Mark Steyn responds to National Endowment for the Arts chief’s Rocco Landesman’s hyperbolic flattery of the Chosen One.

In his keynote address to the 2009 “Grantmakers in the Arts” Conference, Landesman hailed Obama as “the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar”. He didn’t mean a “powerful writer” as in a compelling voice, gripping narrative, vivid characterization, command of language, etc. He meant a “powerful writer” as in Caesar was king of the world, and now Obama is. He came, he saw, he stimulated: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

I suppose so. He could invade somewhere and force the natives to accept degrading roles in NEA-funded performance art. He could take out the Iranian nuclear program by carpet-bombing it with unreadable literary novels. That is, if you “accept the premise” that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. Rocco Landesman may, but it’s not clear, from his actions (or inactions) in Eastern Europe, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere, that the President does. But, even so, it seems an odd pitch to “American artists”. Rocco Landesman, Speaking Goof to Power, isn’t the first Obama groupie to enjoy the kinky frisson of groveling obsequiousness, but he’s set an impressive new standard in public revelation thereof. Rocco’s aunt, Fran Landesman, is the great lyricist of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” as well as “The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men”. But surely there are few sadder middle-aged men than her nephew prostrating himself before his master as the most literate global colossus in two millennia.

Why would anyone possibly want to carry a weapon in a National Park?

In classic liberal newspaper fashion, the Yellowstone Insider performs some grave chin-stroking over the successful passage of Senator Tom Coburn’s S. Amendment 1067 (Text: pg. 1—pg. 2, attached to bill H.R. 627 regulating the credit card industry.

Wyoming does indeed have a concealed-carry law—you can see for yourself on the state’s website—and does indeed recognize concealed-carry permits from other states. ... However, Wyoming is one of the many states that allows citizens to openly carry a legally registered weapon. ...

(T)he fact that Park Rangers must add gun enforcement to their list of duties is not the most desirable of outcomes. Generally speaking, the vast majority of gun owners are responsible citizens. The problem, however, doesn’t lie with responsible gun owners; it lies with irresponsible gun owners, and they, too, exist; there were issues raised by gun owners openly brandishing their weapons during Obama speeches in Arizona and Minnesota this summer, as they went out of their way to openly carry legal semiautomatic weapons in large crowds waiting to see the President. Poaching, too, is still an issue in Yellowstone. And, quite bluntly, we can’t think of many instances in Yellowstone National Park where anyone would need a weapon; we’re not talking about an environment where animal attacks or human crime occurs with any degree of regularity.

In the Daily article, local attorney Kent Spence of Jackson’s Spence Law Firm says he would feel more comfortable camping in the Yellowstone backwoods carrying a weapon capable of taking down a bear, though he admitted pepper spray would be his first line of defense. We’re not so sure every other gun owner would be as comfortable or responsible should a bear attack.

You really have to admire liberal journalistic reasoning in action. Making something legal is alleged to create a new law enforcement responsibility for Park Rangers. Most of us would have supposed that eliminating a potential violation would have the opposite effect.

And you certainly would not want to be “irresponsible” in the event of a grizzly bear attack. Who knows? The indignant bear might sue.

Yes, Pepper Spray is definitely the answer. (Old joke)

I favor the .500 Linebaugh brand of Pepper Spray myself.

Michael Barone admires the liberal establishment’s recent efforts to marginalize dissent.

I would submit that the president’s call for an end to “bickering” and the charges of racism by some of his supporters are the natural reflex of people who are not used to hearing people disagree with them and who are determined to shut them up.

This comes naturally to liberals educated in our great colleges and universities, so many of which have speech codes whose primary aim is to prevent the expression of certain conservative ideas and which are commonly deployed for that purpose. (For examples, see the Website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends students of all political stripes.) Once the haven of free inquiry and expression, academia has become a swamp of stifling political correctness.

Similarly, the “mainstream media”—the old-line broadcast networks, The New York Times, etc.—present a politically correct picture of the world. The result is that liberals can live in a cocoon, an America in which seldom is heard a discouraging word. Conservatives, in contrast, find themselves constantly pummeled with liberal criticism, on campus, in news media, and in Hollywood TV and movies. They don’t like it, but they’ve gotten used to it. Liberals aren’t used to it and increasingly try to stamp it out.

Read the whole thing.

If we study the vocabulary of the American elite, we find that strange things have happened to the English language. Slavish conformity of thought, readiness to bow to conventional opinion, credulous acceptance of popular alarms, willingness to embrace crude simplifications, and firm refusal to question supposed authority and pretended expertise are continually cited as evidencing sound judgment and good education. Skepticism and questioning the authority of media culture is, on the other hand, extremist, polarizing, and ignorant. Our contemporary political culture basically turns language inside out. The most craven conformist mouthing empty platitudes (Albert Gore) is praised for wisdom and bravery, and anyone attempting to subject a received prescription to scrutiny or analysis (Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh) is intrinsically unintelligent.

Herbert London, at PJM, attacks the philosophy of Envy underlying the agenda of the American party of the left.

Whether it is the socialism espoused by the Nazis or the socialism of the former Soviet Union or the socialism that is emerging in the United States, there is one overarching sentiment, however different socialism in these three societies may be. Socialism everywhere expresses envy of excellence by treating the contributions and wealth of the successful as the wages of sin.

The Nazis saw the sin as a Jewish conspiracy, the Soviets saw sin as exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and what is emerging in the United States is the sin of the wealthy.

In the Obama administration greed is considered the sin that must be opposed. But greed, whatever its deficiencies, is, as Adam Smith pointed out, an incentive for the promotion of capitalism which, in the aggregate, has a salutary influence on the economy. To combat greed, the socialists emphasize envy. Since equality is the goal, even trivial differences in income are exaggerated and the progressivity in the tax system is employed as a blunt instrument to impose equality.

Lincoln said “you can’t make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.” But President Obama seems to believe that wealth is invariably related to the wages of sin and must be controlled or, to use his language, “spread around.” To make sure this happens, government must expand and, in so doing, the private sector will inevitably contract. That explains why socialism, which purports to represent the interests of the average person, ends in overwhelming government control or outright tyranny. ...

President Gerald Ford put this matter in perspective when he noted “that a government that can give you everything you want will be large enough to take everything you have.”

Read the whole thing.

John Hinderaker listens to another democrat apologizing for America.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech “surprised the audience.” No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world. ... The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. “It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems,” Albright said. America has been having hard times recently, Albright said. “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York. “My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,’ the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I’m afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy “experts.” Promoting American weakness: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

On liberal editorial pages and across the left-side of the blogosphere, conservative opposition to drastically increased government spending and Health Care Reform proposals, dissent at Town Hall meetings, and last weekend’s massive protest in Washington have all been diagnosed and interpreted as “anger” and “extremism” on the part of “White Males.”

David Harsanyi admires the left’s preemptive definition of political opposition as racism.

Who dictates what level of anger and dissent is allowable? Who decides what a clandestine racist sign looks like? Maybe someone like MSNBC’s Carlos Watson, who wondered if “socialism” was really about the nationalization of industry and hyper-regulation of the private market, or if it was just “becoming the new N-word.”

None of this has anything to do with the left’s paranoid belief that America is an inherently racist nation. It’s just that if you oppose more government dependency and expansion, you might as well be a Confederate infantryman. No, it doesn’t matter what you say, because we know what you really mean.

Read the whole thing.

Coyote identifies precisely what’s going on with “Health Care Reform.”

The leftish political strategy for over 100 years has been

1. Regulate something 2. Blame the free market for inevitable disruptions caused by the regulation 3. Use the above to justify more regulation 4. Repeat

We have an artificial situation, created by government tax policy in the first place. Healthcare charges have been removed from market influence because the consumer has not been paying them, his insurance has. The consumer normally does not buy his own insurance. Tax policy has arranged for health insurance to be a benefit of corporate employment.

When you do get to buy your own health insurance is when you lose your job, and then, ouch! you tend to find out just how expensive being a member of a maginal, ill-serviced market can be, at the very time you can least afford it.

Reforming health care simply requires transferring the tax deduction to individuals, reducing the burden of litigation and consequent staggering malpractice insurance costs and defensive medicine, and removing state barriers to insurance competition. Democrats don’t like any of that. When Whole Foods’ John Mackey made several of these suggestions in the Wall Street Journal editorial, his company was subjected to a boycott.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

They know how to achieve consensus in China

Republicans are declining to support Obama-Care and Cap-and-Trade. Why, it’s enough to make New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman envy China.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse.

America’s Conscience: John Aravosis

John Aravosis, of leftwing AMERICAblog, scored a real journalistic coup, catching the RNC mocking Barack Obama with an imaginary Obama card, which Aravosis discovered could be used to buy “Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature – with pictures to boot.”

The bounders!

Except, wait… why! it’s all in Aravosis’s own head, as Right Wing News explains.

The website has a profanity filter in place that blocks certain words. Otherwise, all it does is pull up a search of that particular word on Amazon.com, which no one considers to be a racist or anti-semitic website.

