Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
It’s probably safe to eat their little niblets. They wouldn’t be so brazen as to off you in the foyer of the Cannon Building. But just remember what their endgame is. In the chilling words of San Fran Nan:
“Kick open that door, and there will be other legislation to follow,” she said. “We’ll take the country in a new direction.”
TCM says never mind polls, do the will of the people.
March 16, 9 AM, at the Capitol. Even though it would be next to impossible to squeeze a quick trip to DC into my life right now, I’m seriously thinking about how I might do so. (I am calling Congresspeople whenever I get a few minutes.)
In any event, BN will publicize it and disseminate details as they become available.
We must defeat this naked attempt at tyranny.
Few things are as important in this country today as making sure people understand that health care is not a right. The very existence of the United States of America may hinge on it.
But what’s involved in conveying that message? I’ve written blog posts and columns for years now about it, and still I preoccupy myself with finding yet more effective ways of getting through.
Let’s try this. Let’s start with some things on which we’re all in agreement as to being rights, and see how it is that we have concluded thusly. I think that starts with how the average human being reacts to really visualizing what it means to have the right violated.
Let’s start with the right to life. If someone threatens you with gunshot or strangulation or bludgeoning or poisoning, I think you can see that the outrage is over a kind of theft. The violator is taking something you already have. You had your life, and along comes this being that is determined to take it away. Your life was yours. You didn’t have to go to a government agency or anyone else to get it. And, most importantly, your having it doesn’t depend on the labor of your fellow human being. You draw a breath because your determination and God’s grace make that possible.
Okay, on to the right to liberty. (And let’s be grown-ups here. This is not the forum to debate the claimed “right” to have sex with three partners at once with a king-sized spliff hanging out of your mouth.) If anyone interferes with your right to, say, marry the person of the opposite sex of your choice, apply to a given school for a particular degree, stroll down to your local Dairy Queen for a banana split, paint your house blue, go to central Iowa on vacation, or join the Democrat party – or, how about this one? – start a health insurance company, that person is in the wrong.
On to the pursuit of happiness. If someone interferes with your ambitions to make it as a folk singer, or to play tennis on Sunday morning, or give all your money to charity, that person is in the wrong.
You have rights to things that are naturally yours. How does this supposed right to health care fit into this model? For one thing, who gets to define the very term? There are Christian Scientists and others who do not go to surgeons or pharmacists and do not want to participate in a system that requires them to spend money on such activities.
So let’s say you get sick, or bust up your knee in a bike wreck. In our present arrangement, who is taking away your right to anything? For the sake of this scenario, let’s say you come down with a really exotic disease, and your research indicates that it just may kill you. You approach five different specialists and get price quotes on treatments. They’re quite high. You could never pay them out of pocket. You submit a claim to your insurance company. Its response is, “We can only pay for one night’s hospital stay. Your actual treatment is way beyond what you are covered for.”
You have a dilemma on your hands, to be sure, but has some right of yours been violated? Is there something that you had always had that is now being taken away willfully by someone?
Of course not.
People in such scenarios do indeed need care, not to mention compassion. But saying to the rest of us that we must forfeit our money – the operative term in that last phrase being our – to provide the skilled labor that such people need is a violation of our rights to do as we choose with what is ours.
I sincerely doubt that this is my last word on this subject, but I feel pretty good that I have come as close as a philosophical level will allow in formulating conclusive proof of something like this.
This is serious stuff. Play-time is over. We are talking about whether the United States of America will survive in the form in which it’s existed for 234 years.
Our enemy is playing for keeps. We must be relentless in fighting it.
The jackbooted Freedom-Haters intend to use reconciliation.
This is way outside the parameters of historically normal Washington back and forth.
This is war.
Charles Krauthammer’s column today, “Toyota and the Price of Modernity,” raises an interesting point.
The fact is that progress – technological and industrial advancement – is about moving into uncharted territory, much like pioneers advancing on the frontier (or astonauts stepping onto the surface of the moon). No one can possibly predict all the variables that will come into play when something new is invented or discovered.
It’s as if we’ve crossed some kind of threshold, and now we have some kind of perception that there is a “system,” like rules of a game, by which we can systemetize the forward push of human ingenuity. The fact is that there is no “system.” As Krauthammer says, we should certainly not trivialize skirting of the pontential for peril that a maker of a product has indeed ascertained to be present. On the other hand, it would be refreshing to see our culture once again nod admiringly in the presence of boldness and robust belief that invention basically leads to good.
Several columns are appearing today with the theme of the FHers’ desperate scramble to find a scapegoat for the failure to implement their vision. S.E. Cupp gives the subject a good treatment, as does Jonah Goldberg.
As I say in the title of a recent post, the kind of thing this regime wants to impose on the American people works in societies with cultural histories full of despotism and instability, but in a center-right nation like ours, the outcome is merely a nasty train wreck.
