Bent Notes

eharmonycom settles a lawsuit by agreeing to post homosexual profiles.

So much for free markets, respect for individuals’ moral codes, the definition of family that served humankind quite well for 10.000 years and still serves all other species well, and sanity generally.

You have to ask yourself why the person bringing the lawsuit didn’t take the entrepreneurial route and set up a matchmaking site for those who see things his way.

Freedom is dying before our eyes without so much as a whimper.

 . . . for strongly condemning what’s been going on in Toledo, which is a foretaste of the Stasi-like means of dealing with those who dare to exercise their constitutional freedoms that we can expect once the FHers institute one-party rule.

 The only real problem for me, and all my homies here at BN, being that our freedom, and this Western civilization that has made our lives so liveable, goes down the tubes if you don’t get a clue, and pronto.

 This s— of not letting your campaign bring up Rev. Wright is not just suicidal but genocidal.

The first thing that stood out for me in Joe Biden’s comments about upper-income Americans getting a tax hike was, like it was for most people, his characterization of it being “patriotic.”  As disingenuous Marxist double-speak goes, it wasn’t any too artful.  One needn’t be a genius to see through it.

Since I first heard about it, though, another word from his remarks has been foddr for much of my pondering: “take.”  He said “We’re going to take that money and put it in the pockets of the middle class.”

“Take.”  If ever a word hammered home with zero uncertainty the coercive power of the state, that’s the one. 

Rule of law is perhaps the aspect of our American experiment in liberty that requires the most intellectual refinement to discern clearly.  Yes, we are ruled by laws, not the whims of individuals in particular positions, but by definition law is a construct backed by a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.  That’s why the West’s greatest thinkers on the subject have said that we mut be supremely careful what we etch into law regarding the dos and don’ts of human conduct.  We must not take short-cuts in our consideration of what is just and proper and what maximizes liberty, dignity and individual sovereignty.

The best minds on the case have concluded that a major way in which liberty is maximized is letting people keep nearly all the money they earn or otherwise lawfully acquire.  To receive money in exchange for one’s time / talent / skills and then use that money as one sees fit is at the core of putting an individual in charge of the making of choices and of the right to define well-being as one so chooses.

And, Joe, who is this “we?”  I think we can strip away any grandiose notion of “the American people” and get to the essence of what he’s talking about when we consider this monopoly on power: he means the government.

Biden isn’t the first to use “take” in the context of people and their money this campaign season.  Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton spoke of taking oil company “windfall” profits and establishing a government fund for atlernative-energy development.

The first step in a state moving toward totalitarianism, toward massive restructuring of society, is getting the public used to the idea that taking the most important of a person’s belongings - his capital - is legitimate when used to make circumstances more “equal” and “fair.”

I’m all the time coming ups with topics of speeches or debate remarks that McCain, Palin and GOP congressional candidates ought to use.  A major examination of the implications of this word “take,” it seems to me would be particularly juicy and beneficial at this time.

I think the appropriate way to regard the tofu-and-sprout-munching, peace-and-social-justice, agnostic, save-the-planet types - the ones who were the first on your street to get an Obama yard sign - is with pity.  The deepest kind of pity, the pity that’s just a microinch removed from scorn and contempt, but does qualify as pity.  For these people really swallow the lie.  They’re awash in Kool-Aid.  After all the evidence that their man is not only a fake, a Marxist and a liar but a thug, they still see him as the change-and-hope prophet he appeared to be last winter.

I’m not talking about the hate-crazed vanguard doing the flooding of radio station phone banks or hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account or cynically taking Rush Limbaugh quotes out of context for Spanish-language ads.  I’m not talking about the economic charlatans in his camp - most notably his running mate, he of paying-higher-taxes-is-patriotic fame - or the 9/11-was-America’s-chickens-coming-home-to-roost crowd.  I mean the nice folks down the block, the ones you see at the farmers market or the wine bar or your kids’ soccer matches.  The ones who, gosh darn it, just want things to be fair and peaceful.

About all that can be done in these remaining forty-plus days is to whittle away at their numbers.  As it becomes easier to expose the ugliness behind the big grin, the confident stride, the thoughtful tone of voice, those numbers can indeed be wuittled.

But remaining numbers there will be.  The enemy in this war has been quite effective at convincing them to sip the Kool-Aid.