In other words, what you’re seeing is a placebo effect for liberal bloggers. ...

It’s like a Rorschach test for the liberal psyche. You see a butterfly, they see Ronald Reagan beating a homeless guy to death with a baby panda.

(T)his has been controversial enough to make it all the way to The Politico in an article entitled, “RNC pulls game selling offensive items. ...

(T)he (real) story is that a bunch of childlike liberals, most of whom curse like sailors, typed words into a search engine that referenced Amazon and pretended to be shocked and offended by what pulled up.

Aravosis demanded an explanation from the Republican National Committee “for including ‘bondage,’ ‘anal,’ and ‘clitoris’.” Hilariously enough, Right Wing News has demonstrated that the RNC included no such words. All the racist and sexually charged search words came directly from Aravosis’s own dirty little mind and their only connection to the RNC page came via his typing them in himself.

Wow, talk about a story backfiring. A sanctimonious liberal hack takes a go at proving that Republicans are dirty-minded racist bigots, and winds up demonstrating before a huge audience exactly how self-righteous, prejudiced, dirty-minded, and basically incompetent he really is himself. Ouch!

John Aravosis Wikipedia entry

According to the Washington Post, the plan to send out hit teams of CIA assassins to whack major al Qaeda figures was (8 years later) coming close to becoming operational when new CIA Director Leon Panetta learned of it, yelled Eeeck!, pulled the plug, and ran crying to Congress.

Good thing we elected Barack Obama president, isn’t it?

We wouldn’t want American intelligence officers running around shooting terrorists, would we? Without a formal hearing, without providing them with counsel from top law firms or access to major media reporters? That would be hasty, violent, risky, and (at least from some Buddhist perspectives, and that of much of the contemporary community of fashion) simply wrong.

CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency’s back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a “somewhat more operational phase.” Shortly after learning of the plan, Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001.

The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, yesterday defended Panetta’s decision to cancel the program, which he said had raised serious questions among intelligence officials about its “effectiveness, maturity and the level of control.”

I think it’s time to deal properly with al Qaeda terrorists. First of all, they clearly have grievances, so Congress should add a provision entitling then to TARP payments. We all know that the fundamental basis of all terrorism is always economic inequality, so if Goldman Sachs can get TARP money, why not al Qaeda prime?

Their violent behavior clearly is a way of externalizing emotional discomfort with being fanatical adherents of a medieval, intolerant sect associated with a backward culture widely looked down upon and despised. Counseling is clearly in order.

Instead of trained teams of CIA assassins, perhaps the Obama administration will instead organize a new, more progressive answer, sending out teams of legal aid attorneys to assist indignant ghazis in securing financial reparations for Western slights, along with crack platoons of therapists and anger management counselors to help the bitter and offended mujahedin to just get over it.

Instead of hellfire rockets fired from helicopters or drone aircraft, the Obama administration might start delivering Pilates equipment and yoga mats to Taliban training camps.

Episcopal High Priestess Katherine Jefferts-Schori

Addressing delegates at a recent triennial meeting of Episcopalians in Anaheim, California, Katherine Jefferts-Schori won this month’s Rand villain award by arguing passionately that the Christian doctrine of individual salvation was all wrong.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told delegates to the group’s triennial meeting July 8 in Anaheim, Calif., that the overarching connection to problems facing Episcopalians has to do with “the great Western heresy—that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.”

“It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus,” Jefferts Schori, the first woman to be elected as a primate in the worldwide Anglican Communion three years ago, said. “That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.”

Schori said countering individualistic faith was one reason the theme chosen for the meeting was “Ubuntu,” an African word that describes humaneness, caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation.

“Ubuntu doesn’t have any ‘I’s in it,” she said. “The ‘I’ only emerges as we connect—and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no ‘I’ without ‘you,’ and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the One who created us.”

Jefferts Schori said “heretical and individualistic understanding” contributes to problems like neglect for the environment and the current worldwide economic recession.

“The sins of a few have wreaked havoc with the lives of many, as greed and dishonesty have destroyed livelihoods, educational possibilities, care for the aged, and multiple forms of creativity,” she said. “And that’s just the aftermath of Ponzi schemes for which a handful will go to jail.”

She said in order to be faithful, “we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones.”

“Ubuntu implies that selfishness and self-centeredness cannot long survive,” she said. “We are our siblings’ knowers and their keepers, and we cannot be known without them.”

“We have no meaning, no true existence in isolation,” she said. “We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality.”

Mickey Kaus:

‘We’ll raise your taxes and in exchange we’re going to cut your treatments.’ I mean, how could that not have widespread appeal?

Andrew Sullivan counsels the Obama Administration to rely upon restraint, and green neck ties (!), to effectuate the liberation of the people of Iran.

[T]he evidence of outright fraud is now overwhelming. And the infliction of violence against defenseless protesters should be condemned forcefully.

The administration should, in my view, resist the grandstanding of the neocons – who remain almost autistic about the world they seek to remake – but insist that no violence be used against peaceful demonstrations. The truth is: if these crowds continue to grow and the regime does not massacre them, there’s a chance they could topple the regime. By focusing on government restraint, you can empower the resistance without giving Ahmadi’s thugs an opening.

Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.

——————————————————

Even fellow converso John Cole finds Andrew’s approach a little twee.

If someone can give me one legitimate piece of evidence that wearing green boxers is going to help bring democracy to Iran, so help me I’ll wear plaid from head to toe and shoot for world peace.

I know he means well, but this is what I was talking about this morning when I said that the coverage of the events in Iran by American bloggers was giving me a warblogger circa 2003 vibe. I can’t be the only one who is reminded of Abbie Hoffman’s plans to levitate the Pentagon through the power of meditation.

My thoughts are with the folks in Iran risking it all fighting for democracy, but this can not be said enough- this is not about us, it is about them. I love the coverage of events, but please stop with this narcissistic nonsense.

Andrew Thomas observes that liberals want to be punished. Liberalism is a lot like BDSM. Liberals yearn to surrender to a domineering master. For them, pain turns into pleasure.

[L]et’s objectively review the initiatives in the neolib agenda: Environmentalism, global passivism, overpopulation, socialized healthcare, and promoting government intervention into all aspects of life. All of these priorities require individuals to sacrifice their lifestyles, their income, and/or their basic comforts.

This past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exhorted, “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory…” in order to sacrifice ourselves to the gods of global warming. As presidential candidate Obama said, “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times…” He seems to indicate that he wants us to starve and freeze.

Most of these initiatives involve the inflicting of pain and misery. Tom Daschle, in his book “Critical: What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis” says health-care reform “will not be pain free” and that seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of having them treated. In other words, you will suffer a slow agonizing death under government mandate.

As a final phenomenological exercise, impassively observe the level of neolib support for this agenda. It has not appeared to wane. In fact, neolib fervor continues to increase as the promised level of suffering increases.

Hatred of life, detestation of abundance and material success, self-infliction of pain are all very old patterns of perversity associated with extreme forms of religious aberration. In the Christian context, this sort of thing was usually classified as a heresy, being rightly identified with Manicheanism, a mystical Middle Eastern sect which viewed the universe as dualistic, featuring a good spiritual world created by a positive “Father of Greatness” and a fallen and defective material world created by the “Prince of Darkness.”

In the good old days, when patterns of insanity of this kind led to destruction of works of art, physical assaults on persons, and rejection of property rights in favor of some new millenialist regime prominently featuring sodomy and free love, the Church of Rome and the knightly aristocracy would take drastic action to stamp it out and restore order.

Roger Scruton, in the American Spectator, describes how sloth, self-indulgence, and intellectual cowardice led the modern university to surrender to egalitarian relativism and thus to be politicized.

As universities expanded, the humanities began to displace the sciences from the curriculum. Students wished to use their time at university to cultivate their leisure interests and to improve their souls, rather than to learn hard facts and complex theories. And there arose a serious question as to why universities were devoting their resources to subjects that made so little discernible difference to the wider world. What good do the humanities do, and why should students take three or four years out of their lives in order to read books which—if they were interested—they would read in any case, and which—if they were not interested—would never do them the least bit of good?

In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they. And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms. ...

Subjects like English and art history grew from the desire to teach young people how to discriminate art from effect, beauty from kitsch, and real from phony sentiment. This ability was not regarded as an unimportant skill like fencing or horse riding, which students are free to acquire or not, according to their interests. It was regarded as a real form of knowledge, as vital to the future of civilization as the knowledge of mathematics, and more closely connected with the moral health of society than any natural science. It was only on that assumption that the humanities acquired their central place in the modern university.

If, however, the humanities are to avoid the cultivation of taste, it is not only their central place in the curriculum that is thrown in doubt. Given their prominence in the modern university, and the fact that increasingly many students come to university who are unprepared for any other form of study, any change in the humanities is a change in the very idea of a university. Conservatives often complain about the politicization of the universities, and about the fact that only liberal views are propagated or even tolerated on campus. But they fail to see the true cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

The true conservative cause, when it comes to the universities, ought to be the restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities. And that shows how difficult a task the recapture of the universities will be. It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Obama reminds Victor Davis Hanson of his youthful self.

