Nothing More Racist (Or Regressive) Than A "Progressive"

Pat Condell hits the nail on the head in his discussion of those who style themselves "progressives," from their complete lack of intellectual honesty to their regressive politics to their racism of low expectations:



Pat's take misses on one point and only alludes to another worthy of more specific citation. Condell describes the world view of "progressives" correctly, even down to their view of the West as imperialists with the stain of original sin (while ignoring that the most imperialist force in world history has been Islam). It is worth noting that this view comes directly from Karl Marx and his theory that all history is a struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors. In the progressive world view, we are the oppressors while anyone who can be shoehorned into a victim group are the oppressed entitled to permanent special treatment.

What Condell misses in his analysis is the animus of progressives towards Christianity. To understand fully the motivation of progressives, one must note their abhorrence of Christianity. Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization; progressive are warring against it. Christianity must be removed from the public square for "progressives" to achieve their goal of remaking society with themselves as the sole arbiters of morality. Thus the "progressive" treatment of Islam is more nuanced than simply that "brown skinned" people are not to be held to the same standards. Muslims also seek to displace Christianity, and thus they are, in many ways, allied with progressives.

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Worship and Recipes

[W]ith all this confusion abounding, we do wonder if it isn’t a bit judgmental of the mainstream media to condemn the 18 percent of Americans who say they think Barack Obama is a Muslim. For one thing, this is fewer than the number of Americans who say that intelligent beings from other planets have made contact with humans on Earth. And it has gotten hard even for people of good will to keep things straight.

Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard

Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard weighs in on the question of whether Obama is a closet Muslim? No, of course not. He's a multiculturalist progressive.

Obama’s problem isn’t that people falsely think he’s a Muslim. It’s that the public is correctly concluding he’s a garden-variety multiculturalist progressive. So November’s election won’t just be a repudiation of one non-Muslim president. It will be a repudiation of a multiculturalist progressive worldview—and of the bitter elites who cling desperately to that worldview and are consumed by antipathy to most Americans, who don’t.

Well said.

There has never been any indication that Obama, since adulthood, has been a practicing Muslim. That said, it seems apparent that his time spent in Indonesia where he was living in a heavily Islamic environment has colored his views on Islam. He seems to have extrapolated from from what he observed of the benign form of Islam practiced in the Indonesia of his youth to the Islamic world as a whole. That is an incredibly naive error.

The Shafi'i school of Islam, practiced in Indonesia during Obama's stay there, is not the norm for the Islamic world. More and more the norm is Wahhabi-Salafi Islam, the far more militant, racist, misogynistic ideology at the heart of al Qaeda. As I have pointed out countless times on this blog, there is a war going on today for the heart and soul of Islam. It is a war between those who would reform their religion and those who would keep it mired in the backwaters of 7th century Arabian tribalism. Andrew McCarthy makes the same point today at the NRO. Unfortunately for us, our government is not engaging in this war. But that has nothing to do with Obama actually being a Muslim. It has everything to do with the fact that Obama has close experience with a benign form of Islam.

Obama claims to have been converted to Christianity after hearing one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's polemics, the one that took note of inequities created by "white man's greed." But that polemic seemed to have little or anything to do with Christianity and far more to do with socialism and the left's "social justice" construct.

I do not think Obama is a Muslim. Nor do I think he a Christian. I think he sees his deity every day when he looks in the mirror. Moreover, I think Afrocity hit the nail on the head in her post today, Obama is . . . . a recipe for disaster:

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California Broke-n

The poster child for the ills of progressivism and public sector unions, California, has yet to pass a state budget for the upcoming fiscal year, with the legislature apparently in full denial mode as to any need to cut spending. The state comptroller announced today that, without an approved budget, it will begin issuing IOU's at the end of this month.

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The Enemy Of Speech & Debate

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

-- George Washington

The modern progressive movement is intellectually bankrupt. Natural statists, they desire to rule by edict rather than have to debate and convince. It is why they so often resort to the race card to end debate. It is why they inevitably seek to demonize their opponents rather than face them in the marketplace of ideas. Indeed, this aspect of the left is so pervaisive and so deeply ingrained that it one of their defining characteristics.

