23/2006

As the Democrats woo Latino voters, and encourage non-citizens from Mexico to vote, one wonders if the Democrat National Committee noted how many of these potential voters were Roman Catholic. The old saw about getting what you wish for comes to mind.

Luther

They Know About The Socialist Folly in Miami

It seems that Ecuadoreans will elect Rafael Correa as their next president when they go to the polls on Oct. 15. He is young, charismatic and intelligent; an economist with a degree from a U.S. university who communicates well with the public...What's likely to happen, however, is that, despite his notable personal features, Correa will fail noisily and drag the country down with him...Like many of his compatriots, his intentions are right, but his therapy is irremediably wrong. It's true that a good portion of Ecuador's population lives in wretched conditions, and Correa does not err when he says that the institutions are rotten, corruption is rampant and many in the ruling class have gained or maintain their wealth thanks to their toadyish links to power...old and endemic ills are not solved by rejecting a free-trade agreement with the United States, exacerbating ethnic conflicts, picking a fight with the World Bank and the IMF, placing Ecuador in Hugo Chávez's insane orbit and spouting nonsense such as the search for ``alimentary sovereignty.''....Ecuador marching rapidly toward the cliff, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami Herald, , 10/23/2006

Every so often, it seems, we need to be reminded of what American interests really are. Montaner is not deluded into thinking we should be greatly concerned about the ongoing soap opera highlighted by current campaign ads about the foibles of various US Representatives and US Senators. The American hemisphere is under threat again. The 15-year party since the fall of the USSR should not put us at our ease about the ambitions of thugs either north or south of the border. But you have to go outside of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles to see this, apparently.

Luther

New York's Tax Folly

Jeffrey Confarotta, a 35-year-old computer software salesman, fits the profile of someone New York officials say the state needs to attract, or at least retain, if the upstate economy is going to thrive...The Fairport native...left New York to live in Massachusetts nine years ago. But family is tugging him back to the Rochester area...But he's not coming home. The reason: property taxes...His present [Massachusetts] house is worth about $525,000. Taxes are about $4,400 a year...He could buy a similar house in a Rochester suburb for $300,000 to $350,000. But the taxes in, say, Canandaigua would be about $9,100....even more in Webster — closer to $12,000, he figured. "We're staying put," he said.Property Tax on Voters' Minds, Jay Gallagher, Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester, NY, 10/23/2006

It's amazing how hard it is for politicians to get it. For the better part of the last four years, New York State's government has made sweetheart deals with labor unions, dramatically increased spending for education, and made little or zero progress in dealing with Medicaid costs that, per patient, are more than twice that in California. The assumption under each increase has been that "rich" people would pick up the tab, i.e., those people who could afford New York State's already fabulously expensive housing. They seem unable to respond to the fact that the largest export from New York is middle income couples with children. They look at midtown office rental prices of $100+/foot and have apparently determined that this proves New York's economy is healthy, neglecting to acknowledge that the number of corporate headquarters in New York has declined sharply, and that manufacturing has entirely disappeared. Like their compatriots in France, New York politicians seem to believe that distribution of wealth is all that matters. But, if even well-paid software salespeople can't afford New York's taxes, what future is there for middle class families in New York State? Don't ask the current "leadership" in Albany. Evidently, families with children are a Red state issue, not something that should concern New York.

Luther

Miami Opinion on Chavez

Has Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reached his peak? Will his political star begin to fade following his latest setbacks at the United Nations and his failure to get his protégés elected in Peru's and Ecuador's first-round elections?...Chavez's UN Fiasco raises issue: Has he peaked?, Andres Oppenheimer, Miami Herald, 10/20/2006

It's curious that you have to go to Miami to get a thought on this subject from a columnist. Chavez's political condition of course is of greater interest to people who fled (or whose parents and grandparents fled) from Cuba. Oppenheimer doesn't gloss the issue, however.

As long as the United States continues importing Venezuelan oil at its current pace -- $31.6 billion a year in 2005, and a projected $37 billion in 2006, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures -- Chávez will be down, but not out. Ironically, his megalomaniac dreams will be kept alive by the United States....(Chavez...,Oppeneheimer continued)

A columnist to pay attention to, Andres Oppenheimer!

Luther

What We Thought America Was About

Whether it’s math, science or swimming, Kenai Central senior Taylor Moore isn’t afraid of the laborious work it takes to find the right answer and get to the next level....Getting Better, one step at a time, Jeff Helminiak, Peninsula Clarion.

Maybe US Representative Nancy Pelosi and the Victims Rights Brigade haven't gotten to Alaska yet. Taylor Moore would likely be at the barricades.

“In math and science, you can get to a higher level, and there is an answer for everything.” Moore has translated this same thinking into swimming. Unlike in math and science, Moore does not have natural abilities that have allowed her to rocket to the top of her class in the pool...“She’s had some great teachers along the way that have encouraged her to push herself,” Lee Moore said of his daughter. “She could have sat back and not gotten much better if she hadn’t been challenged."...(Getting Better, continued....)