Obama reminds me a little of myself–at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study-all on scholarships, TAships, research-ships and part-time summer and school jobs tucked under the aegis of the academic, no-consequences world. By the end of endless seminars, papers, theses, debates, discussions, academic get-togethers, I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin-and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

Oh yes, I came back to Selma thinking, “I am not going to be the grouch my grandfather was, yelling at neighbors, worried all the time, nervous, seeing the world as rather hostile, hoarding a tiny stash of savings, worried as if bugs, the government, hired men, weather, and markets were out to destroy him. I’ll farm with my Bay Area manners and sort of think, “I will reset the farm, and things will at last work as they should” (not thinking that my grandfather raised three daughters, sent them to college while mortgaging the farm in the Depression, and spent on himself last, and was a saint compared to my pampered existence in the university).”

One small example of my late coming of age. A rather brutal neighbor (now dead and not to be mentioned by name (de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est)), an immigrant from an impoverished country, a self-made man, veteran of infamous fights and various bullying, shared a communal ditch. We talked and exchanged pleasantries–at first–at the standpipe gate. He lamented how rude my late grandfather had been to him, and even had made unfounded accusations that he was less than honest (he was also sort of playing the race card, remarking about the prejudicial nature of California agrarian culture).

I was shocked to hear that, and assured him that there would be no such incitements on my part on the new age of the Davis farm. No more ‘me first’, no more disdain for newcomers and upstarts. And then after about 3 months of sizing me up (at 26, I confess looking back I was not 1/8th the man my grandfather was at 86) he began stealing water in insidious ways: taking an extra day on his turn, cutting in a day early on mine, siphoning off water at night, destroying my pressure settings, watering his vineyards on days that were on my allotment. Stealing no less! And in 1980!

Here’s how I rushed into action. First, I gave a great Obama speech on communal sharing and why the ditch would not work if everyone did what he did. Farmers simply would perish if they did not come together, and see their common shared interests. He nodded and smiled-and stole more the next week.

Then I appealed to his minority status, and remarked how wonderful it was that he came from dire poverty abroad and now farmed over 500 acres. He growled-and stole even more.

I took the UN route and warned that that I would be forced to go get the ditch tender (a crusty, old hombre who enjoyed watching fights like these for blood sport); he pointed out that the tender was, in fact, on the alleyway across the street watching us, and meeting him for coffee in an hour.

I went to the irrigation district and filed a formal complaint. Nice people with smiles and monogrammed hats promised they’d look into it, but pointed out the season was half over anyway, and I should “get used to it” and start anew next year. Meanwhile, I noticed by July my vineyard was starting to be stressed, and his was lush. He watered so much that he began to flood the entire vineyard middle, the water lapping out the furrows and reaching berm to berm.

For a while I went the Clement Attlee mode and rationalized, “Hmmm, maybe all that watering is going to give his vines more mildew, while my dusty dry vines will aerate more. Do I really need my water? Did I offend him in some way? Do I really want to lower myself to his troglodyte methods?” A few meetings went well with his, “OK, it’s a misunderstanding.” I heard “No problem” about a zillion times the next two weeks.

Then by July 15, after three months of such aggrandizement I tried the empathetic route with the neighbor, “If you don’t stop this, I’ll have to turn on my pumps and spend hundreds of dollars to supply the water I’m supposed to get by virtue of my irrigation taxes. You know that’s not fair!” He laughed at the use of “by virtue of”.

I felt sorry for him, really did, that he had reduced a dispute over something as mundane as “water” into some sort of existential issue of regional peace. What did he wish me to do-descend down to his level, to become exactly like him, to settle differences on the basis of primate strength?

I thought about this for yet another seven days, compulsively so as I looked out at the parched vines. Couldn’t I just pay the power bill, pump for 10 days, and feel as his moral better that I had not descended to his cave-dwelling status? Oddly, I began to hear a once familiar voice in my head whisper, “He’ll take your crew next right when you need it. He’ll take over your alleyway. He’ll drive on your place like he owns it. He’ll…”).

Then in a trance-like fashion, I went out to restore deterrence. I got a massive chain and lock, and simply shut down his communal lateral. Locked the gate so tight, he couldn’t even get a quarter-turn. He’d be lucky if he got a 100 gallons in a week. Then I got a veritable arsenal of protective weaponry, got in my pickup, drove back over to the gate, and waited with ammo, clubs, shovels, etc.

In an hour he drove up in a dust cloud. He was going to smash me, get his football playing son to strangle me, sue me, bankrupt me, hunt me down, etc. He swore and yelled-I was a disgrace to my family, a racist, a psycho, worse than my grandfather. He was going to lock my gates, steal all my water, and indeed he leveled all sorts of threats (remember the scene in Unforgiven when Eastwood walks out and screams threats to the terrified town?-that was my neighbor). I got out with large vine stake and said something to the effect (forgive me if I don’t have the verbatim transcript-it has been 29 years since then), “It’s locked until you follow the rules. Anytime you don’t, it’s locked again. Do it one more time and I weld it shut. Not a drop. So sue me.”

He got up, screeched his tires, blew a dust cloud in my face, and raced down the alleyway-honking even as he left.

For the next ten years until his death, he was the model neighbor. He would stop me with, “Victor, I shut off tomorrow, half-a day early-why not take my half day to jump start your turn?” And indeed we finally began to have philosophical discussions (he was widely read) about Sun-Maid, Carter, Reagan, the US, literature, etc.

Here was his final compliment, one that apparently connected my once elite disdain for his grubby world of the muscular classes with my inevitable failure and bankruptcy to come. It went something like this, though after three decades I have forgotten his exact phraseology: “Victor, I used to drive by your grandfather’s house, and see you up there on the scaffold, scraping off the old paint. I’d say to my friends-look at that young fool, he’s painting my house. You see, I knew you’d go broke, and I’d buy your place. Always wanted it, and knew you were getting it ready for me. Why not let you finish before I took it?” (I didn’t tell him, that in fact he used to say that not just to friends, but to me as I was chipping away.)

He died about a month later. I still miss him, and grew to, if not trust him, in a strange way like him.

Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Niles Gardiner, in the Telegraph, says it’s time for all the grovelling and up-sucking to stop.

No leader in American history has gone to greater lengths than Barack Obama to make amends for his own country. From condemnation of American “arrogance” in a speech in Strasbourg to acknowledging U.S. “mistakes” before millions of Muslims on Arab television, Obama has rarely missed an opportunity to apologise for the actions of the American people.

President Obama has elevated the art of national self-loathing to new heights, and seems to delight in prostrating the most powerful nation on the face of the earth before its critics and rivals, especially on foreign soil. The Obama worldview revolves around the central premise that the United States must be humble and “engage” and work with its enemies through the application of “smart power”. There is nothing smart, however, in appeasing rogue states such as North Korea or Iran.

The Obama doctrine is now lying in tatters after North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-Il and Iranian demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met Obama’s recent overtures with missile tests and even a nuclear blast from Pyongyang. The president’s video message in March offering “a new beginning” to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” was followed by the launch of a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 1,200 miles capable of reaching southern Europe. Incredibly, the U.S. response has been to slash defense spending, with a dramatic scaling down of plans for a global missile defence shield.

The world today is considerably more dangerous than it was in the days of the Bush Administration, and the Obama White House has nothing to show for its weak-kneed efforts. The brutal truth is that the United States is increasingly viewed as a soft touch by its enemies, increasingly jeered rather than feared.

Read the whole thing.

Janós Blaschke, The Goddess Themis, 1786

Justice is conventionally depicted in countless engraved, painted, or sculpted representations displayed at courthouses and in judicial chambers at every administrative level around the European world in the form of the goddess known to the Greeks as Themis, to the Romans as Iustitia. Justice carries a sword and a balance, and is blindfolded.

Themis’ blindfold signifies not her lack of access to reality or to the facts of the cases she is adjudicating, but her indifference to persons or affiliations, her impartiality and objectivity. Themis was not the goddess of justice as an expression of human whim or desire, but of justice in accordance with the divine order.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in delivering the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, expressed a very different, more contemporary view of justice.

Judge (Miriam) Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote because we were described then “as not capable of reasoning or thinking logically” but instead of “acting intuitively.” ...

While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society. ....

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. ...

[O]ne must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. ...

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

In her lecture, Judge Sotomayor acknowledges the existence of an ideal of impartiality, but implicitly rejects the concept of an objective legal or moral order. She additionally denies that human beings are really capable of impartiality and objectivity.

In the place of the Natural Law, which guided the Greeks and Romans and the framers of the United States, Sonia Sotomayer enshrines the left’s identity politics, its narrative of the victimhood of certain groups, its indifference or hostility to others. As a judge, Sotomayor denies the possibility of transcending human partiality and prejudice. Her openly expressed relativism denies that any real distinction between justice and injustice exists in any case.

In place of justice, “as circumstances and cases require,” Sotomayor proposes to substitute personal emotion.