Andrew Klavin, writing at City Journal, makes some cogent observations along these lines:

. . . [E]verywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on.

Take the e-mails that the Daily Caller obtained from the now-defunct lefty Web service Journolist. Never mind the personal or psychological implications of a radio producer who lovingly imagines Rush Limbaugh’s death or a law professor who doesn’t know that the FCC has no power to deprive Fox News of a license or a reporter who wants to smear Fred Barnes and other right-wing commentators as racist in order to distract the public from the hateful radicalism of Jeremiah Wright, then Obama’s pastor. The point is not these people’s animus or ignorance or wickedness. The point is that what they desired was not victory in open debate but silence — the silence of censorship, intimidation, or the grave.

When has Rush Limbaugh ever wished a liberal’s mouth closed forever? Really, who can deny that Rush would happily argue a point with absolutely anyone anywhere? When has Fox News ever done anything to its rival cable stations but trounce them in a free competition for ratings? When has Fred Barnes ever tried to bully or intimidate someone into shutting up? . . .

Freedom of speech and the market place of ideas are anethema to our modern left.

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What In The World Are Our Children Being Taught?

Where is Milton Friedman when you need him:



Capitalism has been the world's greatest engine of wealth creation. The past three centuries of economic - and concomitant social - advancements throughout the world are a history of the impact of capitalism - and, in the mirror image, the failure of socialism. Yet today, many of our children are apparently coming out of school with a negative view of capitalism, a dearth of knowledge about economics, and no understanding of the negative impacts of socialism. Moreover, it would appear that the left's rebranding from "liberal" to "progressive" has been a successful one. Chalk that one up to the "you can fool most of the people some of the time." See this recently released - and highly depressing - poll from Pew:

“Socialism” is a negative for most Americans, but certainly not all Americans. “Capitalism” is regarded positively by a majority of the public, though it is a thin majority. There are certain segments of the public – notably, young people and Democrats – where both “isms” are rated about equally. . . .

These are among the findings of a national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that tests reactions to words and phrases frequently used in current political discourse. Overall, 29% say they have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 59% react negatively. The public’s impressions of “capitalism,” though far more positive, are somewhat mixed. Slightly more than half (52%) react positively to the word “capitalism,” compared with 37% who say they have a negative reaction.

A large majority of Republicans (77%) react negatively to “socialism,” while 62% have a positive reaction to “capitalism.” Democrats’ impressions are more divided: In fact, about as many Democrats react positively to “socialism” (44%) as to “capitalism” (47%).

Reaction to “capitalism” is lukewarm among many demographic groups. Fewer than half of young people, women, people with lower incomes and those with less education react positively to “capitalism.”

The survey, conducted April 21-26 among 1,546 adults, measured reactions to nine political words and phrases. The most positive reactions are to “family values” (89% positive) and “civil rights” (87%). About three-quarters see “states’ rights” (77%) and “civil liberties” (76%) positively, while 68% have a positive reaction to the word “progressive.” . . .

The most striking partisan differences come in reactions to the word “socialism.” Just 15% of Republicans react positively to “socialism” while 77% react negatively. By more than two-to-one (64% to 26%), independents also have a negative impression of “socialism.” However, Democrats are evenly divided – 44% have a positive reaction to “socialism” while 43% react negatively.

“Capitalism” elicits a less partisan reaction. About six-in-ten Republicans (62%) react positively to “capitalism,” compared with 29% who have a negative reaction. About half of independents (52%) have a positive impression while 39% react negatively. Among Democrats, 47% react positively to “capitalism” while nearly as many (43%) react negatively.

There is a substantial partisan divide in views of the word “progressive.” However, majorities of Democrats (81%), independents (64%) and Republicans (56%) have a positive reaction to “progressive.” . . .

Young people are more positive about “socialism” – and more negative about “capitalism” – than are older Americans. Among those younger than 30, identical percentages react positively to “socialism” and “capitalism” (43% each), while about half react negatively to each. Among older age groups, majorities view “socialism” negatively and “capitalism” positively. . . .

More than twice as many blacks as whites react positively to “socialism” (53% vs. 24%). Yet there are no racial differences in views of “capitalism” – 50% of African Americans and 53% of whites have a positive reaction.