In the universe beyond US Representative Pelosi's imagination, it's still true: practice makes perfect. If you want to succeed, you have to try.

Luther

Taxpayer Bill of Rights/TABOR Fight In Maine

The coalition that has crafted an alternative to the proposed TABOR spending cap says the group's diversity will translate into enough political power to win the plan's passage in the Legislature. The coalition includes the state's municipalities, hospitals, teachers union and big businesses..."This is astonishing," said Sen. Peter Mills, R-Cornville, who helped draft the plan. "I have never seen anything like it, in terms of people coming together around a common core of principles."....TABOR Foes: Group has clout to get plan passed, Tom Bell, Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, 10/20/2006

A coalition against a taxpayer bill of rights that would limit spending includes municipalities, hospitals, teachers union, and big business. Gee, there's a surprise. One gathers (and hopes) than Senator Mills has a sense of irony when discussing their "common core of principles".

Luther

Fighting Big Government in Nebraska

Colorado's TABOR and Nebraska's Initiative 423, which faces voters at the ballot box Nov. 7, both are aimed at restricting government spending..."What we learned in Colorado is, you can have economic growth or government growth, but you can't have both," John Andrews (President of Nebraska Senate) said Thursday at Grand Island's College Park....Pro-423 representatives tout initiative during tour, Tracy Overstreet, Grand Island Independent

It's never easy. Such a proposition in New York would probably put District 37 and the AFT on picket lines from Times Square to the Stock Exchange. Best of luck, Nebraskans!

Luther

Creeping Socialism in Dodge City

Roundup President R.C. Trotter asked the board Thursday to consider recommending a $72,303 contribution from the "Why Not Dodge" sales tax fund to help the organization eliminate the deficit. The board did not act on his request but will consider it next month along with funding requests from other eligible tourist attractions....Roundup asks CFAB for financial assistance, Dodge City Globe, 10/20/2006

You just can't get away from somebody begging for taxes to cover an unprofitable business's losses, not even in Dodge. Bat Masterson probably didn't ask for a tax rebate on his Colt. And tax funding is bad business all around. Under the administration of a government, a fine business can go bad faster than Wyatt Earp could draw. Why, not long ago, in New York, the head of the OTB Corporation, a legal bookie with offices in a thousand communities, announced that she could not foresee a day when betting on horses would make money for the state. In Brooklyn, the writer engaged in conversation with a former bookie, who could not believe that anyone other than a chimpanzee could lose money on gambling on horse racing. Very suggestive about the types of people elected, as well as the people they appoint to run government programs -- someone said that in Dodge City, but it's not possible to say who. In Dodge, people still carry, and opinions are measured in lives, not endorsements from Senator Clinton.

Luther

I Guess New Orleans Can Afford This Now

A wide-ranging plan to improve the availability and quality of health care services in the New Orleans area and reduce the region's longtime reliance on the Charity Hospital System was presented to Gov. Kathleen Blanco Thursday, a day before a federally mandated deadline....Blanco unveils health care plan, Jan Moller, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 10/20/2006

In 2000's census, New Orleans had a population just under half a million. Today, according to Reuters, its population is less than 220,000. That's great timing for Governor Blanco's medical plan. With 60% of the population of New Orleans vanished to other states, New Orleans can spend the same amount of money as proposed, but save $6 out of $10 it would have spent. Then, the Governor can give that money as a donation to the New Orleans Levee Board. The latter institution gained great modern fame last fall when its principal area of responsibilities, the levees that are supposed to protect the city from hurricane storm surges, collapsed, killing a thousand people, and ruining the Crescent City for sixty percent of its population. (The casino funded by the Levee Board, however, is now back in operation.) Given Governor Blanco's sterling record of non-involvement in the Katrina disaster, she seems like the perfect person to give the Levee Board additional largesse. I'd just love to hear the Governor sing "let the good times roll." Trouble is, given her record during Katrina, she'd probably blame the President of the United States if she sang off-key.

Luther

Pelosi: Extremism in Pursuit of Ideology is No Vice

Busy day today, so light blogging here. (Although I highly recommend Luther's most recent posts on McCain-Feingold hypocrisy (just WHO is messing with our freedoms, ACLU?) and baseball in the heartland.

Meanwhile, for nasty political fun, may I recommend to you this link, which pretty accurately states Botox Queen Nancy Pelosi's political position (although not as she would state it). It also lists the approximate range of her net worth as "between $14,746,108 and $55,085,000." Which might make the Wicked Witch of the West "the the richest Speaker in American history" if the Dems, along with their media and Mahdi Army allies, could actually succeed in taking over the House.

