Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Neo-neocon looks at Shelby Steele’s assessment of what we’ve come to know about TCM this past year, and goes him a step further. Key line: “He lacks an inner core, and has filled the vacuum with an ideology that he plans to impose on this country if he possibly can, whether we like it or not.”
. . . but not our infantile FHer overlords.
Despite decades of attempt by the public-education system, the journalistic world, and the arts and entertainment industry to turn the nation’s public’s minds into oatmeal, we still know how things ought to be.
Great Pajamas Media piece by Tom Blumer entitled “Economic Rebound? What Economic Rebound?”
Rush is resting comfortably after being admitted to a Honolulu hospital for chest pains. Prayers for a speedy recovery to one of the world’s indispensible upholders of freedom, common sense, human dignity, and the notion that life should basically be a joyful adventure.
At the current juncture in her tentative dance with reality, she comes to understand that TCM is completely worthless as far as keeping us safe.
And another New York paper not known for kicking FHer tail, the Daily News, tells the Most Equal Comrade to get a grip.
Per Toby Harnden’s column today in the UK Telegraph:
1.) The repeated attempts by Abdulmutallab’s father to alert the CIA to his son’s radicalism
2.) the bureaucratic bloat of the organizations designed to adress national security (This is, of course, a problem that began under W, who was haphazard in his execution of this war even if he had the requisite sense of urgency, which TCM clearly does not)
3.) the CIA’s identification of A. in August as a “person of interest”
4.) TCM’s use of the term “isolated extremist” in his statement – three days after the attempted attack – when it’s clear that A is al-Qaeda through and through
5.) The regime’s overall minimization of the various terrorist incidents throughout this year
6.) Stigmatization of Gitmo as some kind of place where human rights are debased (Again, another problem begun under W, such as the release of Yemeni jihadists who went through the Saudi “rehabilitation” program and then went back to waging war)
7.) Janet Napolitano, who is a pathetic failure way in over her head
8.) the reluctance of TCM to seriously kick ass within his administration – that is, fire people
9.) the ongoing “what-we-inherited-from-W” whine
10.) lack of recognition of Yemen as a nest of jihadi trouble
The full skinny on what TCM and the FHers are imposing on us with hourly momentum.
The TCM administration whines about DHS procedures from the previous era as the reason this al-Qaeda looney nearly blew up an airplane in Detroit.
Memo to my fellow American citizens: No one has our back in this current war.
Another Black Conservative looks at three areas meriting presidential involvement that didn’t get any in the last few days:
1.) the 17 percent unemployment rate (which put the kibbosh on lots of Americans’ plans for vacations of any kind, much less in tropical paradises)
2.) the terrorist attack in Detroit (and Janet Napolitano’s alarmingly buffoonish response)
3.) the renewed passion with which Iranians are protesting the regime that rules them (marking the best – and last – opportunity we may get to avoid apocalyptic showdown)
The latest print-edition issue of National Review is one of those magazines physically lying around the house that needs to go into some kind of permanent file.
The cover story is actually comprised of four related articles. Taken together, under the title “The Four Horsemen of Progressivism,” they provide a very timely look at the question of how we got here that VDH explores in his own fashion in he link in the last post.
Along with the pioneers of progressivism examined in each of the articles – Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Richard T. Ely – the reader is inspired by choice references to go back and bone up on such figures as Auguste Comte and the Marquis de Condorcet.
Each of the four NR articles at one pont or another delves into biographical data, and it’s here that one can see that a lot of our current cultural forces go back a long way. Both of New Republic founder and Promise of American Life author Herbert Croly’s parents were New York journalists. The dad was into some kind of kooky movement to loosen up society to the point of being cool with premarital – and, I think, extramarital – sex, and the mom was an ardent feminist.
There is much examination of the German influence on the development of American progressivism. Several members of the first and second generations of the faculty of Johns Hopkins, for instance, studied at German universities in the mid-19th century under pioneering scholars in such new fields as sociology.
This leads me to a personal reflection. I remember one professor in particular when I was working on my master’s degree in American history in the 1980s who, while he did try to deliver his lecture content with a credibly objective tone, nonetheless, it is clear in retrospect, spoke glowingly of the above-mentioned figures, in addition to Thorstein Veblen and Charles Beard. I was being fed PC propaganda, no doubt about it. (On reflection, it does seem as if he brought a bit of dismissive tone to his mentions of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.) This teacher was keen on impressing on us what an intellectual trailblazer Germany was at that point.