Those with a high school education or less are evenly divided over “capitalism” (44% positive vs. 42% negative). Among those with some college experience, 49% react positively to “capitalism” as do 68% of college graduates. Those with a high school education or less are more likely to express a positive view of “socialism” than do those with more education. . . .

Perhaps surprisingly, opinions about the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” are not correlated with each other. Most of those who have a positive reaction to “socialism” also have a positive reaction to “capitalism”; in fact, views of “capitalism” are about the same among those who react positively to “socialism” as they are among those who react negatively (52% and 56%, respectively, view “capitalism” positively). Conversely, views of “socialism” are just as negative among those who have a positive reaction to “capitalism” (64% negative) as those who react negatively (61% negative). . . .

I have long thought that no child should graduate from high school without an understanding of free market economics, basic accounting and business law. It would seem we are a long way indeed from that reality.

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Most Misleading Drudge Headline Ever

Drudge completely fooled me. Here is the first line of the Drudge headline:

OBAMA PLANS SPRING OFFENSIVE:

Given that Obama is in Afghanistan and we are at war there, I immediately clicked the link to see if we were about to launch a new front against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Surprise, surprise - I should have read the next line of the link:

TARGETS WALL STREET, SCHOOLS, CAMPAIGN FINANCE, ENERGY...

What irony. I should have known. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are mere distractions. Obama's war is on America itself.

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AP Goes APE Over Texas School Book Changes

We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.

Bernard Lewis, quoted in Teaching Religion, Washington Times, 23 Dec. 2008

When it comes to the text books used by public schools throughout the U.S., the Texas School Board wields vast influence. Approximately 47 other states use the textbooks approved by the Texas School Board. This year, the Texas School Board made revisions to books used in social studies and history - revisions that will effect texts in these subjects for approximately a decade. The School Board made some changes that accurately reflect history as well as refused make changes that would have rewritten history. Further, they refused to include in the curriculum a section holding that institutionalized racism continues to be a major problem in America. A progressive journalist for the AP, Ms. April Castro, is up in arms over all of this.

Ms. Castro all but accuses the "far right" and "ultra-conservative" members of the Texas School Board of having staged a coup over the sane, mainstream, progressive Democrats. Let's take a look at what has her, on behalf of the AP, going ape.

A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education . . .

How about "a majority of the duly elected members of the Texas State Board of Education?" This was not, despite the author's angst, a coup by the evil "far right." The author, Ms. Castro, does not want to admit that what we are seeing is simple democracy.

. . . succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade. [cue primal scream]

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. . . .

What Ms. Castro and progressives are arguing for is a rewrite of history. They wish to rip the First Amendment and Thomas Jefferson's remark on the "separation of Church and State" wholly out of historical context and have schools teach students the progressive's brand of radical secularism as if it were the vision of the founding fathers.

There was no inherent tension between the First Amendment and Christianity at the time of the founding. Indeed, no single document demonstrates just how much a generic form of Christianity was intertwined with our government at our founding than does the Declaration of Independence, composed by Thomas Jefferson and signed by all the members of the Second Continental Congress on 4 July, 1776:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, . . .

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, . . .

Our founding fathers saw our government as fully effectuating Judeo-Christian religious truths arising out of the Enlightenment. History shows that the trappings and spirit of a generic Christianity permeated the public sphere at the time of the founding and for over a century and a half thereafter.

True, our founding fathers, fifteen years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, passed the First Amendment, providing in relevant part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; . . .

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played pivotal roles in the drafing of the First Amendment. Eleven years after the Bill of Rights was ratified, Thomas Jefferson coined the term "a wall of separation between church and state" in private correspondence. As blogger JP points out:

Jefferson's phrase, "a wall of separation between Church & State," frequently quoted by secularists in their arguments, is one of the most misunderstood quotes in the history of the United States. It is nearly always quoted out of context, which is why is it nearly always misinterpreted. The Danbury Baptists, a religious minority in Connecticut, wrote to Jefferson in 1801 to express their concerns that they might suffer religious discrimination should an official state religion be adopted. Seeking to reassure the Baptists, Jefferson replied in a letter to them in 1802:

To messers. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.

