Juan Williams & Canards Of The Left

Juan Williams comments on the fact that our modern left does not believe in a free and fair airing of opinions; rather, they attempt to punish any who dares articulate a position with which they disagree. This from Williams during an interview with the Daily Caller:

I always thought it was the Archie Bunkers of the world, the right-wingers of world, who were more resistant and more closed-minded about hearing the other side,” he said. “In fact, what I have learned is, in a very painful way — and I can open this shirt and show you the scars and the knife wounds — is that it is big media institutions who are identifiably more liberal to left-leaning who will shut you down, stab you and kill you, fire you, if they perceive that you are not telling the story in the way that they want it told.

Juan Williams is a smart man. Thus I find it telling that Williams wasn't able to see this reality until he was raped by the left in 2010 for daring to say that he got nervous when getting on a plane with men dressed in Muslim garb. The left's preference for demonizing over debate and their intolerance of dissenting opinions has been blatant and obvious for decades. That our left are "liberal" is one of the great canards of the left - but it is only one of many.

The other great canards are that the left champions the middle class and minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. The left champions these groups only to the extent that they are, at any given moment, pathways to power and money. For instance, blacks are to be protected - but when it comes to a point where blacks and the teachers unions interests diverge, the moneyed teachers unions win. The left speaks of protecting the middle class - but when it comes to things such as cheap energy, the green special interests win out.

If you want to understand the left's actions, look at what they do, now what they say. Rarely do their actions match their rhetoric - and indeed, often that are complete odds. That is one of the reasons the left are so intolerant of dissenting opinion. That is a level of reality that hasn't dawned on Juan Williams yet, but give him time.

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The Liberal Code Of Beliefs

The Liberal Code of Beliefs

I’m a Liberal because I’m way too irresponsible to own a gun, and I know that my local police are all I need to protect me from murderers and thieves.

I’m a Liberal because I love the fact I can now marry whatever I want. I’ve decided to marry my horse.

I’m a Liberal because I believe oil companies’ profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene, but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn’t.

I’m a Liberal because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

I’m a Liberal because freedom of speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it. [Which means anything uttered by anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton – ETR]

I’m a Liberal because when we pull out of Iraq I trust the bad guys will stop what they’re doing because they now think we’re good people.

I’m a Liberal because I believe people who can’t tell us if it will rain on Friday, CAN tell us the polar ice caps will melt away in 10 years if I don’t start driving a Prius.

I’m a Liberal because I believe business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as THEY see fit.

I’m a Liberal because I believe liberal judges need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who could NEVER get their agendas past the voters.

A Liberal has to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.

A Liberal has to believe that the same teacher who can’t teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.

I’m a Liberal because my head is so firmly planted up my own butt, it’s unlikely I’ll ever have another point of view.

“A Liberal is a person who will give away everything they don’t own."
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Unabashedly stolen from the Vocal Minority . . . who unabashedly stole it from Mike's Politics and Finance blog.

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The Supreme Court: Activists, Conservatives & Individual Rights

Progressives, those who profess to be the defenders of civil rights against the centralization and accretion of government power are standing reality on its head. In terms of our traditional rights to freedom of speech, freedom to own property and the like, and not to mention right to own weapons, progressives, and their judicial counterpart, activist judges, regularly act to limit our traditional civil rights. This is often accompanied by imposing new "rights" outside of the text of the Constitution. David Bernstein discusses this as part of an article on the Supreme Court that he wrote for the CATO Institute:
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This from Mr. Bernstein:

The Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support "individual rights" and "civil liberties," while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.

Or perhaps it's not as remarkable as we've been led to think. Consider the Court's First Amendment decisions. Contrary to popular belief, conservative justices are about as likely to vote in favor of individuals bringing First Amendment challenges to government regulations as are the liberals. Indeed, the justice most likely to vote to uphold a First Amendment claim is the "conservative" Justice Anthony Kennedy. The least likely is the "liberal" Justice Stephen Breyer. Consistent with general conservative/liberal patterns in commercial speech cases, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have voted to invalidate restrictions on advertising more than 75 percent of the time. Justices Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, meanwhile, have voted to uphold such restrictions in most cases.

Conservative justices also typically vote to limit the government's ability to regulate election-related speech, while liberal justices are willing to uphold virtually any regulation in the name of "campaign finance reform." . . .

Liberals have also been more willing than conservatives to limit the First Amendment's protection of "expressive association." The Court's conservatives held that forcing the Boy Scouts of America to employ a gay scoutmaster violated the Scouts' right to promote its belief in traditional sexual morality. The liberal dissenters thought the government should be allowed to force the Scouts to present a message inconsistent with the Scouts' values.

The Fifth Amendment's protection of property rights presents, if anything, an even starker example of greater commitment to individual rights by the conservative majority. In the infamous Kelo v. New London, the Court's liberal justices, joined by Justice Kennedy, held that the government may take an individual's property and turn it over to a private party for commercial use. The four conservative dissenters argued that such actions violate the Fifth Amendment's requirement that government takings be for "public use."

A few years earlier, the Court's conservative majority held that a government regulation that deprives a land owner of any use of his property amounts to a "taking" that requires compensation. The liberal dissenters would have permitted the government to totally wipe out an individual's investment without any redress.

And consider the issue of government use of racial classifications. Liberal justices have been willing to uphold virtually any use of race by the government--including quotas in higher education, set-asides for government contracts, and raced-based assignments of students to public schools--so long as the government claims benign motives. The conservatives, by contrast, argue that the government must treat people as individuals, not as members of a racial caste.

Other examples could be raised. The conservatives, for example, have been more sympathetic to free exercise of religion claims than the liberals, and more inclined to forbid government regulation of "hate speech."

The point should be clear. There are many ideological differences between the conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court. But a consistent, stronger liberal devotion to supporting individual rights and civil liberties against assertions of government power isn't one of them.

Read the entire article. Don't expect this truisim to get repeated too often. And where it does, expect the point to be shouted down by the progressives who really do not want you to exercise those First Amendment rights.

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Confession of a Liberal

The blogger Rough Diamond has posted her own "Confession of a Liberal:"

I believe in the liberal use of firepower
because
there is no problem too big,
that the right amount of explosives can't cure!

Heh. Now that is a JFK liberal. Do visit her site.

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"Senator, You're No Jack Kennedy"

The title of this post is from a memorable quote from the late Sen. Lloyd Bensten, eviscerating Dan Quayle during a VP debate. But it could equally be the words of James Piereson, the author of a book on JFK, Camelot and the Cultural Revoltion, as he responds to those on the left who equate Barack Obama to JFK. Indeed, as he notes, the progressives of today have nothing in common with the hawkish liberals of old.
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This from Mr. Pierson in an e-mail posted at the NRO:

. . . Theodore Sorenson, JFK's close aide and speechwriter, has said recently that Barack Obama is the natural successor to President Kennedy because of his skills as a speaker and his message of "hope and change." This idea has been augmented by endorsements of Obama by Ted and Caroline Kennedy.