After you read this post, just remember: Dirty Republicans support the "tax cuts for the rich," not pious Democrats like Pelosi who, like their "working class" allies, make barely enough to pay the rent in "Bush's Amerikkka." Please.

In Case McCain-Feingold Doesn't Shut You Up

The timing of a crackdown on city code violations in Edwardsville has some residents crying foul. The day after the Oct. 9 City Council meeting, when several residents got up to speak against a rezoning proposal for an apartment complex at 1300 S. 94th, at least seven of the 40 signers of the petition against the apartment complex received code infraction letters from the city's codes enforcement department or Edwardsville police officers....Codes crackdown raises hackles as well as eyebrows, Jesse Truesdale, Bonner Springs Chieftan, 10/19/2006

The inventive cowardice of McCain-Feingold's suppression of political speech is nothing new of course. As this article in the Bonner Springs Chieftan makes clear, you're not any safer from having a politician tape your mouth in Kansas than you are in New York or Los Angeles. Ever vigilant is not a cliche; it's a watch phrase for citizens of a republic.

Luther

Heartland World Series

The first long drive to left field wound up in the webbing of Endy Chavez's glove as he crashed against the wall. The second one sailed clear over his head. And that's what sent Yadier Molina and the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series....Cardinals Win NL Pennant, Mike Fitzpatrick , AP 10/20/2006

As good a manager as Willie Randolph is, and he even fooled as smart a baseball writer as Tim Marchman of The NY Sun, you can only manage with mirrors for a while. Finally, if all you've got to offer is one experienced starting pitcher in Tom Glavine, a batting practice pitcher in Steve Trachsel, eight middle relievers of varying quality, and an occasionally erratic closer in Bill Wagner, you're not going to the World Series. The amazing thing is that the Metropolitans got past Los Angeles and nearly won the 7th game against the Cardinals, a tribute as much to the risk-taking of their manager as to their team. There are lots of good things, certainly the Mets' rebuilding, long overdue, but as well a heartland Series. Because of the seemingly perpetual presence of New York (or former New York) teams in the Fall classic, though they've become scarce in the last few years, baseball may seem to many as the province of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Of course it's not, nor is the life of the American nation limited to NY; Washington, DC; and Los Angeles. It still comes as a shock to those accustomed to regarding aircraft as mobile living rooms between their houses in Malibu and their apartments on Sutton Place that flyover people actually contribute the vast proportion of economic, cultural, spiritual and, of late, political energy to the Republic. As Detroit whomps St. Louis in five games next week, that's something to remember in the runup to the election.

Luther

Solution for Londonistan?

Britain's first full face transplant could be given the go-ahead in the next few days, it has been revealed....Britain Ready to Perform First Full Face Transplant, Jenny Hope & Emily Cook, The Daily Mail, 10/19/2006

It strikes this writer that it would be a lot easier for someone in need of a new face to just wear a veil. Oh, wait, Britain is already doing that!

Luther

Foley A Perfect Victim?

A Catholic priest told the Herald-Tribune on Wednesday about an intimate two-year relationship he had with former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley when the congressman was a teenage altar boy living in Lake Worth....Priest Tells of Foley Relationship, Matthew Doig and Maurice Tamman, HeraldTribune.com

What a pity disgraced former US Representative Foley isn't a Democrat! With this story, he'd be able to position himself as a superior victim, ready to stand with other sexual harassment heroes like the late US Representative Stubbs and the former President, WJ Clinton. Then, instead of being run out of DC on a rail for writing suggestive emails to a 17-year-old, he'd be standing at Hillary Clinton's side, shouting down the backward, biased, anti-homosexual Republicans. It's all in the product label in Washington!

Luther

Diane Sawyer Reports on Potemkin Village in North Korea

North Korean schools are a world away from the unruly individualism of any American school...The students there snap to attention, shouting out their answers, including the differences between the sounds of British and American English...If you ask them about their country, they can't say enough. It's the most beautiful country in the world, they say. They are the happiest children anywhere. It is the most wonderful place to live under the leadership of Kim Jong Il..."We are the happiest children in the world, thanks to Kim Jong Il," one student told me. It is a strange sound for American ears, considering that North Korea is one of the most isolated nations in the world...The children are proud of their racial purity as well....Diane Sawyer Tours North Korean School, ABC News, 10/19/2006

Let's run part of that again. "North Korean schools are a world away from the unruly individualism of any American school...the children are proud of their racial purty as well...." Is this what's called "objective" journalism? Visit a tightly select "example" of North Korean life, look at a highly controlled school, make disparaging comparative remarks about American schools? This strikes me as being about as representative a "cluster" as the ones selected by the Johns Hopkins study on Iraqi casualties in the current war. Perhaps Diane Sawyer will next interview the 47 people chosen to "represent" the situation in Iraq.