Gentlemen

The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.

Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.

Jefferson's personal opinion was a political one, and the phrase "separation of Church & State" does not appear in the Constitution, which restricts Congress from establishing a state religion and preventing American citizens from believing and worshiping freely.

As to precisely what Jefferson believed his words to mean, it is important to note that none of the founders, including Jefferson during his two terms as President, did anything in the slightest to impose radical secularism on America. They did nothing to rip the trappings of Christianity from the public sphere, nor to suggest that those that existed were in violation of the First Amendment. To the contrary, prayers then (and still today) opened Congress. Christianity was an essential part of public school curriculum. Christmas and Easter were celebrated in the public and private sphere. And the federal, state and local governments enacted laws supporting religion and imposing moral prohibitions based on the Judeo-Christian ethic.

To understand how all of this fits together at the time of our founding, one must note that our nation was in large measure founded by deeply religious people escaping institutionalized religious persecution and, further, that Europe was not then long from a series brutal and bloody religious wars that culminated in the Enlightenment. With those truths firmly in mind, Jefferson was virulently opposed to the use of public funds in support of any particular religion and as equally opposed to involving the state in settling religious disputes by favoring one religion or sect over another. Those were the subjects that animated the First Amendment and were the context to Jefferson's phrase, "separation between Church and State."

The historical context was further explained in a speech by James Buckley, the brother of William Buckley:

For most of our history, the First Amendment’s provision prohibiting the “establishment of religion” was understood to do no more than forbid the federal government’s preferential treatment of a particular faith. But while the First Amendment’s purpose was to protect religion and the freedom of conscience from governmental interference, as Thomas Cooley noted in his 1871 treatise on Constitutional Limitations, the Framers considered it entirely appropriate for government “to foster religious worship and religious instruction, as conservators of the public morals and values, if not indispensable, assistants to the preservation of the public order.” As that perceptive observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it, “while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.”

And so it is not surprising that the Congress that adopted the First Amendment also reenacted the provision of the Northwest Ordinance which declares that “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged;” and early Congresses proceeded to make grants of land to serve religious purposes and to fund sectarian education among the Indians.

In sum, as understood by those who wrote it, the First Amendment did not forbid the government from being biased in favor of religion as such so long as it championed none. . . .

What Ms. Castro is arguing for is a rewrite of history to put the words of modern radical secularism/aethism into the mouths of our founding fathers. But the history of modern radical secularism only begins in the latter half of the twentieth century, when Justice Black incorporated Jefferson's phrase, "separation between Church and State," into First Amendment jurisprudence and then added his own exposition upon the phrase in very broad terms. His 1947 decision in Everson was seized upon by the radical left to fundamentally alter our government through the Courts, not the ballot box, and to strip all aspects of Christianity from the public sphere. Perhaps the high (or low if you like) water mark of this effort by the progressive left was Obama's proclamation during a speech in Turkey of all places that America is "not a Christan nation."

What Ms. Castro is arguing for is part of the left's war on Christianity and Judaism that stretches back to Rousseau and the French Revolution. I agree with Ms. Castro that it should be taught - but not as part of the philosophy of our founding fathers, since it wasn't. It should be taught as part of the socialist philosophy of Rousseau, Marx, Lenin and their ilk that has infected America like a cancer since the early twentieth century. It should be taught as a part of their philosophy seeking to deconstruct the foundations of Western Civilization and install in its place a secular, socialist utopia.

Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," . . .

Wow. What is Ms. Castro's problem with this? Whatever it is, this woman is desperately in need of a civics lesson. We are a "constitutional republic." Indeed, the only place you will find a true democracy in America is in a few towns in Vermont.

. . . and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard. . . .

Hmmmm, is there now a problem with teaching actual economic history? I am not sure what sort of rewrite Ms. Castro is asking for here. But evidently, she views this is as just another nefarious plot by conservatives to tell the truth.

Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, . . .

Ms. Castro is attempting to redefine what is the "center" of America. She would have us believe that progressivism is the new mainstream and if you disagree with it, then you are an "ultraconservative," living on the fringes, bitterly clinging to your guns and bibles, and no doubt drinking copious amounts of tea.