. . . From the standpoint of ideas and philosophy, there is little in Obama to remind us of JFK. Kennedy was a firm cold warrior who believed in the American mission in the world. His memorable inaugural address was entirely about foreign policy and the cause of liberty. Kennedy, in fact, tried to run to the right of Richard Nixon in 1960, blaming the Eisenhower administration for a "missile gap," the embarrassment of the Castro revolution next door, and the downing of a reconnaissance aircraft over the Soviet Union in May, 1960. He brought up comparisons to Chamberlain, Munich, and "appeasement." On the domestic front, while JFK is viewed as a hero of the civil rights movement, in fact he came around gradually to support a civil rights bill in 1963. Kennedy was in fact a cautious politician, unwilling to get too far ahead of public opinion on this critical issue.

The reason that JFK left such a powerful imprint on the liberal movement had little to do with his actual policies, which were generally centrist. President Kennedy’s legacy was more cultural than directly political: he spoke beautifully, (thanks to Sorenson) he drew on images from literature and classical culture, he was a young president in the midst of a burgeoning youth culture, he was a highly attractive man, he had a beautiful family, he was rich, he was an author, he hung around with Harvard professors and Hollywood stars and starlets. He practiced the old politics but with a decidedly new cultural approach. Lyndon Johnson was much more of a liberal in terms of policy, but his cultural persona (in contrast to Kennedy's) was of the old school.

This latter fact is the reason that some observers seen Sen Obama as the new incarnation of JFK. He seems culturally to be of an avante garde, like JFK, though his policies internationally and domestically have little in common with the late President's. This says less about Sen Obama or about JFK than about contemporary liberalism, which is far more concerned with style and one's posture toward the world than about actual policies.

Read the entire post. Just to add, in his three years in office, JFK oversaw a vast expansion of our military involvement in Vietnam, the attempt at a coup in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, repeated failed assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, and the assassination of South Vietnam's President, Diem. It would be hard to find a more complete contrast between two individuals on foreign policy than Obama and JFK.

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The Audacity of Newsweek

Newsweek's cover story this week could easilly have come from Kos, Moveon.org or the DNC. Objectivity and intellectual honesty have been tossed out the window at Newsweek as the writers and editors go absolutely over the top in an effort to delegitimize all criticism of Obama and frame the terms of acceptable debate between now and November.

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Obama is incredibly weak on national security, he is an elitist who looks down on traditional American values, his choice of associates (Wright, Rezko, Ayers) is wholly at odds with his carefully crafted public persona and, particularly as to Rev. Wright, put very much at issue Obama's character, judgment and veracity. To the left, this is now the "politics of fear," "painting," "sliming," and that always popular, "swift boating." The NYT has been fighting a rearguard action for Obama for some weeks. And now Newsweek, with their cover story, joins the NYT and goes one better. (The delineation into numbered paragraphs is my own):


1. Republican Victories Are Based On The Politics of Fear

[Newsweek:]. . . The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities.

Newsweek just deligimitimzed every election since 1968 that was won by a Republican and did so on the grounds that Republicans are not being truthful with America. The bit here about Nixon might have been more complete if they had added in that the still unrepentant William Ayers and the Weather Underground were attempting at that time to violently overthrow the government. Here and elsewhere, Newsweek all but explicitly states that any highlighting of threats to our society by the right, from the internal upheavals of 1968 to the terrorists of today who seek WMD to use against us, are simply a political strategy with no basis in fact.



2. False "Painting"

[Newsweek:] The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower- and middle-class whites in industrial and border states—the Democrats' base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but "Reagan Democrats" in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as "the other"—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.

Neither McCain nor any mainstream conservative organization is raising the issue of Obama's Muslim roots. That is a Newseek strawman. As to the rest, Obama says guns and religion are the opiates of the masses, he spent twenty years in a church that spews racisim, anti-semitism, and fantasies of an evil white government attacking blacks with weapons of genocide, and he associates with and launched his political carrer with William Ayers. To point to any of that isn't unfairly "painting" Obama - it's spraying him with clear-coat.




3. Conservative 527's are "Merchants of Slime"

[Newsweek:] . . . Refusing to concede defeat last week, [Hillary Clinton] cited an Associated Press poll "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again." . . . A top Clinton adviser, speaking anonymously so he could be more frank, says the Clinton campaign has actually been holding back, for fear of alienating other Democrats. The Republicans "won't suffer from such scruples," this adviser says. . . . [McCain] may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism. And the real question is whether he can—or really wants to—rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the "independent expenditure" groups who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech.

Whoa. Your kidding. Merchants of slime? Sellers of hate? This from the folk who:

- produced the Petraeus Betray Us ads;



- are using video from a successful suicide bombing and a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. dismounted patrol as part of an attack ad against McCain and the war in Iraq (someone should be hung for treason over that) - and the ad itself takes a McCain quote ridiculously out of context;



- refuse to acknowledge reality in Iraq, spin the news from Iraq far outside the bounds of reason, and are doing their damndest to legislate an American defeat for their own partisan gain;



- have no respect for free speech or reasonable debate, but rather demonize anyone who disagrees with them and have long since abandoned any pretext of intellectual honesty, let alone rationality;



- are the last bastions where racism and hatred are accepted and, indeed, encouraged



- are spending hundreds of millions through "independent expenditure" groups while at the same time trying to shut down Republican efforts in the courts.



Bottom line, for the left to label conservatives "merchants of slime" and "sellers of hate" is nothing more than sheer projection.


4. Raising Obama's 20 Year Relationship To The Racist Rev. Wright Is White Racism And Makes McCain Unfit To Be Commander In Chief

[Newsweek:] Recently, when a reporter asked McCain, "Does it bother you at all that you might actually benefit from latent prejudice in the country?" he answered: "That would bother me a lot. That would bother me a great deal." And last week his wife, Cindy, told NBC News, "My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all." So if McCain's camp does try to exploit Obama's ties to the fiery Reverend Wright, the Obama-ites can question his sincerity—is he really the "Straight Talk" candidate? And if McCain can't stop others from the sort of innuendo and code that Republicans have learned to frighten voters, Obama can cast doubt on McCain's credentials as a commander in chief. . . .

Racism has no place in our society and when it raises its head, it should be dealt with ruthlessly. Indeed, there would be no question that a white politician who had a close 20 year association with a vile racist would rightly have been knocked from the race in a matter of days. But not only does Newsweek want to forestall any questioning of the Obama-Wright relationship, their logic is that simply raising the issue is itself an appeal to, if not evidence of, white racism. To call this outragous obfuscation is an understatement. And then to assert that anyone on the right raising the issue calls into question McCain's qualifications to be Commander in Chief is, to put it tactfully, an equally fatuous premise.




