01.31.09
Contempt is their response to patty-cake
The mullahs say, “Here’s what we think of your offer to talk.”
The nobility of the fighter
There was a very important and heated argument on Laura Ingraham’s radio show this morning. Her guest was Bruce Bartlett, historian and economist with whom she was colleagues in the Reagan administration.
Of late, Bartlett has been getting, shall we say, quirkier. He ruffled some feathers with a 2006 book lambasting W. Myself, not being an unqualified W fan by any stretch, I saw some validity in what Bartlett was pointing out. His latest argument, however, is that we should learn to live with the welfare state.
The fur really flew on Ingraham’s show. She ripped him a new one, said, “this isn’t the Bruce Bartlett I knew and worked with.”
His point was that, with the coming boomer aging and unbearable upward pressure on Social Security and Medicare, we must all resign ourselves to higher taxes. When Laura said, “No we mustn’t,” he replied, “Well, if you want to live in a dream world, that’s your prerogative.” Ingraham reminded him that he, along with Arthur Laffer, had been one of the original supply-siders, and then went on to cite a list of particulars from the recent Republican Study Committee’s alternative to the “stimulus package”: cuts in several types of taxes such as capital gains and dividends, and holidays on several other types of taxes. Bartlett responded, “Laura, the votes aren’t there.” She said that that was where courage and leadership came in. His response to that was along the lines of, well, yes, real Republican leadership has been glaringly missing for years, but since such leaders aren’t coming to the fore, we have to proceed with a course grounded in reality.
It was apalling.
Every once in a while, you see a former beacon of conserv ative clarity swallow the Kool-Aid like this, but it’s always horrifying.
In essence, the mindest is: My principles aren’t worth fighting for.
For a long time, this blog has railed against something we call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. Of course, we had as the GOP presidential candidate last year someone afflicted with a terminal case of it.
Since the election, we’ve seen a form of RSG infect several pundits who ought to know better. Some are coming out of it now, having had their original “He’s-our-president-now-so-let’s-pray-that-he-governs-wisely” fit of goodwill ripped savagely to shreds by the reality of who and what TCM is.
What mostly remains now, in the category of Conservatives Perplexingly Abandoning Their Fervor, is that Beltway type that had always spent just a little too much time rubbing shoulders with the enemy at lunches and cocktail parties. Kathleen Parker, in today’s Townhall column, expemplifies this, setting up a moral equivalence between W and TCM based on W’s having said, in 2005, “I earned this political capital, and I’m going to spend it” with regard to his Iraq policy, and TCM’s response to Senator John Kyl last week to consider more conservative-type tax cuts in the “stimulus” bill with “I won. That trumps you.” Well, okay, Kathleen, so there are levels of similarity. Here’s a question for you though: do you think one of those presidents was right and one wrong, or are you just some kind of slightly bemused but mostly disinterested observer? Or there’s Bill Kristol’s last NYT column from the other day, in which he says that conservative ideas have mostly been right, “as much as any theory works in the real world.” Ha ha. I can’t be the only one who detects an odor of resignation in such an utterance.
In her on-air scrap with Bartlett, Ingraham made sure to concede the enormous difficulty of continuing to press for the conservative solution to this country’s economic ills. She then went on to state what ought to be obvious, but apparently is not to the likes of Bartlett: That is of no relevance to the fact that press we must.
All of this has me thinking about the deep implications of the word “fight.”
In her towering work of cultural observation The Death of the Grown-up, Diana West makes the point that in our society we give speeches for and erect monuments to those soldiers, sailors, pilots and Marines who exhibit valor in such situations as rescuing comrades or enduring captivity, but that we have become reluctant to honor them for just plain fighting well, for instances in which it was their fighting per se that made the difference.
I wrote in this blog, and in my newspaper column, after my trip to San Antonio a couple of years ago how affected I was by the story of William B. Travis, who led the militia that fought Santa Ana’s forces at the Alamo. I called my column about it “The Eternal Line in the Dust.” One evening, as the Mexican forces were, according to sentries, about a day away, he called all the men into the Alamo’s main yard, drew a line in the dust with his sword and said, “I can’t make any of you cross this line and join me, and there are understandable reasons why you wouldn’t. We’ll almost certainly all be killed. We will, however, die with honor and the record will show we stood for what was right.”
Much is made of certain of Christ’s teachings along the lines of turning the other cheek, or how the meek are blessed, but it occurs to me that he was actually the ultimate fighter. On that cross that awful Friday afternoon, awash in blood, flies buzzing around his face, the tendons in his hands fraying around the nails under his weight, hearing the mockery of the soldiers and the masses that had been convinced by the forces of evil to give up their good sense and goodness of heart, surrounded by wrong and insanity and chaos and darkness, he did not waver, and he defeated the dark force that prevents this creation from truly being the Father’s kingdom, as he proved the following Sunday morning.
Guys like Bartlett make me want to vomit. Grow a pair, or shut up and go away.