Yes, war.  And what it is is the domestic front in the overall world war, the one that manifests itself in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, joint Venezuelan-Russian naval exercises, Russian invasion of Georgia, new and more powerful engines for North Korean long-range missiles, bombings in India, Iraq and Yemen.  It’s a war in which we face an array of enemies who share a hatred of the goodness that lies at the heart of our greatness.  We love freedom, we know it is a gift from almighty God, and we know it is the key to our prosperity and progress.  And they hate us for it.

So let the minions of the Marxist From Chicago “get in [your] faces.”  You’re prepared.  Meanwhile, take every opportunity to compel the nice folks down the street to wake up.  Feed them ideas. Lace your conversation with noble principles.  A lot of them can be convinced to value their own freedom and prosperity, to see truth and smell falsehood.  The rabid types are too far gone, but a lot of the nice folks down the street can be reached.

The pathetic and poisonous efforts of the left to destroy Sarah Palin gives the lie to the meme that the oh-so-moderate chin-stroking urban/coastal chattering class has been trying to get us to swallow for a while: the notion that the culture wars were winding down and Americans were now more concerned with efficient delivery of health care and energy and other dry, arcane considerations.

The delicious irony is that it’s that sector of our society that, so far, has been the most shrill and murderous about the Palin candidacy.  It’s the magazine writers, TV commentators and lefty bloggers who are pulling out all the stops in their attempt to wreck the governor’s career and life.

John Edwards was wrong about what comprised them, but he was right in his basic assertion that there are two Americas.  The division is deeper than it’s ever been.

As a historian, I am interested in the roots of the schism.  It certainly goes back farther than the 1960s.  The New Left movement in academic circles got going in the 1940s and 50s with the works of William Appleman Williams and C. Vann Woodward.  But the whole thing really goes back even further.  There’s the Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, Walter Duranty’s puff-piece treatment of the USSR under Stalin.  Maybe it goes back to the salons in the Greenwich Village brownstones of the turn of the century.  American folk art is full of pairings of cousins, one a country bumpkin and one a city slicker, and I think that’s an element.  One could even make the case that the Enlightenment, which originated in Europe, with its forthright reliance on rationality and empiricism, paved the way.  In America, it led to a lot of offshoots from core Judeo-Christian thought, such as Unitarianism and the array of New Thought denominations.  Also, here one would need to concede that even such Founding Fathers as the Deist Jefferson were looking into interpretive ways to relate to scripture.  Still, relate to it he most definitely did.

In any event, at some point, a mindset ingrained itself into certain sectors of our society and spread to others.  It was based on a divorce from a foundational and commonly held set of assumptions that had, up to that point, been part of American life in such a broad sense as to be considered universal.  Church, family, gender differences, the relationship between industriousness and prosperity, sufficient understanding of human nature to make obvious the need for strong national defense - these were givens for pretty much everybody.

I was in the thick of the period when the Big Split became codified, when a sufficiently large plurality of citizens embraced it as to legitimize it in schools, workplaces and arenas of civic participation.  I sat in the back of high school math class and read Ramparts magazine and Do It! by Jerry Rubin.  I had shoulder-length hair, told my dad he was a fascist and a corporate fat cat. Spent days on end in the lysergic trenches.  Made a point of running as far away from square old Jesus as I could and insisting that some kind of all-is-one state of so-called reality constituted ultimate truth.

So I bear some culpability for the current diseased state of our precious nation.  What is so blessed about time, though, is that once you get smarter than you used to be, you can genuinely change.  You can pick a moment and declare, “That’s not me anymore.”

The horror, the ghastliness, of what the enemy in the culture wars is attempting to do to Sarah Palin has been a wake-up slap across the face for me.  I thought there was some tiny possibility that this was going to be a civil airing of differences, perhaps with some raised voices, close elections and strongly-worded polemics. 

No, this is an actual war.  My main encouragement about the odds for what is good and true prevailing stem from the resolve of those like the woman currently on the front line.  I think tonight she will serve notice that she can outgun any comers.

Did you hear what she said in response to someone’s question about whether she’s up to this state of affairs?  She posed a question and then answered it.  “Do you know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” she asked.  And then she said, “Lipstick.”

. . . but the administration of George Washington University wants them to apologize anyway.  For what?

This smear-somebody-and-then-demand-an-apology tactic seems to be catching on.  Is there any more foul way to engage in public discourse?