5. Raising The Hamas Endorsement Of Obama Is Mud-Slinging and The Endorsement Itself Is Meaningless

[Newsweek:] . . . At the time of the Pennsylvania primary, the McCain campaign sent out a letter suggesting that Obama was the candidate of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group ("Barack Obama's foreign policy plans have even won him praise from Hamas leaders," read the letter). McCain, by contrast, portrayed himself as "Hamas's worst nightmare." (In fact, Obama and McCain have the same position on Hamas —no talks, no recognition, no outreach.) . . .

Hamas, as well as Iran, Castro, Daniel Ortega, FARC, Ghadaffi and other's whose goals are antithetical to the U.S., democracy, capitalism and freedom have all endorsed Obama. It doesn't take an i.q. above 90 to work out that this is because Obama articulates a weak and permissive foreign policy and he embraces soft power politics as a panacea. A weak U.S. creates a happy hunting ground for all of those opposed to America and all it represents. Obama and his virulent apologists can crow til the cows come home about how he does not support these people or institutions, that has no bearing on the the fact that, across the board, those opposed to America support him. The only thing of importance - and McCain's point - is why our enemies support Obama in the first place. Newseek is being so transparently disingenuous in trying to twist this as to be laughable.



6. While Hamas Is Out As An Issue, Wholly Unjustified Suggestions That McCain Is Senile Are Apparently Fair Game

[Newsweek:] . . . Last week Obama told CNN: "This is offensive. And I think it's disappointing because John McCain always says, 'Well, I'm not going to run that kind of politics' … For him to toss out comments like that, I think, is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination."

To raise questions about Obama's foreign and national security policy is improper and immoral, but cheap shots aimed at McCain's age are apparently within the bounds of reasonable political discourse for Newsweek. The magazine reports Obama's remarks without batting an eye. As an aside, Newseek, fails to mention Obama's own, frankly incredible problems with early on-set loss of bearings.



7. Calling Obama A Liberal Is Mudslinging

[Newsweek:] Then there's David Bossie, already deep into a mudslinging campaign against Obama through a political organization called Citizens United. Bossie is planning a widespread DVD release of a documentary that will portray Obama as a "limousine, out-of-control leftist liberal … more liberal than [Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders, who is a socialist," . . .

How is pointing out that Obama has a more liberal voting record in the Senate than Sanders, mudslinging? Indeed, it is a fact that goes to the center of how Obama will govern and whether his promise to heal all divides and create a utopia of bi-partisan unity is just so much feel good smoke being blown up our collective asses. Pointing to unambiguous reality is not mudslinging. Newsweek only labels it as such to disingenuously frame it as an illegitimate argument that should not be considered by the electorate.

Update: Juan Williams summed up the combined arguments of the NYT, News Week and Obama on Fox News this evening. To paraphrase, to criticize Obama on national security, on Hamas, or to raise Rev. Wright or Bill Ayers makes you a "racist pig."

Why all this frankly outragous bit of agenda journalism now? It is because Obama is a very weak candidate and because he has long and deep associations with racism and anti-Americanism that would rightfully disqualify a white candidate from any elected post above dog catcher. That he survives til today is a function of a grossly biased MSM that has abandoned any pretense of intellectual honesty or objectivitiy. That they are publishing this utter tripe now is a mark of how worried the MSM is that they won't be able to stem the bleeding on all of Obama's weaknesses come November. When it becomes acceptable within polite society to ponder such things as why Hamas endorsed Obama or how Obama can claim to be a post racial candidate when he spent twenty years in a close relationship with a vile racist, Obama's slow bleeding of today will progress into a fatal arterial spray. You can read this whole Newseek cover story here.



Update: Mark Salter, from McCain's campaign, has responded in an e-mail to Newsweek that the magazine has linked:

In an email to Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham on Sunday, McCain adviser Mark Salter responds to this week's cover story:

Dear Jon,

A useful way to read the piece would be to try to imagine you were a Republican reading it. The characterization of Republican presidential campaigns as nothing more than attack machines that use 527s and other means to smear opponents strikes us as pretty offensive. Is that how Ronald Reagan won two terms? . . . From the beginning of their article, Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe offered a biased implication that Republicans have won elections and will try to win this one simply by tearing down through disreputable means their opponents. . .

Suggesting that that we can expect a whispering campaign from the McCain campaign or the Republican Party about Senator Obama's race and the false charge that he is a Muslim is scurrilous. Has John McCain ever campaigned that way? On the contrary, he has on numerous occasions denounced tactics offensive tactics from campaigns, 527s and others, both Democratic and Republican. By the way, which party had more 527 and other independent expenditure ads made on its behalf in 2004? It wasn't us.

By accepting the Obama campaign construct as if it were objective, Evan and Richard framed this race exactly as Senator Obama wants it to be framed—every issue that raises doubts about his policy views and judgment is part of a smear campaign intended to distract voters from the real issues at stake in the election, and, thus, illegitimate. And even if Senator McCain might not be inclined to support such advertising, if he can't stop them from occurring then he will have succumbed to the temptation to put ambition before principle. How this notion could appear credible after MoveOn, the AFL-CIO and the DNC launched negative ad campaigns weeks ago, and after leaks from the Obama campaign that they would soon start running negative ads against McCain, is mystifying. When a conservative talk show host emphasized Senator Obama's middle name, Senator McCain immediately denounced it himself in the strongest possible terms. When a left wing radio host called Senator McCain a "warmonger;" when Senator Rockefeller disparaged Senator McCain's war record; and when Howard Dean consistently accused Senator McCain of corruption, dishonesty and various other smears, the response from the Obama campaign has been either silence or a spokesperson releases an anodyne statement saying they don't agree with the characterization.

To see how completely Evan and Richard have accepted the Obama campaign spin look at the example of an illegitimate smear they cite: Senator McCain raising the Hamas spokesman's comments welcoming Obama's election. The Senator has never said that Senator Obama shares Hamas' goals or values or proposed a relationship with Hamas different than the one he would propose. On the contrary, he publicly acknowledged that he doesn't believe Senator Obama. He did note that there must be something about Obama's positions, particularly his repeated insistence that he would meet with the President of Iran (Hamas's chief state sponsor), that was welcomed by Hamas. Imagine if a right wing death squad spokesman announced that they welcomed McCain's election. Would Evan or Richard treat that as an illegitimate issue or would they examine which of McCain's stated positions might have found favor with the terrorists? That seems obvious on its face to me. Rather than argue that his position on Iran is the right one and has no bearing on how Hamas views him, Senator Obama makes a false charge that we accused him of advocating a different relationship with Hamas than Senator McCain's supports. His false characterization of Senator McCain's statement was accepted uncritically by Evan and Richard.

Democratic Party allied third parties have announced negative ad campaigns, which distort McCain's statements and positions, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They are already running them. Senator Obama himself and Democrats generally have taken out of context and distorted Senator McCain's statements on a post war military presence in Iraq and his views on the economy. Our townhalls are now routinely salted with Obama supporters who are there to raise embarrassing questions for the Senator (we don't screen people at our events). An Obama supporter asked him in Iowa if he called his wife a very vulgar name. . . .