There’s a frequent BN commenter who, lately, has peppered his responses to posts with the phrase, “You lost.” Well, yes, we lost a battle, called the November 08 election, but that merely proves what I’m saying here: We haven’t achieved victory yet, so we must fight.
Reading Time magazine will rot your brain – today’s edition
Time calls Pubs “truculent” and tries to put the word in Michael Steele’s mouth. Also, in their coverage of Lt. Gov. Steele’s assuming of the RNC chairmanship, not a word from an actual conservative about the excitement this generates. Also – and this is no surprise – does not tell the lefty origins of the “magic Negro” phrase but rather tries to trace it back to Rush.
Henry and Claire are rolling in their graves.
01.30.09
Any Word Press experts out there?
I just wrote one of the best and most important BN posts ever, but I’ve had to take it back out. (I did save it as a Word file.) It made all the right-hand-side stuff – categories, acrchives by months, links – go away. Thought it might be the length, so I divided it in half. Same thing.
I’d very much like to re-post it. Anybody know what’s going on?
UPDATE: I think I have it taken care of. See above post, “THe nobility of the fighter.”
TCM kicks his Marxist-Leninist bona fides up a notch
Now we’re gonna have a “middle class task force” and also “level the playing field between management and workers.” All true Marxist-Leninists love that word “workers.”
Had you wondered what the latest was on this front?
To follow up on something we took note of the other day, North Korea has now scrapped its non-agression pact with South Korea.
01.29.09
Beyond patty-cake
And so millions of Iranian people are consigned to indefinite totalitarianism. And so the Iranian nuke program gets another boost.
It’s all yours, toots
By now you know about the demonstration of spine, fealty to principle and common sense, and party unity exhibited by House Pubs who, to a member, voted no on the “stimulus package.”
And, with the delusionality typical of totalitarians, she tries to make it sound like everyone in the field of economics is on board with the need for government to cure this recession. As the Cato Institute’s full-page ad in the NYT shows, that just ain’t so.
Kind of reminds one of Al Gore’s attempt to portray climate science as “settled.”
01.28.09
Runup to showcase
The studio where Mrs. BN and I take dance lessons is putting on its wintertime showcase in about three weeks. We’re doing a waltz routine to “Someday My Prince Will Come.” I can visualize the sequence of steps in my head, and I can do it fairly fluidly the first time or two we go through it at rehearsal, but then I start over-thinking it and getting lost.
There are definite parallels to getting lost in a chart when paying music. And the only recourse is the same one: do somethign credible to tread your way back to a familiar point at which you can get back on track.
Part of the particular challenge of dance is remembering a whole set of stuff for your upper body: good frame, shoulders back, chest out, upward gaze, and then the feet stuff: forward side together, twinkle, left box and such.
And then there’s trying not to do stuff that makes Mrs. BN laugh.
The first week, in realistic terms
These are tricky times for we writers whose principal thrust is upholding Western civilization. Here is this president, whom the MSM assures us is “enormously popular” with goodwill and political capital out the wazoo. He has very solid majorities of his party in both houses of Congress. Much left-of-center punditry energy is being spent on trying to convince us that conservatism is marginalized to its place in our culture of sixty years ago.
So every time I write a BN post, I look it over before hitting the button. You are seeing some strong rhetoric here lately. I’m prepared to field the accusation that it is purple, over-the-top, reality-challenged. Life outside my window, after all, looks pretty normal: cars going down the street, people shoveling snow, walking their dogs. Rest assured that no one is more concerned about whether there’s validity to such accusations than your present blogger.
I’d say that the most important tool in examining that is some sort of baseline. Freedom and prosperity and common sense in America have had their waxes and wanes over the course of my life, which goes back to the Eisenhower era. I’m also an academically trained historian, so I know a few things about what came before me. One probably needs to look at some past time of crisis or precarious set of circumstances, when leaders considered extraordinary measures. The Civil War and the Great Depression would qualify for such times. Or one could look at times of clearly failed leadership, when obvious fools were at the helm of policy-directing. Jimmy Carter’s term would fall into this category.
Okay, I’m considering all such times, and I still say we haven’t seen anything like what we’re seeing now.
Let’s recap TCM’s first week:
- He’s on board with the broad outlines of an absolutely horrendous “stimulus bill,” a monstrosity full of pork and expenditures having nothing to do with an immediate economic boost.
- He’s rescinded the order banning use of our tax dollars for abortions in foreign countries.