The overall impression one gets from the sum total of the four articles comprising the cover story in the latest NR is that this archetype of the American progressive goes back a long way: a professed empathy with the “struggling” or “disadvantaged” classes and demographic groups, which must be juxtaposed against an actual snobbery that borders on contempt for the actual human beings in those classes. You see, Croly, Dewey et al looked down their noses at devout Christians who put personal faith above the state, people who were at home working with their hands and backs, and those who had profit among their considerations when thinking up ways to benefit humankind. They preferred the east-coast chin-rubbers, the oh-so-judicial / sensitive / culturally-up-to-the-minute types that comrised the entirity of their social and working circles.
The rest of the issue is of this caliber. Mark Steyn’s back-page column on Nuaru’s recognition of Abkhazia, as well as Theodore Dalyrimple’s look at what Conan Doyle contributed to our culture with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, are two more examples of why you ought to avail yourself of a copy.
Excellent Victor Davis Hanson column (but then I’m being redundant) on the cultural strains that made for the current regime’s hijacking of our way of life and national character. Hanson identifies three particular elements:
1.) equality of result
2.) multiculturalism
3.) the Chicago way
So what we have is a worldview that says all people deserve equal outcomes no matter what choices they make in life, that there has been a glaring inequality characterizing our society, and that this is due to a caste of white male Christians enjoying a top tier of a hieracrchy (and the United States exercising an arrogant hegemony in its international relations), and that the regime is going to by God force its vision down our throats even if it has to resort to blatant thuggery.
May everyone reading this have a Christmas Eve and Christmas glowing with love, sparkling with enchantment, and full of the stuff of memories.
John Kerry plans to go to Tehran.
This is the FHer modus operandi in both foreign and domestic affairs: go for the most disastrous policy available, the policy most contemptuous of freedom and decency, in the name of some supposedly-grand-but-actually-perverted vision for “the world.”
Great Redstate post entitled “When Did Conservatives Lose America?”
New-home sales sank eleven percent in November, and the Dow and S&P have responded accordingly.
Rocky recovery, indeed.
There is a frequent commenter here at BN who accuses me of being tinfoil-hat-balck-helicopter-over-the-top with my assertion that the Freedom-Haters are wrecking the economy on purpose.
Here’s my proof that it’s so: The way out of our morass would be astoundingly simple, quick and elegant. In fact, it would be exciting to witness.
Our overlords are not stupid. They know this in what passes for hearts in such creatures.
Legal Insurrection has started an ongoing series of posts called “Please Tell Me This Is Not So.” The latest installment focuses on some ornaments to be found on the White House Christmas tree.
What a depressing irony it is that, during Christmas week, the United States of America finds itself in the grip of unprecedented evil, a domestic enemy that has used the excuse of being duly elected to turn the last, best hope of humankind into a totalitarian dictatorship.
There are so many levels to this evil.
Jacob Sullum examines the “radical assault on the traditional understanding of rights” that Americans have had throughout their history. Is there anything more foul than convincing people that a right is a “legally enforceable claim on other people’s resources?” That’s what we’re witnessing.
Michael Gerson unpacks the full moral rot of Harry Reid’s offer of thirty pieces of silver to Ben Nelson. A money line: “Many assumed that [Nelson's] objections to abortion coverage were serious.” Alas, they were anything but. And now, taxpayers in all other 49 states will be subsidizing any new Nebraskans coming on board to Medicaid.
It’s the eleventh hour – in fact, well into the eleventh hour. It’s dark indeed. What kinds of resources are called for in a situation like this? Wits, IT savvy, an understanding of the Constitution, but most of all faith.
This is one of those scenarios, much like being outmanned and outgunned in a battle for a peice of ground, in which one realizes that a spiritual level to one’s existence is a binary choice. You may or may not call yourself a Christian, Jew, Buddhist or Hindu. You may or may not sign on to premillenial dispensationalsim, sola scriptura, or even such modern inventions as Rauschenberg’s social gospel, but at a juncture this grim, you will be forced to reach into your core and ask yourself whether all that is true, lovely, noble and worthwhile will in the end be preserved.
Alabama Representative Parker Griffith is switching from the Freedom-Haters to the GOP. He’s an oncologist by career, and it was socialist health care that was the final straw for him.
