Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
The live stream-cast of Restoring Honor. Right now, the stage is rocking with some great gospel music. The Tweet feed on the right side of the page is mostly comprised of expressions of being thrilled at witnessing such an outpouring, but there is also a fair share of snark from lefties.
So a Republican National Senate Campaign Committee lawyer is heading to Alaska to help out Lisa Murkowski. Could there be a more unmistakable sign that the GOP establishment still insists on being the Stupid Party?
We’ve seen this so many times. W’s support of Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey. Newt’s support of Dede Scozafava over Hoffman in that special election in upstate New York last year.
A lot of lefty pundits lately are trumpeting a schism within the Pub party, and it’s mostly whistling past the graveyard since, schism or no, the Freedom-Haters are facing a bloodbath this fall. Still they have a point. Modern Pubs are of two types: those with Tea Party fire in their bellies, and Reasonable Gentlemen.
To any new BN readers out there, let me define my term “Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.” It’s that mindset that says, “Well, yes, we have deep philosophical disagreements with our colleagues across the aisle, completely opposite policy prescriptions. But we know these guys. We run into them at lunch in the Capitol Hill mess, at social functions around Washington. Our kids go to the same schools. We’re all just Reasonable Gentlemen and Ladies earnestly keeping the nation’s best interest at heart. And politics is merely the art of the possible, so we presume some degree of compromise going into our work on any given issue.”
It basically amounts to rolling over, exposing your underbelly and inviting your mortal enemy to claw out your entrails. It sells out Americans’ freedom every time it’s practiced.
And now comes along a new type – and, in lots of cases, generation – of candidate, people with real and substantial experience in areas such as business or military service, people who indeed are not well-versed in the ways of Washington, with its system of gotcha and calling in favors and offering people cover for theri betrayal of principle with sound bites about “common ground.” The GOP establishment thinks – well, let’s be blunt here – that they’re a bunch of yay-hoos.
We’ll get our chance to demonstrate a massive show of force. Probably in both houses of Congress. But it’s our very last chance.
I’m going to take a little chance with my level of rhetoric here and say that I see Divine Providence sending us a clear message: Either go into this with a clear and comprehensive set of values and principles you’re willing to defend with the utmost fierceness, or you will be responsible, even more than the current regime, for the final undoing of the greatest esperiment in freedom in history.
UPDATE: It gets worse: The Alaska GOP phone-banked for Murkowski in the final days leading up to the primary.
Not a good time to be in the construction industry in the Golden State.
The Most Equal Comrade and his regime have submitted a report on the US’s performance in the human-rights realm to the UN Human Rights Council. That’s right – and it says that Arizona’s immigration law is a shortcoming in our human-rights record. Also infers that we torture detainees. Also touts affirmative action as a plus.
The Most Equal Comrade disdains freedom, dignity and common sense – that is, to the extent that he understands these things at all. He doesn’t have a patriotic bone in his body. He is a peril to Western civilization’s prospects for survival. He must go as soon as possible.
The thunderous refutation to the idea that there’s anything racist about the tea party movement:
Missouri voters say they aren’t on board with mandatory health insurance.
The other day I heard my state’s governor (Mitch Daniels, Indiana) express concern that “this American experiment is at risk.” He’s certainly not the only one forthrightly expressing alarm, and that is alarming in itself – or, rather, should be. The last thing we can afford is to become inured to the growing recognition that America’s existence is in grave peril.
That’s why “So what? Public opinion fluctuates constantly on all manner of issues” is a whistling-past-the-graveyard response to the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index experiencing a ten-point drop in June. This drop covers people’s feelings about the economy’s current state as well as where it will be in six months. Fear is also behind today’s 235-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Another phenomenon that is becoming noted more frequently is left-wing disenchantment with TCM. Although they usually get the prescription wrong for where to go from here, and generally still hold to the belief that TCM has America’s best interests at heart, they are souring on his approach as fast as the rest of us now. Bob Herbert’s NYT column today is a perfect example.
The key going forward is to transmute our fear. The first step is to have genuine, gut-level faith that we can revive the United States of America. I’m not talking about stump-speech platitudes or smiley-face bromides. How this plays itself out in our real-time interactions with each other is conversations about first principles and the things of this life that are precious. Willingness to fight is key as well. If freedom, decency and common sense are precious, we must not be cowed in defending them.
Summer 2010 is only going to get hotter.
Neo-neocon has a great post on the significance of TCM’s “point when someone has made enough money” remark, examining it in light of an observation Thomas Sowell makes in his book Intellectuals and Society. I was not aware that his speech as originally written only called for him to say the part about providing quality goods and services. He threw in the “enough money” part off the cuff. One of Neo-neocon’s commenters takes the analysis a step further, noting the insidiousness of the “responsibility” aspect of the original text. There’s that collectivist mindset on full display, that “common good” jive discussed in the post below, as if someone starts a widget company or a bank or a restaurant or a wholesale clothing distributorship to fulfill some “responsibility” to his fellow comrades. Also, the commenter asks, who gets to define what goods and services are worthwhile?
