01.30.10
Ransacking the past
Ronald Radosh looks at the poisonous work of “historian” Howard Zinn, who passed away this week.
01.24.10
Why the FHer project collapsed with such breathtaking suddenness
A lot of astonishing things are going on in the world right now, but none more so, it seems to me, than the jaw-droppingly swift erosion in American enthusiasm for the FHer project – the polices, the approach toward governance, the underlying premise. In the space of a year, how did numbers plummet for support of anything and anything FHer from their lofty heights?
Most people knew, even if they voted for him harboring some kind of hope against what was likely, that TCM was a socialist and a pathological narcissist. Still, for reasons ranging from his rock-star charisma, to the confluence of several streams of good fortune for him, to the dismal alternative the GOP was offering, a lot of Americans gave him the most powerful position in the world and permitted themselves to be charmed to whatever degree.
I think what has so dramatically changed about the American mindset is what we’ve seen by coming perilously close to the condition of national life that we discussed in the abstract before the TCM era got underway. We’ve had a taste of what the entire scenario would look like. We have nationalized car companies. We’ve seen deficits ratcheted to previously inconceivable levels in the name of swine odor research and bridge repair. We’ve come within a hair’s breadth of the enactment of the utterly insane idea of cap and trade. Government regulation of pay for executives of privately owned companies is being seriously discussed. We narrowly escaped socialist health care.
This was all very unnatural for Americans. Once it was up in their faces, they asked themselves, is this really going to be our future?
A major component of the American character is a robust energy. We love to invent and discover. Anybody does who enjoys sufficient freedom. I think people looked at the FHer project and said, “But what will we do?” The raod ahead looked like the narrowly fenced-in through-way from the cattle pen to the eighteen-wheeler. Americans are mustangs, not cows.
This is a powerful moment. The bloom is really and truly off TCM’s rose. We have solid, dreadful numbers to back us up.
To be sure, we can expect the kind of writhing, teeth-baring, and claw-extending one sees in mortally wounded beasts. We must remember that we hold the big stick with which we delivered the blows that already have it reeling.
There will be no fading of our light, though. (I’m mixing a feloniously large number of metaphors here, aren’t I?) I think freedom has returned from dormancy to an irreversible degree. Any sneaky attempts at repackaging the FHer project will be seen as such. We know what we almost sold for a bag of trinkets, and it won’t happen again.
01.21.10
Why we call them Freedom Haters – today’s edition
The damage they have done is quantifiable and measurable.
01.20.10
Americans dig freedom, plain and simple
David Harsanyi says the Dems had better see that their problem is not leadership or message delivery, or even any coordinated effort by Pubs. They have an idea problem.
12.22.09
A guy with no ambitions beyond defending American interests knows how to shake up the TCM White House
John Bolton says Dick Cheney is the Conservative of the Year.
10.13.09
Let’s head this one off at the pass
I don’t often take the time to light into poisonously wrong-headed op-eds by effete east-coast America-haters, but occasionally I must chime in. I think the main reason I’m compelled to do so in this instance is that I’m pretty sure my next column for The Republic (the Columbus, Indiana daily newspaper) (deadline at the end of this week) is going to be on the subject of American exceptionalism. That was the subject of film critic / cultural observer Neal Gabler’s column this morning in the Boston Globe.
He makes one of my tasks – avoiding a I-can-match-your-stats-and-figures-on-this-controversy pissing match – easier by establishing at the get-go and at every turn afterward throughout his essay just what his assumptions are. He buys into the global-warming nonsense. He thinks national health care is an obviously desirable thing. He thinks our nation’s intelligence-gatherers have tortured. He bandies the term “affordable”- in the case of this column, in the context of education – as if there’s some objective definition of it. He thinks income equality is some kind of public-policy issue. And then comes the crown jewel of his foul, stinking premise: he sees Americans as “thinned-skinned and arrogant.”
I will take him on regarding what he has to say about immigration. He says that those who – well, I’m going to use my terminology here, not his – understand that America is exceptional point to the number of people who clamor to get here. The example he uses to make his point is Mexicans, and, while there are certainly a lot of them here, legally and illegally, they are far from the only foreign population seeking residency and / or citizenship inside our borders. Consider the growing number of people from India, various Pacific rim countries, Brazilians who come here, get first-rate educations and either start small businesses or make huge contributions to American corporations. He uses the example of Turks emigrating to Germany as his example of an equivalent pehenomenon elsewhere in the world. Well, yes. Germany certainly gets its share of Turks – and far less secular Muslims from far more strident lands. They are not so good at assimilating, Mr. Gabler may have noticed. Also, the United States has a history of people pouring in from various nations – even Germany – going clear back to its birth.
What Gabler doesn’t do is address the actual substance of the claim of exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is not predicated on any kind of prowess or might we have. These are by-products of what makes our country exceptional.
To go over the basics again – something you constantly have to do with leftists, since they make an art out of obscuring the main point of an argument – America is exceptional because it was founded on an idea – in and of itself a novel basis for starting a country in the 1770s – and that idea was that human beings are free because God built it into the nature of our creation. That was powerful stuff. It certainly shook up George III, and Europe generally. (Can you imagine how it blew the minds of rulers and political theorists in Asia, Africa and South America?)