Her cherished personal emotions, of course, amount really to ethnic and gender-based chauvinism combined with carefully cultivated group and class grievances. Instead of believing that judges should strive to emulate the divine, modern liberalism encourages its representatives in the judiciary to sink and become “all too human,” to be their worst, their most self-infatuated and partisan selves rather than to transcend their own prejudices and animosities. The liberal judge does not aspire to be a disinterested servant of the law. The liberal judge proposes to pursue the interests of groups or persons he or she feels to be specially deserving of advocacy and assistance.

Thomas Sowell describes how Judge Sotomayor’s jurisprudence actually works when applied in reality.

Empathy” for particular groups can be reconciled with “equal justice under law” — the motto over the entrance to the Supreme Court — only with smooth words. But not in reality. Obama used those smooth words in introducing Judge Sotomayor but words do not change realities.

Nothing demonstrates the fatal dangers from judicial “empathy” more than Sotomayor’s decision in a 2008 case involving firemen who took an exam for promotion. After the racial mix of those who passed that test turned out to be predominantly white, with only a few blacks and Hispanics, the results were thrown out.

When this action by the local civil service authorities was taken to court and eventually reached the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, Sotomayor did not give the case even the courtesy of a spelling out of the issues. She backed those who threw out the test results. Apparently she didn’t have “empathy” with those predominantly white males who had been cheated out of promotions they had earned.

In judging, better to have Themis than Thersites.

Liberals hate any kind of individualism. They hate your having your own car and driving to work by your own chosen path at your own time. They even object to your having your own house and a backyard.

You should be living collectively in small apartments, where you can smell your neighbors’ cooking and hear him slam his door and flush his john. You ought to be riding to work in public transportation train cars, packed in cheek by jowl with the whole range and variety of humanity, rubbing up against them, inhaling their breath and body odors.

Exurban life represents a rejection of the entire urban life style, of trendy restaurants, of currently hot music clubs, of the clash of interest groups in urban politics, of both fashion and Bohemianism in favor of family and of shopping in favor of Nature.

As George Will observes, liberals think government ought to be doing something to force you to choose differently.

For many generations—before automobiles were common, but trolleys ran to the edges of towns—Americans by the scores of millions have been happily trading distance for space, living farther from their jobs in order to enjoy ample backyards and other aspects of low-density living. And long before climate change became another excuse for disparaging America’s “automobile culture,” many liberal intellectuals were bothered by the automobile. It subverted their agenda of expanding government—meaning their—supervision of other people’s lives. Drivers moving around where and when they please? Without government supervision? Depriving themselves and others of communitarian moments on mass transit? No good could come of this.

Although proponents of the “war against sprawl” think of it as newfangled, it actually is quaintly retro. In the 1950s, when liberalism took a turn toward esthetic politics, its thinkers began looking askance at middle-class America. To the herd of independent thinkers who deplored it in chorus, suburbanization was emblematic of the banality of bourgeoisie life. Then, 45 years ago this week, a Democratic president who had been in office exactly six months heeded the liberal intellectual’s cri de coeur.

On May 22, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, speaking at the University of Michigan, announced plans to transform America by leading it “upward to the Great Society.” Exhorting the Class of 1964 to “indignation,” he said America was in danger of being “buried under unbridled growth.” The implication was clear: Government must put a bridle—and a saddle and snaffle—on Americans, the better to, LBJ said, “enrich and elevate” their lives above “soulless wealth” and to serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Once upon a time, government was supposed to defend the shores, deliver the mail and let people get on with their lives. Today’s far-seeing and fastidious government, not content with designing the cars Americans drive to their homes and the lightbulbs they use in their homes (do you know that, come 2014, the incandescent lightbulb will be illegal?), wants to say where their homes can be.

Timothy Treadwell

Randall Hoven, stirred by liberal rhetoric about “reality-based” policies, cites a long and amusing list of counter-examples.

Giuseppina Pasqualino

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Doctor Zero at Hot Air has a pretty good analysis of the differing viewpoints and methods of appeal of the two opposite American political poles.

Republican politicians often forget that conservatism is an argument, while liberalism is a promise. The conservative champions both the moral and practical superiority of liberty and individualism. The liberal promises tangible rewards in exchange for votes. The conservative argument will never be over, because any free-market system will always include a certain population who fare poorly. No matter how small that population is, or how much the overall wealth of society eases the burden of their poverty, they will always be extremely receptive to the seduction of collective politics: You’re not responsible for your lot in life. You were cheated. The wealth of others is unfair. Give us the “freedom” that wasn’t doing you any good anyway, and we will sharpen it into a weapon against those who took advantage of you. Give us your undying support, and you’ll never have to worry about feeling confused, guilty, or inadequate again. Voting for the Democrat ticket will fully discharge your moral and intellectual duty as a citizen – we’ll take it from there. In fact, we’ve got ACORN representatives standing by to fill that ballot out for you. You have a “right” to housing, a job, health care, a college education, easy credit, and a host of other benefits, and the liberal promises to provide all of these things, while making nameless rich people pick up the tab.

Liberal socialism is the ongoing critique of capitalism’s imperfections. To the casual center-left voter, the world seems overwhelming, confusing, and unfair. This was never more obvious than in the financial crisis that erupted last fall, when a large number of citizens became very angry and frightened about a crisis they couldn’t begin to understand. They just knew something terrible was happening, and they demanded action. The Democrats stepped in with a ready-made narrative, which the Republicans suicidally left unchallenged, and offered the exact same solutions they have offered to every problem since the days of FDR: massive government spending and control. Conservatives found this dismaying and horrifying – who in their right minds would solve the problem Barney Frank created by giving Barney Frank more money and power? But Democrat voters were willing to accept this diagnosis and solution, as they always seem ready to accept liberal solutions, despite a century-long track record of absolute failure… because they need to believe that someone out there knows what they’re doing, and has the answers to the overwhelming problems produced by a complex economy, and packaged by a sensationalist media in love with Big Solutions to Big Problems. ...

We might ask the rank-and-file liberal why he’s so willing to believe slippery, corrupt characters like politicians would be better suited to distribute the wealth of the nation, than the people who earned that wealth. The answer is the talismanic power of democratic elections. The American voter has been raised since childhood to believe voting is a sacred process that confers tremendous moral legitimacy on the winners of elections. Dollar bills are ugly instruments of crass materialism and greed in the hands of private citizens, but they acquire a luminous aura of virtue when handled by an elected official. The liberal voter believes his political leaders are entitled to control whatever portion of their constituents’ wealth they require, because the voters gave them this power, voluntarily. They see ballots as an unlimited power of attorney to act on their behalf. Conservatives view their votes as a way to restrain politicians, while liberals view them as decrees of informed consent.

The liberal is comfortable with members of his Party descending from the heavens in private jets, to lecture citizens on the need to drive tiny fuel-efficient cars, and is untroubled by the spectacle of politicians who amassed vast fortunes through political corruption attacking private citizens for their greed… because those politicians were sanctified through the ritual of the popular vote. You might get a friendly liberal to admit that most politicians are crooks… but he’ll hasten to add that businessmen are all crooks too, and at least the politicians gained their power and comforts through the informed consent of the voters, instead of stealing it from them with elaborate business schemes.

The gulf that divides liberal voters from conservative ideas is a crisis of faith. The liberal voter does not believe the system is fair, or that businessmen operating in a free market will provide the necessities of life that every American is entitled to. The upper class liberal doesn’t have faith in the ability of the poor and downtrodden to seize the opportunities provided by capitalism, and build a better life for themselves. The dependent voter relies upon the benevolence of Big Government because he doesn’t have faith in himself – he sees the competition of the free market as a rigged game he is destined to lose, rather than an exhilarating opportunity. The moralistic liberal has no faith in the judgment or compassion of ordinary people, who are products of a society forever mired in racism, sexism, phobias, and greed. The cynical young liberal thinks he knows what the ultimate goals of a wise and just society should be, and doubts that uneducated, Bible-thumping rednecks will ever arrive at those goals of their own free will. The working-class liberal is fearful that collapsing corporations will leave hordes of unemployed people who won’t be able to find another decent job. High schools and colleges are filled with kids who have been taught to have no faith in the ability of free people to take proper care of their environment.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

The New York Post reacts editorially to the terrible revelations contained in those memos the way any normal American would.

If nothing else, President Obama’s decision to overrule his own intelligence officials and release Bush-era legal memos justifying what The New York Times sanctimoniously described as the CIA’s “brutal” interrogation techniques proves what a bunch of pushovers we Americans are.

Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV.

We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells.

Then we’re the ones who are condemned as the worst human-rights violators on the planet.

Jonathan Turley observes in the Washington Post that the combined influence of Islam and political correctness make speech crimes prosecutable in country after country.

Jon Ward, at the Washington Times, explains that making concessions to the other point of view, then pivoting and asking for favors, concessions, and understanding of the American perspective is just President Obama’s characteristically preferred technique of deal-making and consensus-building.