. . . Without a trace of skepticism, your reporters embraced the primary communications strategy the Obama campaign intends to follow: any criticism of their candidate is a below the belt, Republican attack machine distortion that should discredit the authors. And any attempt by our campaign to counter that suggestion will be dismissed as a rant. The other day, Senator Obama noted that Representative DeFazio's accusation that Senator McCain was up to his neck in the Keating Five scandal was a legitimate line of attack, despite the fact the Senator was largely exonerated by the Senate Ethics Committee, whose special counsel declared he had been kept in the investigation only because of his party affiliation. Were we to raise the Rezko matter, their campaign would accuse us of distracting voters with a low blow by making more of a "flimsy relationship" than the facts warranted. Evan and Richard, I feel certain, would agree.

The McCain campaign will keep to the high standards of political debate Senator McCain demands of us. The Senator will not tolerate unfair attacks by anyone on our campaign. We won't, however, abide by rules imposed on us by our opponents, and which pertain only to our campaign and not theirs, even if they manage to get reporters to call the deal fair.

Read the entire response. It is accurate and articulate. To describe Newsweek as in the tank for Obama is a gross understatement. This is nothing more than an all out push to get Obama in the White House, irrespective of how unqualified he is or how dangerous his policies may be for America. Further, it is a push being made at the cost of Newsweeks journalistic ethics and objectivity. I thought something like this far below the standards of Newsweek. Obviously I couldn't have been more wrong.

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Progressives, Not Liberals

I have been saying for years that there is nothing of classical liberalism in the ideology expoused by our modern left. Our "progressives" are far more influenced by Marx than Aristotle and Locke. They are anything but liberal. And recently, Victor David Hanson made a similar argument.


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This from Victor David Hanson writing in the NY Post:

THESE days, Democrats aren't sounding very liberal. Classic liberals, after all, would support free markets, internationalism and the universal desire for constitutional government, while downplaying racial affinity. But the following examples highlight how far from these ideals today's liberals are.

Campaigning earlier this year in recession-prone Ohio, both Democratic candidates trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sen. Barack Obama advocated renegotiation of the treaty. And Sen. Hillary Clinton assured voters she had always opposed NAFTA, an agreement that was concluded under her husband's administration.

. . . Despite such illiberal pandering, both Clinton and Obama know that a traditional liberal position would be to defend free trade that lowers prices and increases choices for poorer American consumers - while helping foreign economies catch up with the United States.

Free trade isn't the only example in which liberal Democrats advocate positions that sound parochial and blinkered. Let's take an environmental issue. It may seem environmentally correct for liberals to oppose oil drilling in a small part of Alaska. But how is this prohibition in any way liberal?

Unless Americans are willing to accept a drastic reduction in their standard of living or can discover novel methods of conserving or creating energy, in the short-term transportation fuel will have to come from somewhere. Given our present prohibitions, that somewhere apparently means foreign oil.

. . . Homegrown, clean-burning biofuels sound great as a partial replacement for polluting foreign petroleum. But at present, to supply grain-based ethanol, we are diverting a large percentage of US farm acreage away from food production. The result - apart from the net energy loss needed to grow and refine ethanol - is that the price of basic food staples is soaring.

It's politically incorrect to say so, but an oil well in Alaska might cause less damage to the world environment, less strain on our food supply and more savings to poorer US consumers than most of the present alternatives.

What also is the real liberal position on Iraq? Not long ago Clinton and Obama slugged it out, trying to establish who was more anti-war - and who would bring the troops home the most rapidly. But then one of Obama's chief campaign advisers, the now-dismissed Samantha Power, suggested that an Obama administration would assess withdrawal on the basis of conditions on the ground in Iraq, not according to once-promised timetables.

Power is no conservative. But it sounds like she grasps that the humane - indeed liberal - position now on Iraq is to continue to support the democratically elected government of Nouri al-Maliki.

"No blood for oil" and "American imperialism" may be catchy slogans, but no serious observer believes that the United States is stealing Iraq's oil or trying to colonize the country. The Iraqis themselves are selling oil on their own terms, and they are no longer so eager for Americans to pack up and leave their fragile democracy before it's stabilized.

Finally, what is the liberal position on race? It is not to offer relative contexts and mitigating circumstances for hate speech, as did Sen. Obama regarding the words of his former pastor. Nor, in contrast, is it Bill and Hillary Clinton's racial polarizing and scapegoating to defend - and then restore - a poorly run campaign. It's surely not a Democratic race that has devolved into the candidates counting on their constituents to vote along racial lines.

In short, with all this demagoguing, backtracking and firing of aides, we don't always know exactly what the Democratic position is on trade, energy, Iraq or race - only that it is seems to be far from what we once thought was liberal.

Read the entire article.

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Interesting News & Posts - 17 February 2008

Interesting news and posts of late from across the blogosphere, all below the fold.










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From Patrick at Ankle Biting Pundits: "Eventually, the shine will come off of Sen. Obama’s vapid and puerile campaign. Eventually, someone in the press will ask him a challenging question. When that day comes, this messiah business will evanesce and left standing there will be just another liberal politician."

And RightTruth has the story on Obama’s attempt to pass some seriously costly legislation. Its Obama’s plan to feed the world with fish and loaves – and our tax dollars. The water to wine bill is still in committee.

From the Jawa Report: When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious." Quod. Erat. Demonstrandum. I quibble with the label "liberal" as the modern left has left classical liberalism in the dust. I think it more accurate to refer to the folk described above as progressive.

And you can see the progressive mind amply demonstrated at Red Alerts in the story of Bernie Ward, liberal lion and vociferous critic of our troops.

I have been saying for years that there is nothing of "classical liberalism" in the modern "progressive"left. You only find classical liberal principles valued and upheld on the conservative side of the house these days. From the left, you get "intellectual terrorism." Some thoughts on this at Covenant Zone.

See Blonde Sagacity’s Blog Rollup. There are pics from the Berkley City Council protest, the Top Ten Economic Myths of 2007, funny chicks, and much, much more. And at Iris Elk, an eclectic roll-up, from Chavez’s favorite capybara recipe to musings upon whether a Catholic can be a Democrat.

Seraphic Secret has more on the complex operation that was the Mughnieyah hit, and a suggestion that Mughnieyah was killed to forestall future terrorist operations in Europe. And from MK, the BBC apparently cannot distinguish who the bad guys are. Here is a rule of thumb, the folks described by Crusader Rabbit who kill innocents or threaten to do so in order to get their way – they are the bad guys. And insane bad guys at that. Perhaps they might try viagra before going straight to the beheadings for witchcraft.

Over at Political Insecurity, the animals are on the loose. Muslim students in Nigeria attempt to lynch a Christian student because they were angry at the Mohammed Cartoons. They ended up rioting, killing several people and burning a police station.

And at Shield of Achilles, the animals are on the loose in Denmark. Is anybody watching? Sheik Yer Mami informs us that the problem in Denmark is actually global warming. The multiculturalists are fiddling while f*** Rome burns.