Luther

Islamic Fascists' Allies among Democrats Plan Impeachment

Senator John Kerry, D-MA, told a gathering of 100 Democrats that, should they capture the House in 2006, there would be a “solid case” for impeachment based on President Bush's “misleading” the American public over prewar intelligence....The Coming Impeachment, Rocco DiPippo, Frontpagemagazine.com

As irritating as some of the things Republicans and this administration have done, nothing compares to the fabulous reaches that the liars on the Left are taking. Look at the order of events: 1) Lies about the President and the administration; 2) running for office on the lies about the President and the administration; 3) plans to impeach the President based on the lies they told and ran on. If you've never seen a pack of wild dogs, and back in the Dinkins Administration in New York we got to see a lot of them, some of them canine, you don't have to. Just watch Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Carl Levin and other baying bastards of the Moll Flanders Surrender Party. There's enough foam in their mouths to drown a hundred real canines.

Luther

Playing the Race Card in Maryland: Round 2; or, a Short Dissertation on the Language Police of the Left

Last year, Wonker cited the blatantly racist attitudes of Democrats toward black Republican Senatorial candidate Michael Steele, an attitude that still persists, although it's usually buried by the press which favors his Democratic opponent, Ben Cardin. The incident I cited in this earlier post was one of many common variations on a theme that more or less goes as follows: if a black man or woman is identified as a Republican, that man or woman is therefore not black. Further, it's fine to make racist attacks on them because they are Republicans and thus not worthy of racial respect. (If you think I'm kidding, ask Justice Thomas.)

The racially-tinged atmosphere in "liberal" and "tolerant" Maryland has continued off and on during Steele's difficult campaign, where he has closed the gap but is not favored to win. But this latest flap is a little unusual. It puts the shoe on the other foot as it were. The kerfuffle is synopsized on Powerline under the header "Please":

Michael Steele's campaign wants to make something of a comment by Rep. Steny Hoyer, who during a campaign speech on behalf of Steele's opponent said that Steele has "a career of slavishly supporting the Republican Party." Come on. This word is used all the time in politics to attack those who support a particular line. Let's not draw any inferences from ordinary usage of the English language.

PowerLine is offended by Steele's tactic, and there was a day when I would have been irritated as well. But over the past year or so, my gloves have come off forever and I've put on brass knucks instead when dealing with the congenital liars on the left. In my view, they've gotten away with their own language and meaning distortion tactics for so long that it's time to hit back.

Steele knows just what he's doing, and it's lovely, frankly, to see the race card being cynically played back in the other direction. Paybacks are rough. Steele is an intelligent fellow and was no doubt delighted that no less than the House Minority Whip was caught in a remark that gave a Republican a chance to play the race card back against a 'Rat—this in a state where that tactic may have some resonance going down the stretch.

I recall several years ago when a white official appointed by DC Mayor Tony Williams used the word "niggardly" to describe how he'd have to manage an upcoming budget. The resulting uproar from lower-level employees caused Williams to terminate the poor dude who, as a liberal Democrat, had more than paid his dues. Too bad. His opponents took "offense" to the "racist" remark, and didn't back off when informed that this old-fashioned but perfectly useful English word has absolutely nothing to do with race, which it does not. The retort (and I quote indirectly as I can't find the source readily on the web) was something like, "Well, it sounds racist, so I'm offended anyway." The result: another perfectly good word lifted out of the English language and discarded because some ignoramus didn't know what it meant and was more than happy to take offense to shore up his victim-status.

More recently, Masachusetts' Republican Governor Mitt Romney had to bob and weave when a similar ignoramus—on the Republican side, no less—objected Romney's use of the term "tar baby" when discussing Boston's current Big Dig mess:

"The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can," he told a crowd of about 100 supporters in Ames, Iowa.

The source of Boomer Governor Romney's reference? Maybe not what you might think.

I remember years ago enjoying the Uncle Remus stories I read in a "Little Golden Book" which was inspired by the Walt Disney film "Song of the South" —a film which introduced the popular, catchy tune "Zippedy Doo-Dah!" in the late 1940s. So did many other Boomers, as the Romney citation (and Tony Snow's reference below) make clear.

While the 1940s were not exactly a progressive time in race relations, the Disney film was an inspired, innofensive, and light-hearted watering down of some of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories that dated from the mid-19th century. (Although the Disney "inoffensiveness" was later pilloried by those who imagined more sinister motives, as described here.) Harris' original stories, I later learned when I perused some originals in graduate school, were written in a thick Southern/black dialect that was virtually impossible to parse. Disney's writers and animators cleaned this stuff up, along with anything that might seem offensive to moviegoers, resulting in a delightful family movie and childrens' book spinoffs that are now hard to get hold of due to today's ideological hypersensitivities. (Interestingly, both the stories and the film were set AFTER the Civil War.)