Besides incorporating the president’s preferred approach in all circumstances of conflict of sweet-talking manipulation, Obama’s apologies also provide undoubtedly agreeable opportunities for continuing the partisan Bush-bashing, America-bashing narrative fundamental to the left’s world view.

America, to hear President Obama tell it, is an occasionally arrogant nation struggling with shameful legacies of racism and discrimination, one that bears a large share of the blame for the world’s economic and climate crises. Oh, and our train service is lousy.

Mr. Obama’s just-concluded eight-day trip abroad, his first major international foray, also marked the debut of a more humble foreign-policy style, one that sought to use cultural concessions and admissions of past mistakes to disarm other countries before challenging their own policies and attitudes toward America.

Repeatedly on a trip that included stops across Europe and in Iraq, Mr. Obama tried to pre-empt criticism of the United States by expressing it first himself – a sharp break from the practice of President George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama told Europeans that “America has shown arrogance” toward their continent, conceded that the United States bears much of the blame for the world’s economic plight, and said in a speech broadcast throughout the Middle East that America is still dealing with its “darker” legacies of discrimination and mistreatment of minorities.

David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest advisers, said Mr. Obama’s approach is one “he’s always believed in. ...

There were moments when Mr. Obama’s determination to show deference to other cultures – countering the image of America as a cowboy nation, uninterested in anything beyond its shores – bordered on the bizarre.

Asked in Strasbourg, France, about a proposed Afghan law that human rights groups say gives husbands the right to rape their wives, Mr. Obama condemned the law, but also said America should be “sensitive to local culture.” His bottom line was that in Afghanistan, the U.S. focus “is to defeat al Qaeda,” but the comment came across as a rationalization of abuse against women.

“Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

3:05 video
—Barack Hussein Obama addressing young Europeans in Strasbourg.

Conservatives are understandably having conniption fits editorially today over the incongruity of an American president bowing from the waist to the king of Saudi Arabia and then kissing up to Europeans with a false and demeaning characterization of his own country’s foreign policy.

To subscribe to Mr. Obama’s nonsensical point of view, we’d need to believe there was some intrinsic moral superiority in the European cowardice and venality that favored selling Saddam Hussein French uranium and German arms components while ignoring blocked UN arms inspections in order to keep doing business with Iraq.

The enterprize of embracing one’s adversary’s point of view to the point of the invalidation and complete elimination of one’s own is a favorite and traditional liberal foreign policy approach. Ordinary common sense should suffice to predict that if one starts off at the far end of one’s negotiating partner’s own territory, one is unlikely to arrive at the conclusion of the process in the middle. But liberalism is never about results, it is always only about self-gratifying displays of righteousness.

Warner Todd Huston is sick and tired of all the nonsense.

[S]eminal changes in the fabric of a nation should only be undertaken when that fabric is rotten even to its core. There have been bad spots of America that had to be surgically removed, we all know. But the core of this nation, despite its blemishes, is not now and never has been rotten.

And so I am tired of the many people who are native to this country that want to destroy what it is to make it into what it isn’t, never was, and cannot be. If we wish this country to be as great into the future as it has been in the past this self-destructive behavior must be stopped.

I am tired of the Constitution being treated as if it is written on a chalkboard to be erased and re-written at will. I am tired of judges imagining they can write laws instead of just read them. There is a reason that judges are said to be “reading at law,” a reason they why they aren’t called legislators. ...

I am tired of being told that Americans “deserve” to die just because they got up to go to work that day. No one, anywhere, deserves to be blown up in an office building, a disco, a mall or as they travel in a commuter train. I am tired of being told that the people who perpetrate such acts are driven to it by the United States and merely need to be “understood” instead of stopped, sick of being told they should be treated like a purse-snatcher instead of a terrorist.

I am tired of actors as assumed “experts” on issues that they portrayed in a movie. Acting like a doctor studying a disease or acting like a lawyer representing the downtrodden does not equal being one or having the expertise to discuss it in the halls of Congress. I am also tired of singers who think that because they have sold a few thousand albums they are entitled to impose their every harebrained political, environmental, or religious theory upon their audiences. Playing a guitar does not qualify one for brain surgery or rocket science. Being able to rhyme with a mouthful of gold-plated teeth does not make one a philosopher.

“What if the government put a cap on blog readership? or the number of words you could post?” one of Matthew Yglesias’s readers proposed as a thinking point in the course of arguing against the Gen Y pinko’s suggestion for a 95% tax on earnings over $10 million.

“Fine by me, I’d love to post fewer words,” replied the crafty Rand villain, carefully sidestepping the reduced benefits to him (fewer readers) portion of the analogy and seizing like a limpet onto to the “less work” portion. They train them well in precisely this kind of sophistry in our elite schools.

In an older essay (have we linked and quoted this one before?) clinical psychologist Gagdad Bob (frequently quoting his own book) explains that it is liberals’ atavism that keeps them from understanding economics, and remarks on the irony of the application of the term “progressive” to the left.

For millennia—until quite recently—human beings struggled to rise above subsistence because of a stubborn inability to recognize how wealth is created. Certainly into the late 18th century, people mistakenly believed that there was simply a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and that it was left to individuals and governments to fight over their share. Not until Adam Smith was it recognized that wealth can grow without limits, but obviously even now people have a hard time wrapping their minds around this idea.”

In my view, one of the central mechanisms that kept mankind in its rut of subsistence was the expression of constitutional envy. ...

“One of the things that makes the creation of wealth possible is the accumulation of surplus capital to invest, but here again, for most of human history this was quite difficult to accomplish because of envious mind parasites that could not tolerate the idea of one person possessing more than another.” Thus, envy “was one of the psychological barriers to material development that humans have struggled to overcome.”...

Which brings up a fascinating irony about so-called progressives. Now, it is a truism that progressives are not just ignorant of economics, but that they confidently embrace and promulgate what can only be called economic innumeracy. Why is this? How can people be so confidently and yet demonstrably wrong? ...

The problem—as I touched on in my book—is that the primitive progressive is operating under an economic theory that is not so much cognitive but genetic. In a way, it’s deeper than thought, since it was programmed into us for survival in small groups (obviously, natural selection did not anticipate a high tech, competitive, free market global economy). Thus, Fiske confirms my speculation that the logic of market pricing was a very late development which is not at all “hard wired”—and even goes against our genetic programming. ...

For hunter-gatherers in small bands, sharing, matching and ranking were probably as fundamental to survival as eating and breeding. But market pricing involves complex choices based on mathematical ratios…. Commerce and global trade, of course, require a finely honed version of the market-pricing model. But if humans developed this model relatively late, it might well be less than universal, even today.”..

“In other words, to have an intuitive grasp of economics, you might just need to take a step or two up the evolutionary ladder.”...

In short, to cure yourself of progressivism—or any other kind of atavistic primitivism—you will have to grow and evolve. This is exactly the problem we are facing in the Islamic world, for if we cannot even lift our own tragically backward progressives out of economic magic and superstition, imagine the difficulty of doing so with an explicitly tribal and authoritarian mindset. ...

If the most progressive people are those with a concept of market economics, one of the great tragedies of the modern age has been their systematic destruction by less progressive people who call themselves the most progressive…. I’m wondering whether there might be a basic, persistent inability to distinguish forward from backward. I used to think that ‘progressives’ imagined themselves to be forward in their thinking, but I’m now thinking that ‘scientific Marxism’ might have been grounded in an unacknowledged need for primitivism.”

Would this explain how leftist economic theory functions as a sort of seductive door through which all sorts of other barbarisms rush in? To put the answer in the form of a bumper snicker, “Come for the egalitarianism, stay for the bestiality and tyranny.”

From Dr. Sanity via Bird Dog.

Charles Wellman Freeman, Jr.

Barack Obama’s choice to lead the National Intelligence Council, the body which advises policy makers on global strategy and which produces the National Intelligence Estimate, is reported to be former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman, Jr.

The radical left is rejoicing over what even the AntiWar.com Blog describes as an “amazing appointment.”

Freeman’s position on the political map can be identified by the fact that he succeeded George McGovern as head of the Middle East Policy Council.

He is renowned for anti-War-on-Terror and anti-Israel public pronouncements, as well as for statements sympathetic to the viewpoint of despotic regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and China.

Marty Peretz, at New Republic, expresses profound indignation at this appointment.

Here is the most stunning prospective appointment of the Obama administration as yet. Not stunning as in “spectacular” or “distinguished” but stunning as in bigoted and completely out of synch with the deepest convictions of the American people. What’s more, Charles “Chas” Freeman is a bought man, having been ambassador to Saudi Arabia and then having supped at its tables for almost two decades. ...

That Chas, as he is so artfully called, also made himself a client of China and China a client of himself, is evidence that he has no humane or humanitarian scruples that underlay well, his unscrupulous political views, viz, his remonstrance to Beijing that it should have smashed the democracy protests as soon as they emerged on the streets. ...