And at Lionheart, the animals are on video on the loose in Luton.

It has been apparent for years, with leak after leak finding its way onto the NYT, that our intelligence agencies are out of control and seeking to influence policy. As Michael Rubin reports, these rogue acts reached their zenith in the drafting of the NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program – an NIE that even our spy chief Mitch McConnell admits was inaccurate.

Multiculturalism is destroying Britain. Will it destroy America. Ask the Velvet Hammer.

Its nice to see someone on the right who finds Ann Coulter as tedious and ridiculous as I, though I admit to laughing at the "coherent tax policy" line. And while I had considered Lieberman as a running mate to McCain – and I happen to greatly respect Lieberman – I think that someone with strong economic credentials, such as Romney, might be a better choice.

Sometimes, fiction is stranger than . . . well, fiction.

All laws come with unintended consequences, though many are foreseeable. Though, I have to admit, I did not see this one: How long will it be before some enterprising American plaintiff . . . files a complaint alleging that calls for affirmative action at his or her institution have created a hostile working environment?

Painting: The above painting is "Leonidas at Thermopylae" Jacques-Louis David, 1814.

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Ezra Levant & The Politics Of Free Speech In Canada

Ezra Levant is an eloquent spokesman for free speech, as he demonstrated in video here, documenting his being hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Now Mr. Levant covers the politics in Canada as one liberal lawmaker, Keith Martin, is bucking his party and has proposed amending Canadian law to protect freedom of speech. What Mr. Levant describes bears out my thesis that those on the hard left - the progessives, if you will, or at least those people who have progressed beyond classical liberalism - are the biggest threat to freedom of speech and thought in the modern world. Its a fascinating look at the political machinations now happening north of the border. Read it here.

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Krauthammer Ponders the Friction Between "Black Dreams" & "White Liberals"

Several days ago, I posted on my concerns with the unwarranted interjection of charges of racism into the Democratic primary race. You can read that post here.

I framed my argument in the context of how Obama's campaign is being treated by liberals who seem so enamored at the thought of a legitimate African American candidate that they are willing to unquestioningly accept him based on his rhetoric alone. Indeed, the liberal MSM has given Obama a free pass until now.

But things turned ugly when the Bill Clinton leveled criticism of Obama's stand on Iraq and Hillary made innocuous comments about MLK. Both were portrayed as racist remarks and Obama did nothing to put a stop to it. Indeed, after I wrote that post, Obama ominously embraced the unfounded allegations of racism being leveled at the Clintons. Although the racial issue seems to have receded in the last few days, it has hardly been put to bed, and it now sits just below the surface like some sort of dormant virus.

Today, Charles Krauthammer weighs in on the same topic. Krauthammer takes note of Hillary Clinton's "shock" at these charges of racism, but notes that its really just the chickens coming home to roost:

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil-rights-era agenda.

Anyone who has ever made a principled argument against affirmative action, only to be accused of racism, knows exactly how these tactics work. Or anyone who has merely opposed a more recent agenda item -- hate-crime legislation -- on the grounds that murder is murder and that the laws against it are both venerable and severe. Remember that scurrilous preelection ad run by the NAACP in 2000 implying that George W. Bush was indifferent to a dragging death of a black man at the hands of white racists in Texas because he did not support hate-crime legislation?

The nation has become inured to the playing of the race card, but "our first black president" (Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton) and his consort are not used to having it played against them. . . .

Who says there's no justice in this world?

Read the entire article here. I can truly appreciate Krauthammer's enjoyment in this conundrum of our modern left, but I see in it a great potential for harm to our nation. As I stated in my post a few days ago, if Obama becomes the nominee and allows Republican's to be smeared with charges of racisim for any criticism they aim towards Obama, this portends to become a destructive and bloody Presidential campaign indeed.

Update: Soccer Dad has a very good post on Krauthammer's article today, taking a look at several aspects of the post that I glossed over. See it here.

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Silencing of Free Speech in the EU

At some point it will be generally acknowledged that the enemies of free speech and liberalism in the world today are those who occupy the left side of the aisle, whether they denominate themselves as progressives, socialists, secular humanists, or quite disingunously, liberals. Today's example comes from that grand experiment in socialism, the EU.

At the EU Parliament, those MEP's who seek to argue that the new EU constitution imposed by the Lisbon Treaty should be subject to a referendum of the people are being silenced and disciplined for their temerity. As the authors of the blog EU Referendum cogently comment, the EU "may have gone for the trappings of democracy, with their votes and their "parliament" but they will not brook dissent."

For backround on this issue, see here. What is occurring today in Europe with the EU is nothing less than a socialist coup. And now today, the latest from Euroskeptic MEP Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph:

. . . Once again, I and a group of other MEPs asked to exercise our right to explain, in not more than one minute, why we voted as we did. Once again, the European Parliament chose to ignore its rulebook and deny us that right, cutting off the session after 20 minutes. You can watch the Deputy Speaker’s explanation of why he did so here.

Let us be clear about what is happening. We Eurosceptic MEPs have never before, in 30 years, sought to delay the business of the House. We are doing so now only to protest about the outrageous cancellation of the promised referendums on the European Constitution, and about the EU’s illegal implementation of large parts of that document in anticipation of formal ratification. Our action would not have halted parliament’s business: all it would have done is to slow things down very slightly. Had they been sensible, the federalist MEPs would have rolled with the punch and allowed us to make our point peaceably — as Diana Wallace, a likeable Lib Dem who happened to be in the chair yesterday, did.

But we Eurosceptics often have an unsettling effect on our colleagues. Whenever one of us stands up, a red mist seems to descend on the integrationist majority. They can’t bring themselves to do anything we ask — however reasonable our request, and however unreasonable they make themselves look by denying it. (See, for example, the pompous blog by Labour MEP Richard Corbett, despite his reported private acknowledgment that the parliamentary authorities were behaving illicitly.

Fourteen MEPs, including my Tory colleague Roger Helmer and various UKIP members, have now been summoned to be disciplined over their participation in the pro-referendum demonstration last month.

Sanctions might include a €1000 fine or suspension without pay for up to ten days. Now it is true that some Euro-MPs behaved yobbishly on that occasion: it would have been better had they held up their “REFERENDUM” placards in silence. But, as I recorded at the time, the tumult was sparked by the Speaker’s decision to send his officers to tear away the placards (which the poor ushers did apologetically and with great charm). In other words, the Speaker would not even tolerate the word “referendum” in the chamber.

Meanwhile, I am continuing to mimic Marcus Porcius Cato, who ended every speech with a call for Carthage to be destroyed (usually recorded as "delenda est Carthago”. This afternoon, I spoke on the European Human Rights Institute, on Europol (the federal police force), on Turkish accession and on the EU’s policy towards the South Caucasus, and each time I ended with a call for the Lisbon Treaty to be put to the vote. . . Pactio Olisipiensis Censenda Est. . .

In the mean time, the European Parliament has put itself so at odds with natural justice, with democratic principles and with its own rules of procedure that it is doubtful whether we can still call it a parliament. . .