Uncle Remus was a genial, grandfatherly black guy who always had a good story to tell, many of them about the wily Bre'er Rabbit who fearlessly took on the much bigger and meaner Bre'er Bear and Bre'er Fox and generally got the best of them—something gleefully highlighted in the Disney film which was primarily animated but occasionally featured live actors. Some of these stories were later extracted and put in the Golden Book that I read as a child, delighted to see the oppressed little rabbit elude his enemies via wit and trickery. This actually places him in the mythical tradition of Loki and other legendary trickster figures in world folklore.

The sneaky Bre'er Rabbit didn't always win, however. Sensing his cockiness and overweening pride in his own cleverness, Bre'er Bear and Bre'er Fox (at least in the Disney verson) decided to play a fine trick on the rabbit, fashioning a little human-like figure out of a chunk of thick tar, clothing it, and sitting it on a log where their diminutive antagonist was sure to pass. Indeed, Bre'er Rabbit walked by the log and repeatedly tried to engage the "Tar Baby" in a discussion.

"But de Tar Baby, he say nothin'." After a few more attempts at conversation, Bre'er Rabbit became enraged at the Tar Baby's affront to his dignity and started swinging away. But with each blow he landed, the rabbit got more and more hopelessly trapped in the thick tar, at which point the villains just happened to walk by, laughing their heads off, to make fun of the rabbit's utter helplessness. Since I've never been able to penetrate the original, I can only imagine that the fox and the bear took their revenge. But the Disney folks wisely bowed out of the story at that point, figuring that the moral lesson about pride leading to a fall had been sufficiently imparted to the young audience. (Walt Disney was nothing if not an early conservative.)

Why this long aside? Very simple. The "tar baby," as a result of Chandler's story and Disney's update, became a lively metaphor to most Baby Boomers for a mess you shouldn't have gotten yourself into and now can't get yourself out of. I know of almost no one who hasn't used the term in this context at some point, since it's a perfectly apt short description of a potentially tricky situation if you know the story behind it.

Apparently, "tar baby" has also been used in an offensive context against blacks, if you buy the following observation. That was sure news to me. But this was offered up as a response to now-Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow's use of the same term, which he probably acquired the same way Romney and Wonker did. Snow defended its use as a vivid descriptor that had nothing to do with race. But:

In response to a similar point raised by Tony Snow in his own defense, one African American commentator, Margaret Kimberly, says that we miss an important point. She writes, “The words tar baby are a slur, period. They are used to hurt, to anger, and to offend. The fact that they first appeared in the Uncle Remus stories doesn’t let Snow off the hook. The Uncle Remus stories were part of a carefully orchestrated effort to make plantation life appear benevolent instead of horrific.”

Sorry, Ms. Kimberly, I beg to differ. The overconfident moral absolutism of the left's moral relativists is always rather startling. But it is the stock in trade of Democrats regardless of race. Now hear this: "Tar baby" is not a slur, period, Ms. Kimberly. Caught up in typical lefty righteousness, she herself misses an important point, as she lectures us—no, hectors us—in a way that she would never allow herself to be harangued. She is either unaware of or doesn't care that most white Boomers learned about the tar baby via the Disney version of the Harris story. They never had a clue that the term might possess any other meaning beyond that expressed in the Harris/Disney story they so enjoyed.

But no matter. Since someone has now decided to become "offended" there's some possibility that this wonderful metaphor may go the way of "niggardly."

In this way, slowly and incrementally, nuance and meaning in language have been gradually lost to us due to the triumphalism of leftist dogma and purposeful aggressive ignorance on the part of individuals who don't understand that certain terms may have multiple entymologies. (BTW, the article that contains the quote above has as lovely a background and defense of the innocent use of "tar baby" as you're likely to see. Link to it here.)

But back to our original point: Unlike PowerLine, I find it delightful that Mike Steele has turned the table on the phony Idiotarians who are tolerant of everyone except those who have the audacity to ignore the party line when it comes to langauge, culture, and politics. But in a larger context, whether we're dealing with "niggardly," the "tar baby," or something else, I am increasingly disgusted by the relentless of the Gramsci-inspired left to re-mold our language and culture in a way that robs us of context, history, and meaning, while making us fearful of employing innocent but richly descriptive words and phrases. This is called "coercion" and its aim is to censor the same freedom of speech the doctrinaire left hypocritically claims to uphold.

As for moi? I'll continue to use both terms whenever I choose to. If you don't like it, I'll see you in court.

(Note: The word "comment" in the initial quotation above contained a link to an MSNBC report on the Steele campaign. But examining the link I found no sign of Hoyer's remark, meaning that it was edited out after MSNBC discovered the link to PowerLine. Sometimes you can find an earlier version of a PC-vacuumed release via Google News, but sometimes not. Post-story editing on the web is a trick that's commonly used by journos and PC police on the left, a Moscow-inspired alteration of history meant to cover the tracks of their lefty heroes in the Democratic Party. It's rarely used to correct mistakes, which are generally allowed to remain only if they damage Republicans.