By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.

Ms. Castro's progressive credentials could not be more evident. She evidently sees "American exceptionalism" and the minimally regulated free enterprise system as controversial subjects. But the truth is, we are exceptional (quick, someone tell Obama). Unlike every other country on the face of this earth, we are not defined by a single nationality or even a few nationalities. Nor are we defined by a single religion, a class system, or even a deep seated and common culture. We are a mix of all and sundry defined only by a few ideals - democracy, freedom, liberty. and respect for property rights being the at their core. And if Ms. Castro believes a more heavily regulated economic system is better than what we have, I wish she would point to the models she has in mind, or the countries that have outperformed our economy. Given her knowledge of history and her evident antipathy to free market economics, I am sure it would be illuminating.

Board members argued about the classification of historic periods (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); . . .

B.C. - Before Christ, and A.D. - "Anno Domini" which means "in the year of our Lord," are the manner by which we in Western Civilization have counted the years for most of two thousand years. And indeed, the history of Western Civilization is completely intertwined with the history of the Christianity, Judaism and, on the periphary, Islam. There is no intellectually honest way to separate them out of Western history of the last two millennia.

That said, intellecutal honesty and modern progressivism are mutually exclusive concepts. Thus it is no surprise that secular progressives in academia are constantly searching for new ways of separating Western Civilization from Christianity. One of the things they hit upon was to substitute B.C.E. - Before the Common Era, and C.E. - the Common Era, as a new way of identifying the years. Obviously, Ms. Castro is offended that "ultra-conservatives" refuse to join with progressive academia in their multi-front war on Christianity.

. . . whether students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will). . . .

Again, its difficult to see what Ms. Castro objects to here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is always ostensibly at the center of Middle Eastern politics. It is a flashpoint that directly involves the larger issues of Muslim triumphalism, the Islamist's desires to destroy Judaism, and their desires to subjugate the West and establish Sharia law across the world. These issues are of central importance to the citizens of America today. So what could possibly be controversial about students studying that? Indeed, it would be a point of controversy if they did not study it.

And what could possibly be wrong with studying the fascinating and strong willed Israeli Premier, Golda Meir. Is this just the anti-semitism coming through that is seemingly built into the DNA of progressives? I can think of no other reason why Ms. Castro would find this objectionable.

In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class. . . .

Hah. How dare these fringe right-wingers teach that there is a Second Amendment.

Do progressives now advocate selective teaching of only those rights in the Bill of Rights with which they agree? It wouldn't surprise me in the least, though even Ms. Castro is apparently too abashed to do anything other than to obliquely suggest as much. Perhaps the ultra-conservatives will actually be so reactionary as to teach quotes such as:

“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty . . . . The right to self-defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.” . . .

That quote came from Blackstone's Commentaries on the law at about the time of our founding and was explicitly referencing the Second Amendment. Whether the Second Amendment provides an individual right to bear arms is moot. Does Castro think ignoring the Second Amendment will make it go away, or that students should be kept ignorant of the facts, established in Heller, that our founders saw the right to keep and bear arms as both a necessity for self-defense and, ultimately, as the final defense of the individual against a government that becomes tyrannical? Modern progressives view both as a danger to the paternalistic big government that they would like to see in America. And thus, I guess, Ms. Castro would strike them from the education of our students. How Orwellian.

Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.

Certainly as to a musical genres, hip-hop and rap are very significant and should be taught as such. But to define something as a cultural movement means it marks a fundamental change in public attitudes. Neither hip hop nor rap come close to qualifying on that count. Indeed, the subjects of a significant segment of hip hop and rap - misogyny, violence, killing police, killing informants, rape of "bitches" and "whores," all told with multiple profanities - are hardly part of mainstream American culture, nor have they caused a shift in our culture. It is simply stunning that progressives would want to have our children glorify any of that - let alone to hold it out as an advancement in American culture.

Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.

History teaches that Tejanos did form a part of the Alamo force, they did fight shoulder to shoulder with Bowie and Crockett, and they did perish in the fight. And as to others of Hispanic heritage, many contributed to our nation and are worthy of study. These are the only valid criticisms Ms. Castro makes in her progressive manifesto masquerading as a serious news story.