That’s why all those Slavs, Germans, Brits, Poles, Italians, Indians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, Salvadorans and Kenyans have come to our shores. That’s why they by and large experience a rise in their standard of living beyond their wildest imagining. You can do what you want here. You can create, invent, refine, observe, comment on, organize or just plain draw a paycheck from just about anything you can think of, and, at least so far, no one will stop you.
Oh, and there’s our righteousness, too. DeTouqueville saw that. Americans volunteer, make charitable contributions and get civically involved like no other people on the face of the Earth.
Oh, and what was our Civil War fought over? The notion that no human being ought to own another. That was a first.
Where did the notion that women are fully equal human beings really take hold? That’s right. Here at Uncle Sam’s place.
The likes of Gabler must be refuted as soon as they spout their garbage. Think about where his line of thinking – I use the term loosely – takes us. To a world with no moral compass. To a world in which the likes of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Norway and China – to put together a list culled from the current stars of the United Nations – assume the mantle of leadership. Not a pretty picture.
I say “the likes of Gabler.” He’s not some isolated case. We have someone exuding the same odor strutting into the Oval Office every day.
ADDENDUM: I neglected to address his “government-inspires-people-more-than-people-inspire-government” line. For one thing, it sure is in keeping with his basic contempt for the actual citizens of this country – who, by the way, confer legitimacy on the government at their pleasure. Re: his World War II example: national security is the proper purview of the federal government – in fact, its basic duty. Re: JBJ and civil-rights legislation: he comes awfully close here to insinuating that the majority of Americans were basically racist and / or bigoted right up until 1965, which, if that’s what he’s getting at, is a vicious lie.
08.28.09
Not only is the TCM-FHer regime deliberately trying to cripple the economy domestically, it is purposely trying to weaken national security and US world leadership
On the heels of Eric Holder’s decision to have a special prosecutor look into W-era CIA interrogation practices comes the State Department’s decision to cut off aid to Honduras and declare Zelaya’s ouster a coup d’etat.
Beyond shameful.
07.22.09
Now I remember why I cringed when I heard the H-word Creature was going to be Secretary of State
06.23.09
The US wasn’t a bully, but this regime that has replaced it sure is
The TCM administration can’t find the moral fiber to unequivocally cast its solidarity with the people of Iran risking getting shot in the streets. It can’t find the cajones to stop and board the North Korean ship bound for Myanmar and loaded with a cargo of small arms. Yet it thinks it can “demand” that Israel stop natural-growth settlement in east Jerusalem.
When this nation was known as the United States of America, our allies knew we had their backs. Everybody’s on his own in the post-freedom world.
04.18.09
Iran convicts US reporter, sends her to the hoosegow
. . . and the H-word Creature says the US is “disappointed.”
Any bets on whether this stops the patty-cake?
04.05.09
A world without grown-ups
The challenge for all people who love freedom, dignity and common sense and who remember a world that made sense is to withstand the temptation to succumb to numbness. The reflexive reaction to the hourly turn of this world toward utter madness and the death of resolve is to embrace the incrementalism of it, to see it as just another day of shuffling papers at the UN or monitoring rocket trajectories in Tokyo. Ho-hum, more headlines, more shenanigans by those rascally rogue states.
With this missile launch, TCM’s response and the assured inertia of the Security Council given the strategic aims of China and Russia, however, we are witnessing the abnegation of any responsibility for order in the world. There are no grown-ups. Every one of us as individuals is on his own. Oh, for some time to come municipal law enforcement agencies will deal with those who would burglarize your home or bodily threaten you, but how long can local-level order be maintained when those who could prevent apocalypse will not do so?
I feel like I’m a fairly smart and insightful person, but I can’t for the life of me fathom how the phrase “six-party-talks” is still coming out of anyone’s mouth after this launch. The last session of such talks took place in November 2007.
It’s not just this launch, either. Pyongyang has cut its hot line with Seoul and expelled visiting South Korean industrial workers. It is holding two U.S. journalists as bargaining chips. It has miniaturized nuclear warheads for upfitting on missiles.
Human beings are fallible, limited, collectively and individually, in what they can do to influence their fellows, and unable to foresee all contingencies in a situation. There was a time, however, when some at least tried to address grave developments with proper urgency, vigor and vision. That time is no more. We shall see if God has mercy on us.
Patty-cake by proxy
The British Foreign Ministry is going to talk to Hezbollah. After getting over its “initial alarm,” the TCM administration is interested to see how such talks go.
Iran is licking its chops, and Lebanon and especially Israel feel the chill of a world without friends.
03.29.09
Idly watching events unfold may soon not be an option
Looks like North Korea may test more than one missile.
Oh, and dig this: fifteen Iranians are in NorKor to provide technical assistance with the launch.
03.18.09
Here’s what all that “reset button” blather will get you
Russia undertakes its biggest military overhaul in a century.
03.03.09
Well, then, why the hell are we going to submit to Russian blackmail and betray our European allies?
Anyway, Medvedev says TCM’s latest kick-me gesture doesn’t sweeten the kitty near enough.
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.
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.
02.04.09
Obliging the mullahs in their view of us as weak
The H-Word Creature says . . . well, read it for yourself. So much for the meme that she’s some shrewd, tough-as-nails geostrategist.