Chas Freeman is actually a new psychological type for a Democratic administration. He has never displayed a liberal instinct and wants the United States to kow-tow to authoritarians and tyrants, in some measure just because they may seem able to keep the streets quiet. And frankly, Chas brings a bitter rancor to how he looks at Israel. No Arab country and no Arab movement—basically including Hezbollah and Hamas—poses a challenge to the kind of world order we Americans want to see. He is now very big on Hamas as the key to bringing peace to Gaza, when in fact it is the key to uproar and bloodletting, not just against Israel but against the Palestinian Authority that is the only group of Palestinians that has even given lip-service (and, to be fair, a bit more) to a settlement with Israel.

That Freeman would be chosen as the president’s gatekeeper to national intelligence is an absurdity.

The appointment of head of the NIC does not require Senatorial confirmation, so, outrageous as it is, this one is probably a done deal.

John Hawkins gives 15 reasons he’s already tired of Barack Obama.

Roger Scruton argues for the superiority of Western Civilization on the basis of its possession of the faculties of irony and forgiveness, but warns that the arid landscape of multicultural liberalism can never fulfill the spirtual and emotional needs of humanity.

This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. It is hardly surprising that so many Muslims in our cities today regard the civilization surrounding them as doomed, even if it is a civilization that has granted them something that they may be unable to find where their own religion triumphs, which is a free, tolerant, and secular rule of law. For they were brought up in a world of certainties; around them, they encounter only doubts.

If repudiation of its past and its identity is all that Western civilization can offer, it cannot survive.

Liberalism additionally fundamentally misunderstands our current Islamic adversaries, Scrutin argues, erroneously trying to fit their motivations into a simplistic Marxist schema of economic motivation and animosity.

The vague or utopian character of the cause is therefore an important part of terrorism’s appeal, for it means that the cause does not define or limit the action. It is waiting to be filled with meaning by the terrorist, who is searching to change not the world but himself. To kill someone who has neither offended you nor given just cause for punishment, you have to believe yourself wrapped in some kind of angelic cloak of justification. You then come to see the killing as showing that you are indeed an angel. Your existence receives its final ontological proof.

Terrorists pursue a moral exultation, a sense of being beyond the reach of ordinary human judgment, radiated by a self-assumed permission of the kind enjoyed by God. Terrorism of this kind, in other words, is a search for meaning—the very meaning that citizenship, conceived in abstract terms, cannot provide. Even in its most secularized form, terrorism involves a kind of religious hunger. ...

Islamist terrorists are animated, at some level, by the same troubled search for meaning and the same need to stand above their victims in a posture of transcendental exculpation. Ideas of liberty, equality, or historical right have no influence on their thinking, and they are not interested in possessing the powers and privileges that their targets enjoy. The things of this world have no real value for them, and if they sometimes seem to aim at power, it is only because power would enable them to establish the kingdom of God—an aim that they, like the rest of us, know to be impossible and therefore endlessly renewable in the wake of failure. Their carelessness about others’ lives is matched by their carelessness about their own. Life has no particular value for them; death beckons constantly from the near horizon of their vision. And in death, they perceive the only meaning that matters: the final transcendence of this world and of the accountability to others that this world demands of us.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Velociman has harsh, but fair, comments on the American left.

I have no gripe with those who believe there are different paths to an ideal, healthy America. I’m fairly convinced that America is no Leftist’s dream, however, hence the charge of dishonesty. The smallest of children can smoke out a platitude, and I take no solace in the Left’s charade that they want as I do for the nation, and western civilization as a whole. It is a bald-faced lie, built upon a shifting, unstable Sargasso Sea of prevarication. ...

The sad truth is the Leftist cohort, proudly represented by the Democratic Party, has engaged in a decades-long lie of being for the “little guy”, the “forgotten man”, when in fact they are power-mad usurpers of freedom, whose only interest in the little guy is how much of his hard-earned money they can abscond with, and to what nefarious disproven social experiment they can apply it.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Gerard van der Leun via the News Junkie

Just last week, many of those on the left, like Andrew Sullivan, were applauding Barack Obama’s conciliatory tone and acceptance of the viewpoint of the United States’ overseas Islamic adversaries.

But, as Peter Berkowitz recently noted, left liberalism has turned into a kind of secular religion that is in the domestic political context so sure of itself that it “transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics.”

Jonathan Chait, at New Republic, notes the peculiar foreign-vs.domestic discrepancy of the liberal approach to opposition.

It’s kind of funny how, when it comes to domestic politics, many liberals employ assumptions about human nature that are wildly at odds with the assumptions they use about human nature when it comes to foreign policy. When you read the liberal blogs on domestic politics, concessions to the enemy are always counterproductive, will must be met with will, etc. When you read them on foreign policy, all those assumptions are flipped on their head. I’m not saying that these two sets of assumptions are completely impossible to reconcile, but it is pretty odd how easily they sit together.

Personally, I think it has to do with self-hatred.

Liberals want to believe America’s foreign enemies are basically right, at least on the crucial issue of our being wrong.

There is no compromise with or forgiveness for domestic adversaries, because we are the expressive part of the American self that liberalism exists to turn against and destroy.

Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, identifies the source of the irrational immoderation and limitless self-righteousness of today’s community of fashion as our Gramscian-hijacked educational system.

Some will speculate that the outbreak of hatred and euphoria in our politics is the result of the transformation of left-liberalism into a religion, its promulgation as dogma by our universities, and students’ absorption of their professors’ lesson of immoderation. This is unfair to religion.

At least it’s unfair to those forms of biblical faith that teach that God’s ways are hidden and mysterious, that all human beings are both deserving of respect and inherently flawed, and that it is idolatry to invest things of this world—certainly the goods that can be achieved through politics—with absolute value. Through these teachings, biblical faith encourages skepticism about grand claims to moral and political authority and an appreciation of the limits of one’s knowledge, both of which well serve liberal democracy.

In contrast, by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. It is not that our universities invest the fundamental principles of liberalism with religious meaning—after all the Declaration of Independence identifies a religious root of our freedom and equality. Rather, they infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

And hopefully right next to where the insufferable ass who wrote this lives:

The total population of terrorists ebbs and flows all the time. When the number goes up by one hundred, no one much notices. If the number goes up by one hundred because we release some previously identified terrorists, there is or will be a public outcry. But it’s the same consequence.

Fewer terrorists are better than more terrorists, to be sure. But a terrorist we release is not obviously worse than a terrorist who was free in the first place.

We evaluate outcomes differently when we feel we are in control or should be in control. We should examine this intuition carefully, since it is not always justified.

We also treat an outcome differently when we feel it allows an enemy of ours to “get back at us.” I suspect this difference in feeling is not usually justified and that it is the primary driver behind the fear of releasing terrorists.

I can think of “political theater” reasons why an attack from a released terrorist would be worse than an attack from an “already free” terrorist. Overall I do not yet feel that we are thinking about this issue rationally.

Tyler Cowen is obviously so smart that he’ll simply rationalize all those terrorists into utter irrelevance before they can shoot him or blow him up.

While somehow I really suspect, in my heart of hearts, that the learned economics professor would very vehemently object to becoming a personal part of his own thought experiment, on the other hand, from his disinterested point of view, releasing tens or hundreds of murderous fanatics far, far from the DC suburbs where they most probably will harm no one other than some Iraqi or Afghan civilians, or the occasional US soldier, constitutes a perfectly acceptable exercise in statistical theory.

B. Hussein Obama (appropriately enough, I suppose) gave his first formal interview, not to the New York Times or CBS News, and definitely not to L’Osservatore Romano, but to Al Aribiya.

Mr. Obama demonstrated his new style of diplomatic engagement, and carried on one of his own campaign themes, by distancing himself from his predecessors in the White House and by seizing the initiative in criticizing the United States for himself.

Announcing that he was sending former Senator George Mitchell as his own personal envoy to the Middle East to engage in peace-making efforts between Israel and the Palestinians, Obama, perhaps simply by force of long habit, reverted to traditional leftwing anti-American accusations, accusing the United States of “dictating” and of ignorance.

George Mitchell is somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.

And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating – in the past on some of these issues – and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen.

As far as I know, the US has made numerous efforts to persuade Israel to make concessions of territory and an independent Palestinian state, and the US has bribed Egypt and Jordan to make peace. The only US diktats made toward the Islamic Middle East have been: Thou shalt not eliminate Israel from the face of the map, and drive its population into the sea, and Thou shalt not aid and sponsor terrorism.

Both seem to me to be perfectly defensible policies, of a purely defensive character, that do not require an apology.

Mr. Obama gets his first Jimmy Carter Award for embarrassing poltroonery.
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Andrew Sullivan snivels admiringly, in the fashion of liberal bed wetters everywhere:

B. Hussein sucking up to the dish-towel-wearing set is a case of “met expectation.”

If you’re the likes of Andrew Sullivan, what do you do with hostile enemies? Why, you brown-nose them! As Andrew explains: “it’s about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

Liberals are so chrome yellow that any adversary, however contemptible and primitive, is always an apocalyptic threat, and propitiatory grovelling is always not only in order, it is vital for our survival.