Phony journalistic "Photoshopping" of war photographs to favor the terrorists is another history-altering tactic of the left, particularly with the news service that Little Green Footballs aptly calls "Al Reuters." Check the lgf archives for egregious examples that occurred during the most recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.)

Left-Wing Fascists: NOT an Oxymoron

Polipundit continues today's hit parade, literally, citing the far left's latest obsession with "outing" Republican candidates who either are, or alleged to be, gay. (The would, of course, never do that with someone who toed the party line but wanted to remain in the closet.) Here's the latest outing adventure:

According to this Kos diary, Rogers has followed through on his extortionary threat, and apparently outed Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) three weeks before the mid-term elections. I have no idea whether these allegations are true or not, but the truthfulness of the allegations is irrelevant to an extortion charge, and Rogers should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Predictably, extortion is being cheered by the Kossacks.

Read the rest here.

Poli comes to a succinct conclusion that we couldn't improve upon:

Today’s “liberals” are fascists and arguing otherwise makes you look like a fool.

Mm-hmm.

The Worst President in American History

Polipundit is loaded with good stuff today, including the latest outrage from Peanut Man, who clearly is now head and shoulders above Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, and even the Schlickmeister himself, Bill Clinton, as the absolute worst President ever in the history of this great country. As Curly would say, ob-zoiv:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday night that an agreement he brokered 12 years ago for North Korea to halt nuclear weapons development is “in the wastebasket.” Carter contends the Bush administration turned its back on the deal and labeled the isolated nation part of an “axis of evil.”

Right. What this pompous, condescending ass fails to realize that the North Korea agreement he "negotiated" (read "was snookered into") was "in the wastebasket" the day it was signed. But like Bill Clinton, the man who'd sent him to Pyongyang, Carter apparently still believes that you can "negotiate" with congenital liars who just happen to be Commies as well, where lying to capitalist pigs is an article of faith. Because, somewhere in the Marxian dialectic, lying to capitalists, who are subhuman animals, is not lying at all, since, say, lying to your dog is of no consequence. Furthermore, since Marxists get to define reality, lying in such an instance, constitutes the truth because the party and the Dear Leader said so.

The naiveté of both Carter and Clinton became stunningly obvious when the Bushies discovered North Korea's nuclear shenanigans on their watch, and wisely called the Commies on it. The Bushies also did the logical thing, establishing two principles they have yet to violate:

• No more one-on-one negotiations with congenital, proven liars. Only negotiations involving all of North Korea's neighbors, whose own self interests dictate in favor of North Korean containment.
• No agreements or exchanges without absolute safeguards and enforcement mechanisms that cannot be easily evaded.

Rational human beings have to understand that today's international thugs like North Korean and Iran learned long ago the successful "negotiating" tactic perfected by the North Vietnamese, who "negotiated" in "good faith" while continuing to slaughter civilians and improve their positions. "Negotiation" to Marxists, is merely a slow motion stall that enables them to continue aggression while hobbling their enemies thus ensuring eventual defeat.

North Korea learned this lesson long ago, and Iran is executing on it pretty well now. Since Western sanctions have failed (predictably) to materialize, Iran is encouraged to follow North Korea's successful path to continuing aggression, since the Iranians now know that all Western threats (except maybe Bush's) are idle threats. The late Yasser Arafat had learned this lesson well also, as he created the appearance of reasonableness first with Carter and later with Clinton, snookering Clinton at the last possible moment and dashing off to start the intifada that now outlives him.

The left longs for "reasonable" "negotiated" solutions with bums and thugs because they know that they are dealing, in a way, with fellow travelers who are merely trying to snooker the capitalist West once again. It is increasingly clear, as appalling as it may sound, that the only way to solve the problems in North Korea and Iran is to flatten a few cities. This is the only language thugs like this understand and it is foolish to imagine otherwise. Like high school bullies, thugs simply have to be beaten to a bloody pulp in order to gain respect for their opponents.

But this doesn't matter. It's all Bush's fault anyway, since he's not "negotiating." We know this is true, because Jimmy Carter, the chump who enabled the rise of Iran's "Islamic Republic," says so.

UPDATE: The despicable Marxist fifth-columnist quadrillionaire, George Soros, blames Bush, too. It will be interesting at some point in the future, after the Benedict Arnolds are ousted from the CIA and the FBI, to discover which foreign government is actively aiding Soros and his fellow seditionists.

Americans Learning French Ways?

