02.27.09
What successful people are in for – some numbers
There are actually three components involved in the seizing by the FHer-run government – the societal institution with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force – of successful Americans’ money, as The Anchoress demonstrates. She has a lot of noteworthy links to other information about the socialist seizure of successful Americans’ income and assets.
This is supposed to somehow add up to a turnaround next year?
02.26.09
For those who still think the main point is the W-era deficit
The TCM / FHer regime has already tripled it and is on its way to quadrupling it.
Top five reasons why taxing “the wealthy” while the FHer regime is looking at cutting taxes for others is bad and wrong
- There aren’t enough of them to provide the money to cover the massive spending TCM and the FHers are proposing
- They constitute the demographic most able to create jobs for everyone else
- They already pay well over half the tax burden in this country
- It discourages invention, creativity, ambition and striving for success
- It creates the destructive impression that those in that income bracket have some obligation above and beyond others to finance public activity
How I spent the time during which the speech transpired
In my office, with the door shut. Mrs. BN, who claims not to be political but in the last few years has become increasingly interested in what Fox News and radio talk show hosts have to say – principally because that’s what I have on the TV, radio and Internet most of the time – is in the living room, watching it.
We agreed that it was a bad idea for me to be in the living room, too.
I told her that the main reason I’ve been exploring Christianity for the last several months is that I know I have to find a way to deal with the very real and very considrable hate in my heart.
This is war to me. That’s why I came up with the term “Reasonable Gentleman.” Anyone who thinks that Democrats are just fellow human beings with a different perspective on America and governance but basically fine creatures with a core worldview like our own is ripe for the enslavement that is surely their lot.
I ask God how to go about this struggle with the holiest frame of mind of which I’m capable. I don’t want to get anything wrong at this point. Heaven knows plenty is wrong in this universe right now without me doing anything to multiply it.
02.23.09
Hard-core Marxists don’t change their minds
. . . even when leading indicators such as the stock market and the cunsumer index plunge every time the Supreme Directorate announces another plank of its Great Leap Forward. Gateway Pundit has a roundup of numbers and links for today’s slide toward oblivion as well as continuing disastrous moves and goofy pronouncements by various FHer commandantes.
02.22.09
Some FHers have even bigger designs on your money than TCM
The Anchoress has a post about a California congressman who wants to instate a marginal rate of 90 percent on successful people. Actually, her post is about the whole subject of our current state of economic affairs. It’s full of links, including documentation – A New York Times article from 2003 – that you can’t pin it on W. W actually tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole loan-to-people-who-aren’t-qualified stampede.
If you can’t see the jive in TCM’s budget plan, you deserve the dictatorship he’s imposing on you
TCM is counting on you to be stupid. Will you oblige him?
Form a good one, Bibi!
Israel’s President Peres gives Netanyahu six weeks to assemble a viable coalition.
This is the most constructive signal the West has given the Arab-Muslim world in some time.
02.18.09
TCM’s mortgage-relief plan
With this new regime, we get at least one nightmare development a day, sometimes more. Today there’s a veritable cornucopia.
The biggie – so far, anyway – is this mortgage-relief plan. Where to start? It’s bad and wrong on so many levels:
a.) There’s the basic level on which the government has made someone else’s mortgage my problem – and yours.
b.) This is in effect a repeat of the Community Reinvestment Act that started this chain of events in the first place. We have the state strong-arming lending institutions into covering for people who can’t afford their houses.
c.) As a distortion of the free market, it will affect prices and interest rates in ways that make it harder to determine the actual value of anything.
d.) ACORN is already in militant mode, staging squat-ins and trying to play it both ways – acting the beleagured victim but also the politically powerful intimidating force. TCM does know how to help the industry that spawned him – Alinskyite “community organizing.”
e.) Coming as it does on the heels of TARP I and II, the car-company bailout, SCHIP and the “stimulus” package, it entrenches the notion in the public mind that massive government involvement in private commerce is the norm.
f.) It reinforces the notion in the minds of pathetically ignorant rubes that TCM is some kind of glow-enshrouded savior. This is the kind of people who turned out last weekend in Caracas for the vote-no-on-term-limits rallies, the kind of people who fill the main square in Pyongyang for Dear Leader rallies, who filled German stadiums circa 1934 to swoon over the Furher.
We got fooled again.
UPDATE: Stocks slid in immediate response to TCM’s announcement of this plan. IF this were any patriotic, freedom-loving president who wanted to see American citizens prosper, he would be concerned and embarrassed and looking at a way to change course. Alas, this isn’t any such leader. This is Mr. Fundamental Transformation. He’s got us exactly where he wants us.
Our new attorney general is an arrogant race-baiter
One thing you have to hand to the FHer regime: for all the different demographic and personality types, they are all on the same page when it comes to character traits like arrogance, vulgarity and a determination to poke their Stalinist noses into how we live our lives when we’re not in direct contact with the state. They also each and all have a knack for beating dead horses, for staking policy orientations on issues that were resolved long ago.