My sense, for what it’s worth, is that Obama is genuine. He doesn’t know whether this bold new play will pay dividends any more than we do. What he does know, I think, is that we have no choice. The trajectory of the current global conflict, centered on the question of Islam and modernity, is an apocalyptic one if the game isn’t changed soon. He is attempting to change the game. Which led me to my second reaction.

Hope.

Pathetic.

Kyle Smith alerts us to a recently published guide to the land of the “progressives.”

For 143 years, The Nation magazine has maintained, in its adorable way, the blue-faced scowl of an angry toddler shaking its fist at the grown-ups. But while you could go to The Nation in recent years for instruction on how to think about the latest perfidy of the Bush administration, the magazine was no help when it came to advice on, say, how to find a really good lesbian knitting cooperative within easy bicycling distance or where to buy anti-globalization comic books printed on recycled hemp.

The long wait is over. Now comes “The Nation Guide to the Nation,” a travelog/catalog/almanac (whatever you do, don’t call it a bible) “for and about a community of committed, passionate people who have active consciences and a lively sense of social justice.”

Andrew Levy, alarmed by the recession, hopes to supplement his income by blogging for Huffington Post. Excerpt from sample editorial:

In the wake of the events of 1-15, in which a wedge of Geese brought down a US Airways aircraft, here’s what you won’t be hearing about from the so-called “Mainstream Media”: We brought this on ourselves.

After an event such as this one, it’s important to look at the root causes: Why did the Geese attack us? Well, the truth is, for years we have been oppressing the Geese, using them for the fuel they provide for our bodies.

Boneless Goose Breast, Brandied Roast Goose, Roast Goose with Cumberland Sauce and Apricot Stuffing. And of course, the Christmas Goose. In the name of religion, we have been engaged in what can only be called a Crusade against the Geese. Is it any wonder that a few brave suicide Geese would seek revenge?

Everyone knew that Cass R. Sunstein was an extreme “progressive,” a socialist, and an adversary of the US Constitution as actually written, but one particularly dangerous aspect of Sunstein’s personal political philosophy is not particularly well known.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has issued a press release reminding Americans that Cass Sunstein is additionally an Animal Rights activist and extremist.

How extreme?

Well, in The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer, 2002, later recycled into the introduction to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, an anthology he co-edited in 2004, he argues:

“Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf.”

Sunstein, who is soon likely to be gifted with extensive powers as “regulatory Czar,” has argued in favor of bans on animal cosmetics testing, hunting, greyhound racing, and… meat eating!

Facing Animals 1:41:36 video – Sunstein’s keynote address begins around 39:00.

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Hat tip to Claude Sutton, MFH.

Don’t slap that PTSD sufferer, General. Give him the Purple Heart!

Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at New America Foundation, thinks the Pentagon is just plain mean for refusing to award Post Traumatic Stress Disorder victims the Purple Heart, a military decoration given in the name of the president to members of the Armed Forces killed or wounded in combat.

The original form of the award, invented by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, stated: “Let it be known that he who wears the military order of the purple heart has given of his blood in the defense of his homeland and shall forever be revered by his fellow countrymen.”

Mr. Cohen rejects the Pentagon’s (and George Washington’s) criteria of shedding blood for one’s country. For him, internal emotional suffering is quite enough.

Simply because their wounds are not evident to the naked eye does not mean they are not real and debilitating. In many respects, those who suffer from PTSD never truly recover and suffer through all sorts of deep psychological trauma. And as for the notion that it’s difficult to diagnose; perhaps the people who made this decision should crack open the latest copy of the DSM.

One would hope that in the 21st century, with all we’ve learned about the debilitating nature of mental illnesses, that these sort of simple-minded and uninformed characterizations of “war injuries” would be restricted to the peanut gallery. But instead they are seemingly driving Pentagon decision-making.

This failure to recognize PTSD has real consequences. Not only will those who are suffering not receive the added—and much-needed—medical benefits that come to Purple Heart recipients, but the stigma around mental illness in the military is only perpetuated by this action. One can only imagine the chilling effect that this decision will have on soldiers already uncomfortable about facing mental illness.

In the characteristic manner of pundits on the left, Mr. Cohen indignantly asserts the unproven and unprovable as a matter of established fact, pointing to the opinion of his ideological confreres, i.e., the liberal compilers of the American Psychiatric Association’s highly controversial and notorious for changing with the winds of fashion Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as inarguably probative.

His unexpressed, even possibly unconscious, goal is really more egalitarianism. From the viewpoint of the left, concepts of individual responsibility and good character must be discredited and rejected. No one is really better than anyone else. Some are simply more privileged than others. It is the inferior, whose failures in war as in peace must be regarded as lying beyond his own control and treated as the basis for a claim against society, who must be championed and decorated.

In her recently published journals, Susan Sontag writes (1957, p.131):

One of the main strands in modern literature (and in modern politics – DZ) is diabolism—that is, self-conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a “morality of evil” instead of a “morality of good.”

Hat tip to Excitable Andrew.

Roger Kimball in the January New Criterion:

It is often said that an anthropologist is someone who respects the distinctive values of every culture but his own. We in the West are all anthropologists now. It is curious, though, that proponents of relativism and multiculturalism should use ethnocentrism as a stick with which to beat the West. After all, both the idea and the critique of ethnocentrism are quintessentially Western. There has never in history been a society more open to other cultures than our own; nor has any tradition been more committed to self-criticism than the Western tradition: the figure of Socrates endlessly inviting self-scrutiny and rational explanation is a definitive image of the Western spirit. Moreover, “Western” science is not exclusively Western: it is science plain and simple. It was, to be sure, invented and developed in the West, but it is as true for the inhabitants of the Nile Valley as it is for the denizens of New York. That is why, outside the precincts of the humanities departments of Western universities, there is a mad dash to acquire Western science and technology. The deepest foolishness of multiculturalism shows itself in the puerile attacks it mounts on the cogency of scientific rationality, epitomized poignantly by the Afrocentrist who flips on his word processor to write books decrying the parochial nature of Western science and extolling the virtues of the “African way.”...

Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers—terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura of positive values, but in reality they are what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations. “Where conditions permit,” Gairdner writes, the strong step in:

either to impose a new regime or, as in the Western democracies, where overt totalitarianism is still unthinkable, to further permeate ordinary life with the state’s quietly overbearing, regulating role. Relativism is the natural public philosophy of such regimes because it repudiates all natural moral or social binding power, replacing these with legal decrees and sanction of the state.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Josh Marshall complains that representatives of the MSM in the nation’s Capitol are insufficiently on his side.

Like many others, I’ve been saying this for years. So I’m surprised to be surprised. But the journalistic establishment in Washington, whether it’s the Post or the Politico or much of the rest of the journalistic apparatus in the city, is essentially Republican in character—not necessarily in terms of individual voting habits, though you’d be surprised, but in fundamental outlook about whose opinions matter and how government functions, which is what really counts. And you can see that resurfacing with increasing clarity just in that last week.

Personally, I think the Washington Post would need to be blowing up US troops with IEDs to be more any more anti-Bush Administration than it is. I’d be curious to see Josh Marshall try expanding and justifying this curious claim to victimhood.

Victor Davis Hanson predicts that, six months into the new administration, it will be apparent that it was not actually the policies which changed. It will be how they are being reported and described.

All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism. We will hear that, by historical levels, unemployment is still not that bad, that GDP growth is not historically all that low, and that deficits, inflation, interest rates, and housing starts are all within manageable parameters. “Depression” will transmogrify into “recession” which in turn by July will be a “downturn” and by year next an “upswing” on its way to boom times.

Indeed, almost supernaturally crises will be solved with the departure of the hated Bush: no more flooding streets from cracked water mains that were a result of a President’s neglect of infrastructure, and no more spontaneous crashes of Mississippi River bridges due to diversions of critical federal aid from cash-strapped states to Iraq. And when the temperatures rise or drop, the wind howls, the clouds burst forth or go away, the snow melts or piles up, it will be, well, nature that caused the havoc, not the current occupant of the White House who failed to sign Kyoto.

As we watch the innocent die from natural mayhem, it will be due to the breakdown of local responders who now suddenly kill people, not federal inaction—except perhaps for an occasional few Bush federal holdovers that have not yet been rooted out. Human nature, of course, now will be seen more culpable, more selfish, as in needlessly resisting wise and caring federal interventions, rather than being inherently noble but shunned by an uncaring Washington. Yes, when dikes collapse and planes collide on crowed runways, it will be due to a cruel and unpredictable nature, or intrinsic design flaws, or improper local use and maintenance, or the past President’s nefarious legacy, not current government policies. (But if you still must bash the government, it will be wise to do it in 1950s style of inattentive state and local officials, prone to regional and tribal prejudices, blocking the infinite wisdom of a caring federal government.)