Read the entire article here. The more one pays attention to the world, the more one has to be convinced that George Orwell was a prophet.

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Thoughts On The Modern Left From Peter Hitchens & Arthur Brooks

This post looks at two recent articles on the nature of the modern left. Though the word "narcissistic" appears in neither, both paint a picture of how narcissism infects our modern "progressive" left - a group that has left classical liberalism in the dust. The first, from Arthur Brooks in the WSJ, points out that the modern left is today more intolerant and less rational than today's conservative.

The second is a fascinating article by the Daily Mail columnist, Peter Hitchens. Like many of the most eloquent and incisive of today's modern conservatives, Peter started life on the other side of the fence. Like Thomas Sowell, Hitchen's had gone so far left as to embrace communism. As he entered adulthood, Hitchens was marching in support of Ho Chi Min and against British authority.

Both articles contain some very insigtful thoughts, not the least of which is this from Peter Hitchens: "Selfishness needs to attack things that demand self-sacrifice - family, marriage, duty, patriotism and faith." That statement explains a great deal of what we see in the narrcissitic left of today. It explains what otherwise seems irrational.

At any rate, this first from Arthur Brooks in the WSJ in his article, "Liberal Hate-Mongerers:"

. . . What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.

As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups.

. . . [T]hose on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.

In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.

Read the entire article here. Interesting is it not. Those who are least tolerant and rational are projecting their paradigm on conservatives and describing the "politics of hate" as conservative's most vile trait. I have long believed that modern conservatism is the last bastion of classical liberalism, and things such as this Brooks article only reinforce that belief.

And there is this brilliant essay from Peter Hitchens in the UK's Daily Mail. It harkens back to 1968 - and it does much to explain the mindset of our modern left:

It was 1968, I was 17, in Grosvenor Square and hurling mud at the police. I felt fear, and a rapid, intense thrill that I could cast off every rule I'd been brought up to believe in.

Very soon it will be the 40th anniversary of the day I threw lumps of mud at the police in Central London. I had precious little idea why I was doing it, though I can confirm that riots are fun for those who take part in them, and that rioters usually riot because they enjoy it.

I wasn't oppressed, deprived, abused, underprivileged, poor or any of the other things people give as justifications for this sort of oafishness. I had no excuse then, and offer none now. I was a self-righteous, arrogant, spoiled teenage prig, and yes, I know quite a lot of people think I am still more or less the same, only middle-aged.

But if I am going to write about the Sixties, 40 years on, then I can only do so if I am ruthlessly honest about how awful I was, and that means admitting I was even worse than I am now. So this is not a piece of nostalgia about the wonderful Sixties. It is a shameful confession, and an attempt to explain why my generation has, in general, been so destructive and wrong. . .

. . . I can vividly remember the intense, rapid, thrilling moments as the demonstration against the Vietnam War turned nasty; the sudden, urgent shoving, the unsettling feeling of being surrounded by strangers, supposedly my allies, the clatter of hooves, the struggle to save myself from being pushed to the ground, the wordless yelling all round me, the feeling that I could cast off every rule I had been brought up to believe in, and get away with it. It was exhilarating, and wholly stupid. I was 17, the right age to be a soldier, not so much fearless as ignorant of what real pain felt like.

At the time, some newspapers claimed the violence was pre-planned. If so, nobody had told me. It was quite a respectable gathering, as opposition to the Vietnam War had by then become pretty general. Among the crowd, though not misbehaving, was an Oxford student called John Scarlett, who later wrote a letter to The Times, describing himself as 'a Conservative' and saying the police had been 'unnecessarily violent'.

This individual is now Sir John Scarlett, and head of MI6. He was wrong about the police, by the way. They behaved reasonably and with a great deal of restraint. Anybody in Grosvenor Square that day who was surprised when it turned rough hadn?t been paying attention.

We were all supposed to be escorting a then youthful Vanessa Redgrave, in a rather fetching headband, as she delivered a petition against the Vietnam War to the American Embassy. A fat lot most of us cared. We weren't pacifists. We were clueless rebels, indulging in childish shock-tactics to annoy our elders. We thought we wanted the communists to win, and I am pretty certain I carried a North Vietnamese flag and that I joined in with the moronic chant 'Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! We shall fight and we shall win!' among others.

Ho Chi Minh, for Heaven's sake. I am only glad the rhyme didn't include Pol Pot, but most of us hadn't yet heard of him. I can't claim to have been sorry when violence came. There would be other, even worse, occasions - once when I led a charge against a police line outside Oxford Town Hall and was astonished when the beefy constables broke and scattered before us. Having wantonly destroyed authority and order, we had no idea what to do next, a moment of sharp revelation that nagged at me for years afterwards, and may have helped me recover.

For I was suffering from a collective lunacy, and a particularly virulent version of it, that would eventually carry me into a revolutionary organisation just a few inches from the borders of terrorism, and at one of whose meetings I had a nasty confrontation with a man I am now certain was an IRA killer. How on earth does the privately educated son of a Royal Navy Commander end up in such company? It needs explaining. And my explanation is that millions of us went barmy. Mass insanity is much more common than the individual kind, but much less studied. Let us call it the 1968 disease.

In that year, several strands of folly came together in the happy, free, wealthy West. We had our little festival of manufactured wrath in London. French students had a far greater one in Paris. Though most of us had little idea of what we wanted, we succeeded almost completely in overthrowing the society we had grown up in, with the miserable results we now see.

Was there something in the air of that year that made us all susceptible, like the mysterious shiver that goes through the landscape in early spring ? Or was it the result of the great baby bulge that had come after the Second World War ended in 1945? Were there just too many adolescents, hormones churning, concentrated on the European landmass all at once?

For at exactly the same moment, a wave of genuine protest gathered in the subjugated, miserable East. While I was having my fun revolution, Polish students were being beaten by militiamen and put in prison for peaceful dissent, and Czechoslovakia was having its brief spasm of warmth, light and freedom, before Warsaw Pact tanks brought chilly darkness back to Prague, where it would remain for 20 years afterwards.

We, who were self-centred yahoos, succeeded in our futile cultural revolt. They, who were brave, selfless and honourable fighters for national independence and liberty, were crushed. While our good society lacked the conviction to defend itself, their evil states did not hesitate to deploy the truncheon and the boot to stay in being. We barely noticed. Their story didn't fit in our unhinged world view.

Adolescent or not, I knew better. Gently brought up in a comfortable home by loving parents, diligently taught by broad-minded teachers, cocooned in a world where crime and violence never happened, imbued with the tolerant values of Anglican Christianity, I had nothing to be revolutionary about.

So I am not trying to offer excuses when I put forward this explanation. There is nothing new about the bad causes I supported. They have flourished throughout human history - when the forces of good are weak. The Bible is full of complaints about cruel mobs, sexual licence, children rebelling against their parents, self-indulgent generations squandering peace and prosperity and bringing doom on their own nations.