- He’s directed the EPA to look at how to let individual states establish their own emissions and fuel-efficiency standards, thus negating any help we’re giving to car makers, as they will have to come up with unimaginable heaps of specifications, tooling, and marketing plans to deal with all the standards. (And let us not forget that government-mandated standards per se are pure totoalitarian socialism; TCM couches this in terms of “helping the automakers prepare for the future”)
- He gave an interview to a Dubai-based TV network in which he emphasized how the US will listen to the Muslim world, without a challenge to the Muslim world to address its terrorism problem and its human-rights problem, in which he adopted an apologetic tone, fabricating some past US stance of “dictating” things to the Muslim world, and in which all he had to say about Iranian nukes was that we were waiting for Iran to “unclench its fist”
- His secretary of state’s husband’s foundation gets shovelsful of money from Saudi donors
-His treasury secretary has yet to fully explain his tax dodging
- His main meme in talking to GOP legislators has been to tell them to “put aside politics,” to “put aside childish things,” to “turn off Rush Limbaugh,” a clear attempt to marginalize conservative energy in this country
- He’s signed an order to close Gitmo with no plan, even a vague one, for what to do with the mad-dog jihadists being held there
- He’s signed an order putting the kibosh on “harsh interrogation techniques,” methods which have prevented many terrorist attacks so far this decade
- He’s continued to talk up “green jobs,” making all kinds of fantastic projections about how many of them can be created with government initiative, without extending us the consideration of even defining what a “green job” is, or how soon the enterprises hiring people for these “green jobs” will be profitable
That’s the first week. this isn’t a “dramatic pace of action” or a “robust program.” This is radical transformation of the United States of America into something none of us will recognize.
It’s frustrating to watch the MSM report each of these developments. They can get away with the ostensibly objective stance of saying, “We’re just giving you the who-what-where-when,” even as they selectively exclude the alarm of the likes of John Boehner or Mike Pence. It’s a new day, doncha know, and anyone who’s going to have a role in shaping the future is on the Chicago Marxist Express.
Like hell. I’m not. And I’ll say this in unapologetically persuasion-type language: Don’t you be either.
The madness at the core of the FHer worldview
You can see it in the governing styles of the likes of Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe and the Castro brothers – and San Fran Nan.
Here is the poisonous core of leftism in the purest form we’ve seen in a while – the use of feigned pity for beleagured elements in society to maximize the dictatorship’s power at the expense of anybody’s well-being.
Here’s a noteworthy factoid
Did you know Buddhists outnumber Muslims in the US?
TCM doesn’t, given the way he’s spoken about America’s diversity recently.
01.27.09
John Updike, R.I.P.
I always regarded Updike as fitting into that terrain between modern America and postmodern America. He was neither from that group – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Dos Passos, Eliot, Stevens and Williams – that bequeathed a real voice to twentieth-century writing, but neither did he breathe the anger of Mailer or the abandon of the Beats.
His tableau was that precipice upon which mid-century Protestants from small towns in flyover country walked, balancing earnest quest for God, undeniable libido, ambition, regard for virtue, a sense of American greatness and a preoccupation with the small anxieties of himself and his peers, civic-mindedness and community’s capacity to constrict.
Do writers or anyone else nowadays even give glancing consideration to such things?
One week in office and he’s already surpassing Jimmuh as the worst prez ever
To whom does TCM grant his first sit-down interview since becoming president? An Arab network. What does he use the occasion to do? Puke all over himself to genuflect and self-flagellate, saying the US has made mistakes and will now listen to the Muslim world and not dictate like, according to him, it used to do.
This guy has no shame. What he does have, though, is a nightmare vision of what he wants to transform this country into, and the single-minded determination to achieve it quickly.
Positively everything you need to know about the FHer response to current economic conditions
Does it surprise you that it comes from the towering Thomas Sowell?
A frequent commenter at BN has, in previous threads about the recession, characterized it as “a FUBARed mess that no one knows what to do about.” A time or two I have chimed in to say, “Well, no. Lots of people know. and it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what the FHers are putting in place.”
Sowell goes beyond this rather obvious point to inquire into why the FHers would pursue this course. See if your guess as to what it is matches Dr. Sowell’s conclusion.
BTW, his money line is that responding to this crisis with infrastructure spending is akin to mailing a letter to the fire department to tell it your house is burning.
01.26.09
The H-word creature says, “Don’t you worry. I may not be prez, but I can be plenty fatal to human freedom from my State Department perch”
She appoints a “climate change envoy.” From the George Soros-financed Center for American Progress, no less.
More from the file “Yes, we knew the destruction of America was coming, but it’s still weird to see it actually unfold.”
TCM: How fast can I proceed with turning the United States into North Korea?
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Force car companies to make their various models in small batches custom-tailored to each state’s particular numbers. That will help them become solvent and sell more product.
This is happening faster than even I thought it would.
The new regime makes it official
We knew they were going to do this, but now they’re on record wanting you impoverished and dependent on them for even life’s basic necessities.
Scroll down through the interview transcript and you’ll be struck by some major irony. At least I was. Gregory, to whom I’ve never ascribed a lick of sense, says to Sec. Summers – I’m paraphrasing – “let me get this straight. You’re saying the government can afford the massive spending in the stimulus bill, including ‘tax cuts’ for those who don’t pay much or anything in taxes, but that we can’t afford to extend the W tax cuts.” Summers, who I thought did have some degree of good sense, says “Yes, because the middle class will spend it on stuff they need and get goods and services going again.”
That’s with borrowed money, Secretary Summers.
Sounds to me like he’s been told to get with the party line and not give the slightest hint of wavering.
Bad and wrong. These people hate freedom.