Some military action abroad could be necessary—and necessarily reported on as measured and reluctant, rather than cowboyish and gratuitous. European whining will be a result of miscommunications or the Euros’ unfair caricatures of Americans, not Bush’s alienation of allies. If radical Islam strikes, it will be, well, radical again and sometimes even dangerous, not a figment of neocon pipe dreams. If an administration official quits, goes on 60 Minutes, and writes a nasty tell-all book about Obama’s insensitivity and his government’s directionless ennui, he will be a heretic, a whiner, a turncoat, not a truth teller or brave maverick who blew the whistle in need of a bestseller hyped from NPR to the New York Times. We will come again to hate the filibuster, obstructionist Congressional policies, and the occasional loud-mouthed Senator who voices slurs against our nation in unpatriotic fashion.

Those around Barack Obama understand that precisely those measures most derided during the campaign—wiretaps, the interrogation of prisoners in Guantanamo, the decimation of al Qaida members in Iraq and Afghanistan, overseas detentions—probably account likewise most for the absence of another 9/11-like attack. In other words, as the Obamians privately ignore the media hype about flushed Korans and hundreds of innocents caught in the cauldron of war and unfairly detained, and instead examine the sort of killers who are presently in Guantanamo, the type of intelligence gathering that led to prevention of dozens of planned attacks since 9/11, and those who turned up and were killed or arrested in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will realize how dicey it will be to follow through with campaign rhetoric about Bush, Inc. torching the Bill of Rights, fighting made-up enemies abroad, and generally alienating our allies.

So all that will change for now will be the sudden absence of shrill complaints that we live in an America without a Constitution. Static, same-old, same-old government policy will, of course, be said to have altered radically (“hoped and changed”), but it will also be refashioned in the media as “sober” and “judicious”, as the administration moves “in circumspect fashion” to probe and explore “complex” and often “paradoxical” matters of national security that “indeed at the end of the day have no easy answers”.

Read the whole thing.

Joel Stein happily admits that conservatives are right: lefties like himself don’t love America

Conservatives feel personally blessed to have been born in the only country worth living in. I, on the other hand, just feel lucky to have grown up in a wealthy democracy. If it had been Australia, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Italy, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Israel or one of those Scandinavian countries with more relaxed attitudes toward sex, that would have been fine with me too.

Read the whole thing.

Reading this makes it even more depressing to remember that these kind of people won the last election.

Nicholas Kristof finds himself forced to admit that, despite their constant yammering about the less fortunate, liberals are typically not personally very charitable at all.

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

Read the whole thing.

Really there is nothing surprising here.

Liberalism is a philosophy of limitless self-entitlement, which undertakes simply to dispense with Constitutional limits, federalism, and the wisdom of the ages in order to get what the liberal desires… right now. What liberals desire is power, affirmation of their self-importance, the ability to call the shots, and massive federal intervention to tidy up the world on their behalf.

Liberals live in a comfortable haute bourgeois mileu, and are susceptible to self doubt concerning their own worthiness. The existence of different, less eligible human circumstances both offends the liberal aesthetic sense, and makes the liberal conscience uneasy.

Naturally, the liberal feels that all of the world’s untidyness, unruliness, and unhappiness ought to be promptly and efficiently cleared away at the public expense. Tax dollars taken from wealthier people engaged in less obviously defensible occupations than the liberal’s own will be more than ample to pay for all that, the liberal just naturally supposes.

It is precisely this unmoderated selfishness, this unlimited sense of self-entitlement which makes the urban enclaves where liberals abound so unlivable. Government in those places is always impractically overreaching, administratively incompetent, and fiscally wildly out of control. Local politics is always a snakepit of activism, corruption, and interest groups squabbling over every issue, every decision, and every dollar like a pack of wolves.

Paul Moreno, at History News Network, discusses the left’s misuse of rights language as a means of disestablishing the natural rights enshrined in the US Constitution. It’s as if the left discovered a way to apply Gresham’s Economic Law to Constitutional Law: newly invented bogus rights inevitably quickly replace real natural rights in circulation.

In a 2001 interview on Chicago public radio, Obama lamented that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issue of the redistribution of wealth.” The problem, he said, was that the court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution… that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberty.”

In this perhaps unguarded moment, Obama became one of the few liberal politicians candid enough to admit that the Constitution poses a fundamental obstacle to their agenda.

This is a popular theory in academic circles. It is the fundamental argument of Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School (now on his way to Harvard), who is often mentioned as an Obama adviser and potential Supreme Court nominee, and the author of The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We need it More than Ever.

The second bill of rights idea derived from two famous speeches that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave—one at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club during the 1932 campaign and his 1944 annual message to Congress. In the Commonwealth Club address, he spoke of the advent of “enlightened administration,” which would redistribute resources in accordance with an “economic declaration of rights.” In his 1944 message to Congress, Roosevelt said that “our rights to life and liberty”—the negative liberty to which Obama referred, had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” He claimed that “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights.” This bill of rights included the right to a job, the right to food and recreation, the right to adequate farm prices, the right to a decent home, the right to medical care, and the right to a good education.

Of course, these are not “rights” at all—not in the sense that the framers and ratifiers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution used the term—but entitlements. From the founding until the twentieth century, the American regime assumed that government’s purpose was to secure pre-existing natural rights—such life, liberty, property, or association. Everyone can exercise such rights simultaneously; nobody’s exercise of his own rights limits anyone else’s similar exercise. Your right to life or to work or to vote does not take anything away from anyone else. We can all pursue happiness at once. Entitlements, on the other hand, require someone else to provide me with the substantive good that the exercise of rights pursues. The right to work, for example, is fundamentally different from the right (entitlement) to a job; the right to marry does not entitle me to a spouse; the right to free speech does not entitle me to an audience.

The New Deal is often described as a “constitutional revolution.” In fact, it was much more than that. It involved a rejection not just of the structure and principles of the Constitution, but those of the theory of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence—that, as Jefferson put it, governments are instituted in order to secure our rights. Roosevelt envisioned not a new constitution, but a new idea of what Sunstein calls “a nation’s constitutive commitments.”

As to this problem, Sunstein says that “The best response to those who believe that the second bill of rights does not protect rights at all is just this: unembarrassed evasion.”

To commemorate the US release next month of Stephen Soderbergh’s Che biopic starring Benicio Del Toro, Reason’s Nick Gillespie takes a skeptical look at the community of fashion’s love of Communists used as iconography.

8:33 video

The New York Times reports that Barack Obama’s leftwing position during the campaign are now running into conflicts with reality as decisions on CIA appointments and policy need to be made.

Obama can’t appoint the best choice for CIA Director for fear of offending the leftwing base.

Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.

Mr. Obama’s search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama’s decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that “if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,” and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service. ...

The flap over Mr. Brennan, who served as a chief of staff to George J. Tenet when he ran the C.I.A., was the biggest glitch so far in what has been an otherwise smooth transition for Mr. Obama. Some C.I.A. veterans suggest that the president-elect may have difficulty finding a candidate who can be embraced by both veteran officials at the agency and the left flank of the Democratic Party.

Now that the decision-making power, and the responsibility, are theirs, democrats have to square the circle of contradiction between liberal pieties and effectively preventing terrorist attacks. Will “human and non-coercive” methods really get the villain to tell where the ticking time bomb is located, or will Jack Bauer just have to shoot him in the knee?

On Wednesday, a dozen retired generals and admirals are to meet with senior Obama advisers to urge him to stand firm against any deviation from the military’s noncoercive interrogation rules.

But even some senior Democratic lawmakers who are vehement critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush.

But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.

Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said he would consult with the C.I.A. and approve interrogation techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were “legal, humane and noncoercive.” But Mr. Wyden declined to say whether C.I.A. techniques ought to be made public.

C.I.A. officials have long argued that publishing a list of interrogation techniques only allows Al Qaeda to train its operatives to resist them. But they say the secrecy has led to exaggeration and myth about the agency’s detention program.

“Alleged gunman” holding perfectly visible gun

John Hinderaker of Power-Line loses patience with the mealy-mouthed political correctness of the mainstream media.

The very same media which gleefully lynches opponents to the right, like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin, on the basis of its own trumped up charges has no enemies to the left, so any terrorist (even one captured in a photograph holding an automatic weapon in the midst of a murderous mass attack) is always only a potential suspect, someone whose status requires a full-scale courtroom procedure, and a complete professional defense, before it can possibly be pejoratively characterized.

Reuters’ caption for the photo begins: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station in Mumbai November 26, 2008.”

Notice the object the terrorist is holding in his hands. It’s a gun. He isn’t a “suspected gunman,” he’s a “gunman.”

Jamie Whyte, in the London Times, explains to liberals that, no, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Children are selfish. Not because they are unkind (though many are) but because they believe in cost-free transfers. They do not understand that providing the toys and other amusements they demand imposes a cost on their parents. Children live in a fantastical world where Barbie dolls and trips to the zoo can be delivered without depriving their parents of something they might have enjoyed, such as a bottle of wine or a few extra hours off work.

Learning that cost-free transfers are impossible is an important part of growing up, and parents usually make sure it happens quickly. Most of us learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch long before we have ever picked up a bill.

Except when it comes to public policy. Encouraged by politicians, many adults indulge the infantile fantasy that the Government can bestow gifts on us while imposing costs on no one.

Read the whole thing.