Shakespeare's account of Timon's curse, already ancient when he wrote it 400 years ago, is a summary of all the nightmares of a failing civilisation. Religion, peace, instruction and manners are all to be flung aside: 'Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools, Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench And minister in their steads! To general filths convert green virginity! Do it in your parents? eyes! . . . Son of sixteen, Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire; With it, beat out his brains.? . . . Lust and liberty, Creep in the minds and manners of our youth, That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive And drown themselves in riot!? Darkness is a negative thing. It rushes in when the light is dimmed. It needs no conspiracy or organisation, though there were plenty of gleeful people around in those days, happy to hurry things along because it suited their desire to do exactly what they wanted. It was fun for them . . . for us, I ought to say. We would learn later these ideas were not so attractive when everyone else adopted them too.

This organised selfishness was the main reason behind the May 1968 riots in Paris. Selfishness needs to attack things that demand self-sacrifice - family, marriage, duty, patriotism and faith. And above all, it needs weakness and confusion among those in charge, if it is to succeed as it did then, and still does.

Leafing through the newspapers of four decades ago, I was reminded sharply of how authority seemed to have lost its nerve, and people to have lost any sense of belonging. Perhaps it was the accumulated shame and defeat of Suez, seeping into every institution. Perhaps it was the Profumo affair, after which our politicians and judges all seemed funny and deflated.

Perhaps it was the 1965 funeral of Winston Churchill, which was also the funeral of the British Empire, leaving all British people who witnessed it shaken, bereft and afraid for the future.

Perhaps it was the frenzied destruction of familiar townscapes and the appearance everywhere of hideous, howling concrete piazzas, which so many at that time - unbelievably - thought were superior to the old buildings they replaced. And I remember beginning to notice, around about the time I was 12, in 1963 and 1964, that authority had begun to lose the will to live. It was easier to get away with things - bad manners, sloppy schoolwork, lateness, laziness, breaking and above all bending the rules. I learned quickly to exploit every weakness.

That great destroyer, Lenin, advised his fellow apostles of chaos: 'Probe with the bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.' And more and more, it was mush we met. The year before my first riot, in 1967, I remember still being at school when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested in the famous West Wittering drug bust.

This made a special impression on me since we used to have our family holidays each August in a rented house at West Wittering, West Sussex, in those days a profoundly conservative resort. The very idea of Jagger, Richards and Marianne Faithfull, clad only in a rug, roosting subversively in this cosy place was revolutionary in itself. Was nothing sacred? Jagger was not just a rock star, but a herald of cultural revolt.

He had recently declared, moronically: 'Teenagers are not screaming over pop music any more, they're screaming for much deeper reasons. We are only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Teenagers the world over are weary of being pushed around . . . they want to be free and have the right of expression, of thinking and living without any petty restrictions.' Richards, even more of a Blairite before his time, had said: 'We are not old men. We are not concerned with petty morals.' Now both were in the dock, and Judge Leslie Block (a naval veteran who had genuinely fought for human freedom) sent them to prison - Jagger for three months, Richards for a year.

This was shocking. Did the Establishment still have a spine after all? Youth was not outraged - 56 per cent of people aged between 21 and 34 thought the sentence was too light.

The protest came - as so often in those days - from the elite itself. Lord Rees-Mogg, now my fellow-columnist, then editor of The Times. said the sentence was unfair and denounced as 'primitive' those who thought that the future Sir Michael Jagger had got what was coming to him. This, plus an expensive legal team, led to Jagger's rapid release - almost into the arms of Lord ReesMogg, who greeted the freed rock singer, as he stepped out of a helicopter, on live television.

I watched greedily, and concluded with absolute certainty that night that nobody was in charge, and that I could do anything I liked from now on. And I duly did.

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The NYT and the Deadly Peril of Iraq to Democrats

If history is any guide, the Democrats who have invested so completely in defeat in Iraq will suffer a voter backlash if the electorate comes to see the Iraq war as a success. By transparently tying their hopes for partisan political gain to defeat in Iraq, our Democratic leadership is now in bind from which there is no way to retreat from retreat.

Thus, the left are reduced to ignoring the success of the surge in increasingly outlandish ways. Instead of acknowledging the success of the surge in reducing violence to its lowest level since the invasion of Iraq began, the common refrain among Democrats today is that Iraq was the deadliest year yet for American soldiers.

And on those rare occasions when you can get a Democrat to admit that the surge has worked, you get one of two "yes but’s." The first "yes but" is that the success of the surge really only occurred because Iraqis knew that Democrats intended to cut and run from Iraq once they were elected. Indeed, according to history as rewritten by Obama, the Anbar Awakening was a direct result of the 2006 election. That evinces nearly the same degree of intellectual honesty as attributing the continued rising and setting of the sun to a Democratic electoral victory.

The second response one gets is that, while the surge may have improved security, it is still a failure because its whole purpose was to give room for political gains as of yet unrealized. The centerpiece of these "hoped for" gains was de-Baathification to reunite the Sunni population. Thus it was the horror of horrors yesterday when the Iraqi government passed a de-Baathification law out of Parliament. One can only imagine the number of expletives resounding off the hallowed halls haunted by our modern left.

The de-Baathification is a great success for those who want to see Iraq succeed as a democracy. Thus, true to the rule that for every action there is a reaction, we have the enemy of that success, our mendacious left, led in the MSM by the NYT, reacting with all of the sputtering vitriol they can muster to attack the new law. The Sunni legislators in the Iraqi Parliament supported the new law. As described in a NYT article:

But members of the largest Sunni coalition in parliament agreed to the new measure. Adnan al-Dulaimi, the group's leader, said the legislation was fair to low-ranking former Baathists and allowed the higher-ranking Shubah members to receive pensions, "which I consider good and acceptable."

See here. But that is not good enough for the odious NYT editorial board. They use rank speculation to attack the new law. I will not go point by point through the editorial, you can read it here, and I have no doubt you will soon hear similar arguments made in Democratic talking points as time progresses. But one has to love the NYT conclusion. "Iraqis are going to have to do a lot better to make their country work. Withdrawing American troops may finally persuade them to do that."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Apparently, the only way to insure victory is to declare defeat in Iraq and leave it to reinfestation by al Qaeda and Iranian plans to create an Iraqi Hezbollah. If only we declare defeat and leave, then everyone will "live happily ever after." When will the MSM ever press these incredibly disingenuous people on this fantasy? When will the MSM ever ask them what the costs of their cut and run plan portend to be in terms of our national security, a revitalized al Qaeda, and a Middle East that no longer credibly respects U.S. military power?

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The Race Card, Liberal Guilt and Our Next President

We are watching what portends to be a very ugly race for the Presidency – and not because of the lack of a clear front runner in either party. What portends to make this an ugly election is the spectre of racisim. In all fairness to Obama, he has not heretofore actively made his race central to his candidacy. Nonetheless, his candidacy for the President is inexorably taking on racial overtones while Obama himself remains silent.