Another amendment deleted a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society."

I'd like to hear that one explained myself. If we are going to teach about racism in America today and efforts to combat it, shouldn't we be teaching about Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and perhaps the true story of race hustlers, such as those exposed in the Ricci decision last year. That is a reality progressives clearly do not intend to have taught as part of a public school curriculum on "institutional racism." Rather, they seek to put into the textbooks a justification for treating blacks - and all other victim classes - as permanent victims. Progressives want our schools to teach that, if you are white or conservative, you are ipso facto a racist and that, if you are a member of a victim class, then you are entitled to special treatment - unless of course you act outside your victim classification, in which case you are insured of opprobrium and character assassination by the left. How are our children to understand their pre-ordained roles in the progressive world of permanent victims and victimizers if not trained in school? No wonder Ms. Castro is concerned with this. I am surprised she didn't lead with it, since it is at the very core of progressivism.

Democrats did score a victory by deleting a portion of an amendment by Republican Don McLeroy suggesting that the civil rights movement led to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."

McLeroy has got this skewed, but not wholly wrong. The Civil Rights movement that existed through much of the twentieth century was a struggle for equality of opportunity. Thus, it confuses the issues to fully conflate "equality of outcomes" with the Civil Rights movemet.

It is socialism that advocates equality of outcomes - and socialism predates the American Civil Rights movement by 120 years. Socialist ethos today fully vest the race and identity politics of progressives - and it was the progressives who loudly proclaimed the civil rights movement as their raison d'etre in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King.

What needs to be taught are that there are two mutually exclusive philosophies at work in America today. What our founders wrote into the Declaration of Independence, based on the philosophy of John Locke, was that "all men are created equal" in terms of God's law and that all have the right to enjoy the basic freedoms granted by God. They believed in equality of opportunity for all Americans.

The opposing philosophy, that of Rousseau and Marx, is a belief that God doesn't exist and that the government should use the police power of the state to insure "equality of outcomes." That of necessity means that people must be treated unequally under the law and that property must be forcefully taken in order to be redistributed. That is utopian socialism.

Those two philosophies cannot exist in tandem. That, and the ramifications of both philosophies, are what need to be taught to our students.

Thus with but a few quibbles, I see the Texas school text-book as positive developments indeed. As to the AP, I wonder if they could have hired a more progressive and more historically ignorant reporter than Ms. Castro.

Update: The NYT has an article on this issue also. They raise two points of note.

One is a vote by the School Board to scrap the teaching of Thomas Jefferson in favor of teaching John Calvin and others. That is over the top. Jefferson, besides being a two term president, was one of, if not the, most influential of the Founding Fathers. He is inextricably bound up in our political DNA. Taking him out of the history books is a travesty. Indeed, if the Judeo-Christian roots of our nation and the meaning of the First Amendment are to be honestly treated, then the teaching of Thomas Jefferson has to be front and center.

The second issue pointed out by the NYT is that an amendment offered by Democrats, defeated on a party line vote, provided that "the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” That, as discussed above, is fundamentally at odds with the historical reality.

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Speech and Progressives

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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:
______________________________________________________

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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"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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Interesting Posts From Around The Web - 18 May 2008

Interesting posts from around the web, all below the fold.

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Art: The Knight, Death and the Devil, Albrecht Durer, 1513

A Happy 60th Birthday to Israel. Soccer Dad adds his views on this event to Charles Krauthammer’s. In the category of dark humor, TNOY has posted a birthday card to Israel from Iran.

Hamas, now armed with improved Iranian rocketry, continues its assault on Israel with a promise to wipe the country off the map. Seraphic Secret raises the salient questions about that situation – and but for his greater eloquence, they are precisely the same questions I have. Hamas had a choice to make two years ago, peace or war. They have chosen war. When will Israel actually join the war? Israel must fight back robustly and with no concern for the international Islamist echo chamber or it will, in the foreseeable future, it will mean the end of Israel.