That internal barometer that tells us when something just ain’t right
One subject I haven’t really weighed in on since it moved to the fore of righties’ concerns is the matter of who gets to decide how to define conservatism. After the Pub clock-cleaning in November, many a pundit didn’t wait for their reeling to subside to chime in. Purists from markedly different schools of thought dismissed the perceived apostates with the urgency of those determined to lead the charge against the newly empowered state Leviathan.
There are some quirky permutations out there, but the schism really boils down to the question of whether “cultural conservatives,” those whose primary concerns are “social issues” have a place at the table of modern conservatism. You’ve read the arguments by now. The camp that believes they aren’t welcome is itself a rather large tent, including east-coast chin-stroking types, such as Kathleen Parker and David Frum, libertarian types such as Neal Boortz, and generally-spot-on-but-occasionally-quite-oddball bloggers such as Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse. The other camp includes, obviously, politically engaged evangelicals, but also flagship journals such as National Review and talk show hosts such as Laura Ingraham and Greg Garrison.
In order to repair this schism as quickly as possible – there is, after all, a socialist takeover of our country, as well as an overall decay of the West, underway – several participants in this discussion are harkening to various bullet-point-type lists of foundational principles that can serve as guides. Russell Kirk’s list of ten conservative principles has been mentioned. Edmund Burke’s reasons for opposing the French Revolution, after having championed the American one, are getting an airing. (In this regard, may I offer the Bent Notes Manifesto as a useful benchmark?)
I think we may be helped by seeing that there are layers, or levels, if you like, to this ideology to which we all claim fealty and proper understanding.
The most accessible layer is to look at what has been going on in the West for the last seventy or eighty years – certainly in the last twenty – and declare what we’re against. You could get most self-proclaimed conservatives of any stripe on board by saying “We stand opposed to
a.) the disingenuous use of the word “diversity” as a way for such institutions as schools, arts councils and human-rights councils to erode a cohesive sense of what the West is about
b.) the whole “green” movement
c.) the notion that one should regard human sexuality in an utterly casual manner
d.) the notion that there is some magic alternative to free-market economics
e.) the notion that some kind of lasting “peace” for all humankind forevermore is achievable
f.) the notion that you can build the kind of vital and durable civilization that we have in fact built without having an ongoing public conversation about God be part of the exchange of ideas that builds it”
I could probably think of a few more items, but you get the idea.
Then there is the level on which we outline the principles that guide us in asserting what we do stand for as specific issues arise in our society.
I know it’s less easy to define and quantify, but the level on which conservatism is examined as a dispostion, a mindset, an attitude, ought to be part of the debate. If your read Kirk’s ten principles, they are really tendencies. They spell out a direction that a conservative’s response to a given societal development takes.
I think a conservative first and foremost takes his cue from history. We have some ten thousand years’ worth of clues as to what works and what doesn’t. Granted, not all institutions, customs or philosophies of governance that lasted a long time have been good, but even in these we can see what righted them with effectiveness and finality.
I also think the conservative, broadly defined, is instinctively wary of the notion of “fairness.” At first glance, a number of things look fair that, upon closer examination, must be regarded in light of nature’s parameters. A handy example of this is the feminist movement. It seems to the observer employing rationality but not referencing biology, psychology or history that men and women are equally suited for anything and everything in this world, from esoteric feats of engineering to nurturing infants to commanding armies to making a home feel like a home. Such an observer would surely conclude that questions of provision, protection, and final decision-making in family situations should not be colored by gender considerations. Alas, when what we know of the above fields of inquiry is brought to bear on our assessment, we are compelled to move toward some other kind of conclusion. Other examples abound, and as I think of them, I’ll use them for future posts on this subject.
My main point, though, is that there is some intuition involved in how a conservative thinks and operates. It’s a little like Louis Armstrong’s remark that if one has to ask what jazz is, he’ll never know.
The Freedom-Haters – yes, there’s that term, and I’ll keep on using it because it is flawlessly accurate – are taking great delight at the cacophony breaking out all over our side. I’m not denying the real points of difference that make for the din, but I think that as our hoss sense ever more clearly tells us that what is being done to a civilization we had assumed to be immutable will in fact destroy it, we’ll find our common ground fairly quickly.
02.17.09
TCM gives Israel the middle finger
We’re going to be involved in Durban II after all. Probably just “preparations” rather than attendance, doncha understand.
Yeah, right.
If this were anyone other than TCM aka The Anointed One
. . . the MSM would eat his delicate parts for lunch. But, seeing as how it’s The Marxist With The Glistening Pecs, he gets a pass for the 2,000-point Dow slide since his election, which continued today even through his signing of the Take-A-Crowbar-to-the-Market-Economy Act.
This is your Secretary of State, America
Plus, she’s a damn liar. North Korea shredded the Agreed Framework. Even fessed up to it in 02 when we confronted them.
They’ll be prying my cold, dead fingers from this keyboard
The Fairness Doctrine is by no means some overblown fear on the part of freedom-lovers. It’s getting lots of mainstream discussion these days, in fact.