HAVE we lost the will to win wars? Not just in Iraq, but anywhere? Do we really believe that being nice is more important than victory?...It's hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness. Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies...They're going to lead us into failure, sacrificing our soldiers and Marines for nothing: Political correctness kills....Politically Correct War, Ralph Peters, New York Post, 10/18/2006

In certain lounges in the Southwest and California, a good way to get into a barfight is to start a conversation about the Montagnards. Who were they? For a decade, they were probably the fiercest allies that America has ever had. From villages in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, sparsely equipped by US intelligence agencies, they outfought divisions of Viet Cong and of North Vietnamese regulars. In 1973, after a decade of promises, terrible losses, meager supplies, astonishing victories, and a fighting spirit unmatched anywhere else in that war, the Montagnards were abandoned by the United States. Some became "boat people", part of the hundreds of thousands who fled Vietnam. A lot were slaughtered. Many were imprisoned. Their abandonment was the most disgraceful episode in a disgraceful war. The Montagnards were dropped, as many other U.S. allies have been over the past fifty years, because it wasn't politically suitable to have them around a negotiating table. Now, as Ralph Peters analyzes things today, it's going to get a lot worse. Political correctness now infects the thinking of combat officers; the pathology that is gutting the excellence of our universities has crossed over into the military. But should we be surprised?

Ever since 9/11, the lies of the Left, of Islamic fascists (and their friends among "charitable" organizations in the United States), have been an unending drum beat shouting out a consistent message, that anything that we do to resist Islamic terror is unjust, an "imperial" delusion. Lies are nothing new in politics. The same people, or their red diaper baby parents, were telling the same lies forty years ago. And reporting lies as truth is nothing new in media. What's telling is that more and more of us believe the lies. Why?

We believe in lies when we want them to represent the truth. A majority of us now want to believe that the war on terror, and the war on Iraq, are lost. They're too much of a distraction from gasoline prices, or mortgage payments, or bills for kids in school, or our wish to try the latest variation on bread and circuses offered in video games, the movies, and television. And they're too brutal; they're not like Saturday morning cartoons or Hollywood ending movies, where everybody gets up off the floor at the end and kisses. And it's unfair to blame the French, whose country was called the "whore of Europe" for decades after its surrender-first policies in World War II. It's not like we don't know about them. A lot of our fathers died because of Pierre Laval and his ilk in the pre-World War II French Republic's abject failures before the Nazis. It's not the Left, as much as they would like us to believe so. Most people can tell that Lynne Stewart and Al Franken are full of crap. No, we have to face the mirror. It's us. We're the ones advocating surrender. We're the ones who want "gentle" war. We're the ones who want nature to reflect the vision of Walt Disney instead of that of Charles Darwin.

But not to place the blame entirely on the electorate, it's also a leadership unwilling to call for the real sacrifices required to win a conflict whose loss will cost the West any claim to lead the world. This is a writer who's not fooled by a White House that rages on about "staying the course" without bothering to proclaim a national emergency and act as if the nation were actually at war. And this is also a writer who's not fooled by a Secretary of Defense more interested in management prerogatives than what an Army on the ground actually needs to operate. We've had a Defense Secretary like this before. His name was Robert MacNamara. This latest product of Secretary Rumsfeld's imagination says far more about him than any of his allegedly stalwart stands against generals outraged at having to send ill-equipped, outnumbered divisions into action.

Something to think about as election day approaches....

Luther

Election 2006: Some Lengthy Observations

While Wonker was absent earning a living, the dreaded political "October surprise" that Democrats long feared began to unfold. Except that this year's October surprise started unfolding in late summer, particularly in the September timeframe. And it was the Dems, not the Republicans, who were doing the surprising. In short order over the past few weeks, we have had Bob Woodward's latest Bush-trashing tome, amply highlighted and flakked in Woodward's home, the Washington Com-Post (hat tip to Mark Levin); we have the outting and ousting of Florida Representative Foley, with attendant negative PR and lots of finger-pointing at the House Republican leadership; Ohio Congressman Ney suddenly pleads guilty to a whole raft of malfeasance and exits stage left; a former White House staffer, David Kuo, publishes another trashery of anti-Bush malice, this time accusing the Administration of a cold half-heartedness when it comes to "faith-based initiatives"(note: Post links may require registration); the constant running down by the press of attractive Republican candidates in unfavorable environments (such as Maryland and Pennsylvania); wholesale slaughter in Iraq of almost unbelievable intensity; and, oh hell, what's the use? The hits just keep on coming. How long have the 'Rats been storing this stuff for later deployment? Don't answer.

Result: Repubs are on the ropes, with House and Senate seats formerly thought secure being up for grabs and with Republican majorities in both houses in considerable danger. Do we smell some complicity here in all the events listed above? Could be...

Comment: Wonk has never been a conspiracy theorist. The Dems, who long ago dropped reason in favor of the Marxist dialectic, would not be able to put together a concerted conspiracy if you paid them the big bucks. What does happen quite frequently, though, is that the Dems, by means of a kind of intense, unwavering groupthink reminiscent of high school cliques, manage to get themselves severally on the same political page, with numerous groups and individuals plaiting a vast net of dirty tricks that somehow gains harmonic convergence during the endgame of the election cycle.