The plane-crash deaths of Poland’s president, first lady, and several top administrative and military officials – on Russian soil, en route to a commemorative ceremony in the Katyn forest – provides an opportunity to reflect on Poland’s bona fides as one of history’s beacons of freedom and courage.
It’s one thing to populate your op-ed pages with the likes of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd, but the utter lack of legitimacy of a major newpaper’s reportage sections is made plain by features on a 17-year-old suicide bomber’s devotion to her jihadist husband and a comparison of 1969 Weathermen and 2010 tea partiers, based on the “extremism” of each.
So far I’ve avoided the current national conversation on violence and allegations of it – which, I guess it needs pointing out, even though it’s obvious, are two different things – that have transpired since passage of FHer-care. I really strive to keep the debate at the level of ideas and principles. In a time of national peril, “Teacher-he-called-me-a-name-first”-type polemics is unproductive to say the least.
Still, this latest move by the NYT gets to the heart of what is at stake here. Those of us who hate FHer-care and who understand that the whole agenda of the FHers is an unprecedented assault on the essence of the United States of America are motivated by an unwavering fealty to freedom and the finest ideas to be distilled over thousands of years of Western civilization. Leftist radicals are motivated by a desire to dismantle that civilization as rapidly as possible.
I’d never seen the Ayn Rand quotes about extremism and consistency that Pam Gellar offers here, but they pretty much provide what’s necessary as a counter to the Grey Lady’s disingenuousness. Make that extreme disingenuousness.
Rep. Steve King of Iowa pens a Washington Times column that is thunderous in its clarity. Complete repeal of FHer-care. Nothing less. This is about America’s soul.
. . . sign on to the move to file suit against FHer-care as being unconstitutional and just plain insane. That would be the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the state of Indiana.
Well, looky here: a mandate requiring fast-food chains to put calorie information on their menus. There’s even a new supervisory body to make sure they do it. States had increasingly been going in for this kind of tyrannical meddling, but the fed-level FHers apparently felt that you don’t send a Mugabe out to do a Stalin’s job.
This is yet another example of the gastonomic nanny-state-ism my American Thinker piece last Tuesday dealt with. As I’ve said several times before, I consider food – the preparation, consumption and sharing of it – to be one of life’s most sublime delights. This is personal. (As well as national.)
Something we ablsolutely must do at this juncture is cultivate sharpness. Take great pride in how sharp you are. The regime is trying to spread the notion throughout society that we are too dense to come in out of the rain. They want you to think of yourselves as cattle, dumbly staring into space as you’re corralled into the pen.
Stay sharp.
TCM’s self-satisfaction at having reached a nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia fits into a recent pattern of foreign-policy moves that further confirms the conclusion that his zeal is for a left-wing vision of utopia, in which all cultures and ideologies have equal merit and that the power of the idea of humankind’s unity can surmount the cumulative lessons of history.
As Jamie Fly at the link above says, TCM is preoccupied with a 1980s-era problem in a 2010 world in which rogue players pose the really pressing threat. A mutual reduction in US and Russian strategic force doesn’t mean squat to the Kim regime, the Iranian mullahs, or any of the world’s myriad jihadist networks eager to get their hands on what an increasing number of states have.
When one considers TCM’s blatant humiliation of Benjamin Netanyahu, leaving Bibi to cool his heels while he went upstairs for dinner with his family (and saying, “If there’s anything new [as in any reconsideration of Jerusalem home-building], let me know”) and the decision to go for less-than-maiximum sanctions against Iran, in the context of his excitement about this new treaty with Russia, it becomes hard to muster any encouragement about a safer and more just world. This is a worldview that got a foothold in our society some fifty years ago, when red-diaper babies sat in coffee houses listening to guitar-strumming folk singers. This is the worldview of those whose highest priority is feeling good about how much they care for “humankind” in the collective, who have no use for the particular, lest some pesky detail of history reveal a glitch in the notion that endless peace is plausible.
TCM finds the whole business of foreign policy boring compared to his grand plan for the regime that will occupy the land mass known for 234 years as the United States of America, but to the extent he deals with it, his moves are of a piece with his domestic thrust. The idea is that egalitarianism will be the order of the day on every scale. On the world stage, the country known until recently as the United States of America will be just another place on the globe where a certain percentage of the world’s comrades happen to reside. Nothing special about it.
And that means that there will be no room for a different vision, one which invites the possibility of free and sovereign individuals, unhampered by the state as they go about the achievement of their own dreams. No one anywhere will have a place to which he or she can go to see if such a vision can work.
No place left to stand, that’s what The Aquarian Totalitarian has in mind for those of us who harbor the audacity of freedom.
. . . of Americans want to see an effort in Congress to repeal the bill that it just passed, according to a new CBS poll.
This crap is getting more chilling by the hour. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has announced that federal policy will no longer “favor motorized transportation over non-motorized.” The line in the header comes from his answer to a question at a National Press Club luncheon about it.
Hell, until I read this, I had no idea there was a damn “Sustainable Communities” agency within his department.
He clearly spells out that his vision is that of a populace that walks and bikes for shorter distances and takes mass transit for longer ones.
Where in the name of dog vomit did the federal government get the idea that it’s any of its business how you and I get around, for short or long distances?
Is there any doubt now about what this regime intends?