Rick Moran has some brilliant analysis of Obama’s outrage after deciding that any discussion about appeasement had to be aimed at him. As Rick notes, we’re still waiting on Team Obama to actually address the substance of the argument that he’s a Chamberlain clone. In a related essay, Bookworm Room makes what I think is a fair assessment, that Obama is "either incredibly naive or, as I’m beginning to suspect, that – while he’s clearly academically quite bright — he is, in practical terms, an idiot." A point that I make here is that Obama views the world through a marxist paradigm which, by its nature is inherently flawed. He no doubt scored high under hard left professors, but his view of the world, its problems and workable solutions comes out of the collected works of Karl Marx. I believe that explains the disconnects that both Bookworm Room and I have noted.

The Covenant Zone and proof of pure evil. As the Shield of Achilles notes, Muslim apologists in the West, such as Juan Cole, have their work cut out for them.

From Bizzyblog, it’s the recession that never was. That said, the steady drumbeat of negative economic news by the AP over a period of years has worked wonders for the left to make the economy seem much worse than it is.

From JammieWearingFool, there is an "anti-war kook" visiting Iraq as we speak. I am waiting to hear the fallout from Pelosi when she returns. I have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps Pelosi is preparing to rehabilitate Iraq for the far left, thus making it much less of an issue in November. Nah.

One of the bedrock characteristics of the progressive left is an utter disdain for free speech or debate. Q&O has an example of the free speech. I have an example of the debate.

The Velvet Hammer has an excellent post showing how, when Obama does talk substance, he has an incredible problem with consistency. And there is a darkly humorous post at Vast Right Wing Conspiracy where Obama airs his a new poster detailing his many supranational endorsements.

Senator and phony soldier Tom Harkin is at it again, now criticizing the military service of John McCain. That this amazing hypocrite still holds an elected position above dog catcher mystifies. But for the left, who seemingly have no standards, he is still accpetable. The Democratic position on what constitutes acceptable military service to qualify for the presidency is ever changing, depending on the background of their candidate. Four Right Wing Whackos has the story.

Red Alerts finds it difficult to swallow that the UN plans to investigate the U.S. for racism and xenophobia. That is sticking in my craw also. As This Ain’t Hell colorfully describes the UN, it is a "steaming boil on the ass of humanity" – a characterization they back up with a bevy of facts.

Visit the excellent blog, Irish Elk, and help him celebrate his sixth year on the blogosphere. At that blog age, he has now attained the status of elder statesman.

Discriminations notes that the left is having an incredibly difficult time dealing with race and racism in any way that includes even a patina of intellectual honesty this campaign season. And as Fulham Reactionary notes, the problem is much the same across the pond.

Whited Sepulchre has a fascinating and thoughtful post up for National Human Rights Day that looks at America through the eyes of our nations iconic artist, Norman Rockwell, and compares and contrasts that with the brutal reality outside of our borders.

Subadei plumbs the depths of the net to find an individual in severe need of an attitude adjustment session with an airborne ranger.

I always knew that the EU was a bureaucratic nightmare, but I never imagined it could be this byzantine. An Englishman’s Castle touches upon the incredible complexity of being a farmer with sheep across the pond.

The 14th Military History Carnival is posted at Investigations of a Dog. It looks quite interesting.

Everything new is old. As Got Medieval points out, even break dancing is apparently medieval in origin.

I really don’t want to blog about McCain and his embrace of global warming. That said, No Oil For Pacifists has stepped into the breach with an excellent post on this depressing topic. The ever illuminating Aurora provides more thoughts. As much as I like McCain, and I would vote for him on national security and the judiciary alone, stuff like this is absolutely maddening. It is apparently shared by Simon at Classical Values. That said, Republicans need to heed the advice of the Barking Moonbats and GOP 2.0.

Dave of Arabia has led a fascinating life. I wait to hear more of his adventures in the Middle East.

Newsweek’s cover story of the past week was so outrageously partisan I had hoped it an anamoly. From what I read in Verum Serum, its not. There is more hyper left ventilating from News Week, a publication that seems to have taken a huge step to the left of the NYT – something I did not think possible. I was wrong.

Heh. From KG, pondering feminist chomskyesque academic musings beyond the level of human understanding: "For the love of God, someone take the keyboard from this idiot."

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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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