And so it is here. Books, "outings" of reprehensible behavior by Repubs (of course, and let's give Harry Reid a pass since he didn't mean to do it), reverse racism, and even the intensity of Islamofascist attacks are increasingly tending to converge in the September timeframe of an election year with all participants united in an undying hatred of the United States, capitalism, Christianity, and the Boy Scouts. Boring in as hard as they can to upend traditional American values, their object is to eviscerate the President who is attempting to uphold them. Carefully calibrated and relentless push-polling enhances the effect, with questions keenly honed to draw the maximum negative response down on the hapless Repubs.

Meanwhile, the positive effects of waterfalling gasoline prices, an economy that is somehow getting better after 2-ish years of Fed tightening, a stock market that's threatening new records daily, a consistently fine series of low unemployment and high job creation figures—all these either go unnoticed or are buried way back somewhere in the A-section. Meanwhile, anything anti-Repub is plastered front and center, above the fold, and in living color on the front pages of most large metropolitan newspapers each and every day. Like I say, sure looks like a conspiracy. But it's put together instead not with meticulous advanced planning, but with a significant number of lefty political minds, assimilated by the Marxist Borg, working as one without the need for central planning. It's impressive, in a way. But wildly destructive and verging on the treasonous when it comes to the undermining of our troops in the Global War on Terror of which Iraq is merely the second major battle.

In a more sinister vein, the Islamofascists overseas do their best to help the Dems out, figuring, this year at least, that a Democratic takeover of the legislature will provide them with an instant replay of the post-Nixon cut-and-run strategy that led to our obvious triumph in Vietnam. And they are probably right, as Boomer Dems are looking for one last hurrah resembling their disgracing of the Trickster before they start dropping like flies due to coronary events and just plain senility. The Islamofascists form a mirror-Borg, offering their enemies two simple choices, assimilation or swift and bloody slaughter. The Dems love these guys, too, because they share with equal intensity the Bush Derangement Syndrome that drives both massive hives of adolescent minds.

As for the Democrats. This is indeed a party of fundamental unseriousness, enamored of an teenaged, feelings-based approach to nearly everything of importance that should instead be treated with respect and high-seriousness. But the Dems prefer sneering, ad hominem, dumpster diving, and, when all else fails, just plain baldfaced lying proclaimed so loudly and so well that it is soon perceived as the truth.

The Republicans have not exactly dazzled anyone with brilliance in the last term of Congress, inexplicably doing their best to out-Dem the Dems when it comes to unrestrained pork-barrel spending which aims at buying the maximum number of votes out of the taxpayer trough, thus evading the campaign spending limits currently in unconstitutional place. This, however, is the exclusive terrain of the Democratic Party which, with the complicity of the lefty press, keeps such Democratic malfeasance out of the newspapers almost entirely.

The Repubs simply seem incapable of learning that, unless they remain squeaky clean and true to their stated principals, their sins will be ruthlessly exposed to the public gaze and they will be forced to resign or sentenced to long jail terms. Or both. It is significant this week to hear the Democrats eulogize the despicable, and now quite dead, Massachusetts Dem Representative Gerry Studds (love the name), a gay Congressman censured for, er, inappropriate sexual behavior during one of his many terms. Studds of course, was never ousted from Congress. Nor was Massachusett's current gay favorite, Barney Frank, whose roommate several election cycles ago was caught running a house of ill repute out of the townhouse they both shared. Barney pled ignorance, and got the usual pass from the media. But Foley, the Republican, was out within a day of the well-timed release of his instant-messaging escapades. A similar thing happened to Republican Congressman Bob Baumann a political generation ago. (No good link to this at the moment.) And let's not forget Senator Bob Packwood's ass-grabbing, which quickly got him a swift kick out of the Senate. You'll never see that with a Democrat.

Fallout: The Republicans here are literally experiencing, should they choose to notice, a "come to Jesus moment." They need to reconnect with who and what got them the majority on the Hill that commenced with Newt Gingrich's startling takeover of the House in 1994, something once viewed as less likely to happen than the fall of the Soviet Union. Repubs need to boost defense, cut out the pork barrel spending, continue to slash taxes (no matter how the lefties scream), back their natural constituencies like the Chamber of Commerce and the Boy Scouts of America, to name two, against the predations of the Trial Lawyers and the ACLU. And they also need to refocus on the continuing importance of granting as many Islamofascists as possible the sublime gratification of martyrdom. This is what got the Repubs elected and re-elected in the first place. A simple return by the party to its own stated values would be more than enough to rally the faithful and leave the 'Rats and their lying allies in the media and the professoriat holding the short end of the stick once again, as was done in 2000 and 2004.

My guess? Election night will turn out better than the lefty pundits would like to think. But even if the Repubs win in a close call, they'd better learn their lesson this time. Or the chattering, unserious magpies of the left will plant their banners on Capitol Hill and the White House at last in 2008. With disastrous consequences for what's left of Western Civilization.