The allure of Obama is not any of his demonstrated leadership qualities or his economic or foreign policy ideas. As piece after piece in the conservative press and some in the blogosphere have pointed out, Obama has very little experience for the presidency, and his claims to be able to unite the country are particularly disingenuous in light of his voting record as a hard line liberal. Yet none of this is discussed by the main stream media. Nor are his foreign policy pronouncements subjected to any analysis of the foreseeable consequences. Yet an Obama presidency that sees a complete and near immediate withdrawal from Iraq and an attack into Pakistani soil portends a foreign policy disaster perhaps even more destructive to U.S. interests than the presidency of Jimmy Carter. And as to his choice of associations, Obama is an active member of "an 'Afrocentric' church that bestows awards on Louis Farrakhan and practically defines itself through race-baiting." The mere whiff of something like this would be the death knell for any other candidate, yet the liberal MSM does nothing to question it.

Obama’s allure must of necessity lie elsewhere. I do not doubt that, to at least some extent, it is because of his charisma and his choice of themes. But that is only a part of it. Another part of his allure clearly stems in no small measure from the fundamental liberal belief that America is evil and, irrespective of today's reality, America's history of slavery and racisim paints all of the country with original sin. Supporting the African American Obama will have the singular effect of expiating one of liberal Americans' most deeply felt guilts. And thus, we have Obamamania - where his oratory alone is sited as the basis for popularity, and the liberal press gives him a free pass.

As the Washington Post, in an editorial supporting Obama, points out today:

. . . Not since 1896 -- when another rousing speechmaker, William Jennings Bryan, sought the White House – has the zeal for a candidate corresponded so little to a record of hard accomplishment. . .

The Obama phenomenon, then, stems not from what he has done but who he is. As the social critic John McWhorter has written, "What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land." He is the great white hope.

Of all the reasons I can think of to elect someone to office, and particularly during wartime, consideration of their race or gender are not among them. People of all races in America have been fighting against racisim for decades, and America of today, while hardly perfect, is very much a nation of equality. Racisim is not the defining issue facing America today. And expiating liberal guilt over the original sin of racisim will do nothing to protect our country from terrorism, it will do nothing to maintain or improve our economy, and it will do nothing to meet the rising challenges from China and Russia.

Having said that, if liberals choose to vote for Obama on the basis of his race, that is their right. And if liberals choose to affirmatively campaign for him on those grounds, that's fine also. (The same is true for Hillary on the grounds of her gender). But its the next logical step down that road that portends the real danger for our country. It is using charges of racisim to protect Obama from criticism. For example, watch this video of Bill Clinton stating that Obama’s claim to have always been against the Iraq War is a "fairy tale:"

There is nothing at all racial in what Bill Clinton said. It was a legitimate criticism of Obama. Yet as Obama stayed silent, the race card was played by his campaign and others:

The comments, which ranged from the New York senator appearing to diminish the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement — an aide later said she misspoke — to Bill Clinton dismissing Sen. Barack Obama’s image in the media as a "fairy tale" — generated outrage on black radio, black blogs and cable television. And now they've drawn the attention of prominent African-American politicians.

"A cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements," said Obama spokeswoman Candice Tolliver, who said that Clinton would have to decide whether she owed anyone an apology."

Read the story here. And you can see a similar scenario playing out over Hillary Clinton's innocuous remarks regarding MLK. This is a dark cloud on the horizon. If this is what happens when Clinton challenges Obama, what is going to happen when Conservatives go after Obama's record and his choice of associations? If Obama supporters are allowed to make this next election an unspoken referendum on race and liberal guilt, than this is going to be a bloody Presidential election season indeed. It will be a tremendous disservice to an America where racisim is very much on the wane and equality, imperfect though it may be, is the rule, not the exception.

Obama can’t be allowed to have it both ways. If he is going to run on the platform that the color of his skin is a justification for his election to the Presidency, than he needs to say that publicly and be judged accordingly. And if he is not seeking the Presidency on his genetic heritage, than he needs to publicly denounce efforts to portray criticism of him as racist. He needs to be pressed about this in the MSM, and he needs to be pressed about it now. This is very much a substantive issue.

It would be wonderful if we could finally put a stake in the history of racism in America. But we are about to elect a President of the United States and we do so in time of war. We need an effective President, whether that be an African American, a woman, or an occidental male. What we do not need is a "great white hope." And I can think of no more a disingenuous method to expiate racisim than to decide how to vote on the grounds of race.

Update2: Since I composed this post a few days ago, the Washington Post has weighed in with a January 15 editorial making the same point, that the unsupported charges of racism emenating from Obama supporters portend to do great harm to our county. Further, it appears that Obama has ominously refused to denounce these unfounded allegations of racism. As the WaPo notes:

Mr. Obama didn't pick this fight. But he is abetting his supporters in their mischaracterizations when he says, "Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark . . . She is free to explain that. But the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous."

And see this from Classical Values:

"Congrats, senator, you've just lost a supporter." That's what Brendan Loy says about Barack Obama's deliberate decision not to take the high road, and instead "let this racial stew fester":

At a conference call with reporters this morning, somebody asked Barack Obama about the Clintons' recent controversial remarks and Hillary Clinton's response to the kerfuffle. Thus, Obama had a golden opportunity to make clear that he does not believe the Clintons' remarks were racist or racially insensitive -- and he chose not to do so. Instead, he said a bunch of other stuff that I have no problem with, but failed to do the one thing he needs to do, which is to unambiguously disassociate himself from this race-baiting nonsense.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who adds,

The last thing we need is a President who encourages festering racial controversies.

Middle Americans who support Obama do so under the belief that he is as refreshing as he looks, and that he can heal America's racial disharmony. (Guilt also plays a strong role.) Having just demonstrated that he is not as refreshing as he looks, Obama has done precisely the type of thing which, if it does not cost him the Democratic nomination, will cause him to lose in November. . .

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Our Universities Need Real DIversity

Professor Robert Maranto is a lonely Republican in academia. In a recent article for the Washington Post, he documents the left wing bias in academia, in addition to decrying its ill effects on both academia and society as a whole.

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities' role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "God and Man at Yale" -- in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others -- making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I've taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused "a sensation" at his university. "It was as if I had become a child molester," he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because "you don't want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts."

. . . Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us. Among the findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.

Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

. . . Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book "Whose Welfare?," the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn't working -- yet many sociology professors even now deny that '70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients. Similarly, despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

. . . Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life.

Read the entire article. I know of no one who would argue with his conclusions, though I think that the Professor is giving a big pass to the decision makers in academia who are excluding conservatives. I do not believe that the discrimination that they practice is largely unconscious. To the contrary, neo-liberals of today, both in and out of academia, have demonstrated time and again that they have no affinity for free speech or ideas contrary to their own. It is the antithesis of the spirit of classical liberalism that is supposedly so cherished in academia. Consequently, I believe that the Professor's solution to this problem is naive and unworkable. If academia is ever to achieve real diversity - i.e., diversity in thought - it will have to be forced upon them from the outside.

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