One of my highest values is clarity. It’s bracing when you come across it, due to its short supply in this world. Its opposite takes all kinds of forms: convoluted poll questions, situational deviation from principles, excitement over sudden new cultural phenomena, kooky theories, a course of action based on staying loaded or otherwise tuning out the reality in front of one’s face.
Lefties have been lobbing the “simplistic” accusation at us for decades. Ronald reagan mentioned it in the thunderous October 1964 address that began his political career.
You know what they say the real remedy is. Nuance, like a free market, but one that is saddled with all kinds of regulation. Equality for women as defined by feminists but encompassing the reserved right to claim vicitmization at the drop of a hat. “Green” technology, but with pretty much total subsidization since it can’t hold its own in the marketplace. Deference to an “international community” that, when codified into organizations like the United Nations is repeatedly shown to be a cesspool of tyranny, corruption and incompetence.
I hold therapy in ever-lower regard the older I get, but in a sense, that’s what this blog is for me. An opportunity to get clear about what works and what is right, true and good. The leftist utopian vision has reached the point where its core madness is now on full display. The only antidote is exertion of will, a refusal to be sucked into its vortex.
Free markets. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. As Dutch said, not simplistic, but simple after all.
And challenging – indeed, daunting, to see through to reification. That’s for sure.
In the course of musing on the Audi ad that ran during the Super Bowl, Mark Steyn coins a new term: “Conformo-radicalism.” And, no, it’s not a contradiction.
There’s another ad along the same lines that grates on me to no end. It’s for some butter-substitute product. It starts out showing a throng of fit and beaming Danes sashaying down a Copenhagen street. The voiceover says that Denmark recently banned transfats nationwide. Then the ad sells the product, winding up with a message along the lines of “We’re as smart as those with-it Danes!”
Now it’s hip to piss away your freedom.
53 % of Dems view the term “socialism” favorably, per Gallup.
By way of a refutation of Charles Johnson’s (Little Green Footballs) ten reasons for parting with the right, Dennis Prager demonstrates the basic decency and intellectual integrity of mainstream conservatism.
Conrad Black offers a first-anniversary/eve-of-the-State-of-the-Union take on The Aquarian Totalitarian at National Review Online that articulates everything I would put in such a piece, and no doubt more eloquently. To summarize, the current president is a ham-handed authoritarian leftist and an aloof naricissist who is ensuring himself of one dismal term in office. Black says that the Pubs really need to get out in front of this and start floating serious 2012 candidates soon, but that their problem is that none of the likely figures has what it’s really going to take.
That’s a problem not just for the GOP but for all Americans, given the fact that not just TCM but the entire FHer party and media infrastructure seems to have opted for doubling down on the policy orientation that the public clearly hates. Every day at sites such as Real Clear Politics, one gets columns like Todd Purdum’s in Vanity Fair, David Plouffe’s in The Washington Post, and Peter Beinart’s at The Daily Beast that drum home the theme that their message of socialism and planned decline just need to be conveyed more effectively.
In other words, while the Brown victory in Massachussetts was of the greatest significance, there is still a lor of fighting and thinking to do.
Our best bet is to couch all debates and discussions of specific policy in terms of first principles. We must be spotlessly clear about our use of terms such as “rights” and “help” and “justice.” We must permit no co-opting of them for purposes of doublespeak.
As I said in the post below, we’re dealing with a cornered, wounded beast. It still has the capacity to inflict its own grisly wounds if we don’t handle it carefully.
2010 will not be boring.
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.
Another great Charles Krauthammer column today about FHer denial in the wake of Brown.
Two money lines. One is in regard to TCM’s latest lapse back into blame-W mode. You know, “general anger” and “for eight years prior to us.” Krauthammer says, “The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachussetts.” The other is, “Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously and ask themselves: If the people really don’t want it, could they possibly have a point?”
I’ve been thinking about the contrast of the Pub reassessment that was going on a year ago and the FHer response to the Brown victory. Certainly, there were some strong words uttered by pundits, pols and bloggers, and the longstanding points of differentiation between the three main types of conservatism were magnified. What got us through that period was the common insistence of voices from all three camps that the principles that unified us all must be articulated – indeed, shouted – at every opportunity. Everyone issued a call to a return to core precepts – namely, that the state exists to guarantee maximization of individual liberty, that the individual has a right to his property, his view points, and his ability to express those viewpoints, and that the people must constantly restrain the state from encroachment into areas beyond its Constitutional purview.
FHers, by contrast, are now talking about tactics, message delivery, sneaky repackaging of the same old tyranny, and some kind of generalized anger. They are also, as you may have noticed, going at each other like Michael Vick’s pitbulls.
The clarity that has suddenly illuminated our political landscape is as bracing as Rocky Mountain morning air. Some will choose not to let it affect the way they proceed. That’s fine. In fact, it’s helpful. As Krauthammer says in closing, “I say, let them sleep.”
