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.

Arnold Kling sees the culture wars spinning further and further out of control and experiences despair.

I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960’s, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.

Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.

I wouldn’t want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and knowing knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers’ fears.

I come back to my view that this is white, small-town America making its last stand. However, I think, also, that the progressive elite is making a last stand. My guess is that doubts are mounting among many independent voters about whether they want such a highly-charged politics. I am sticking with my bet that the Democrats will hold onto their House and Senate majorities as well as the Presidency through the elections of 2016, but relative to six months ago I feel that I am depending more on Republican incompetence than overall political trends to win that bet.

One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.

Camille Paglia (who is a rebel, and will never ever be any good) finds life within the holier-than-thou democrat party left increasingly uncongenial. They are so conformist, so complacent… and so statist.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. ...

(A)ffluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences—in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy—of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

But dreaming in the 1960s and ‘70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time.

And, of course, they do. The supposed generosity of the bien pensants is really the purest selfishness. America’s pezzonovantes live limitlessly appetitive lives of aesthetic appreciation, worldly and even spiritual aspiration, of constant striving for success, power, personal advancement, and self affirmation. The sight of the poor, the uncomely, the disorderly, the untidied away aspects of cruel reality is disagreeable to them. Someone needs to do something about it. It is A PROBLEM. And all problems, from the viewpoint of the pseudogentsia, can be cleared away by simple transfer to the responsibility of the state with a generous allocation of other people’s tax dollars. Big Government is for the American left essentially just a larger-scale version of the building management they’re accustomed to calling upon to clean the elevator anytime someone has made a mess.

The people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place?—Berthold Brecht.

Nancy Morgan, at American Thinker, comments on the anger of the democrat elite at the common people daring to talk back.

The face-off between the ruling party and the people continues to unfold, as Democrat politicians hold town hall meetings across the country to build support for the Obama administration’s latest power grab, misleadingly labeled ‘health care reform.’

The faux outrage politicians manufacture on demand has been replaced by real outrage. Outrage at the American people for failing to understand the nuances, the broad outline of a 1,000 page plus bill that most politicians haven’t even read. Hey, that’s what staff is for, explained new Democrat, Arlen Spector.

Peons from fly-over country are daring to challenge the carefully scripted and (deliberately?) misleading talking points. Talking points which, by the way, have been endorsed by the media. Don’t these guys read the New York Times?

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are using the standard liberal tactic of diverting attention from the issue by demonizing the dissenter, in this case, the American people. According to Pelosi and Reid, voicing objections to the federal government’s take over of 17% of the formerly free market economy is ‘un-American.’ Harry Reid has gone a step further, tarring dissenter’s as ‘evil mongers.’

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has blithely dismissed the burgeoning dissent by informing one and all that these ‘townhalls are not representative of America.’ Obama, meanwhile, is trying to divert the issue by blaming the ‘headline hungry television networks’, accusing them of ‘enflaming an ugly backlash.’

Unused to any opposition that can’t be spun to their advantage or ignored, Democrats are desperately trying to convince Americans that the tidal wave of opposition is not genuine. Used to viewing every issue in political terms, our elected officials are actually convinced that the disruptive townhalls are merely the product of an evil conservative cabal. After all, every person these lawmakers know agree with them on this issue. Its called the ‘inside the beltway syndrome.’

Despite a new $12 million ad campaign designed to soothe Americans into relying on misplaced compassion instead of common sense, pesky Joe Six-Pack and Susy Homemaker still don’t get it. And adding insult to injury, American citizens are starting to question where all the money is coming from to run these ads. And by the way, who’s signing the paychecks for the new army of health care advocates who are being paid $12 to $13 an hour for their support? Inquiring minds want to know.

Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. Like the classic case of a wife catching her husband in bed with another woman, the question has become, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”

Humorist Harry Stein’s a new book, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, skewering the intolerance, self-regard, and intellectual provinciality of the establishment left is the occasion of this Front Page interview.

F(ront)P(age): ...What inspired you to write this book?

Stein: It was simply the fact of living in a dark blue locale – the artsy New York suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, literally and figuratively an extension of the Upper West Side – and daily facing the reality that, for all my neighbors’ ostentatious ‘tolerance,’ they are astonishingly intolerant of anyone who challenges their own left-of-center assumptions and beliefs. There are millions of us conservatives marooned in places like this all over America, and I wanted the book to reflect their experiences, horrific, amusing and otherwise. I also want to encourage those who tend to hide in the conservative closet to stand up and be counted – something that, in the age of Obama, is more essential than ever.

FP: Why is New York so liberal? What forces made it so?

Stein: ...Historically, New York is a city of immigrants—immigrants who, in many cases, were fleeing genuine oppression. (This was certainly my grandparents’ case). So their tendency, way back when, was to be extremely liberal, if not outright radical, in their political orientation. And leftist politics, like any other faith, tends to be inherited. Question many New Yorkers closely about why and how they became liberal and they’ll look at you as if you’re mad; they’ve always been this way, so has everyone they know, how could anyone possibly be anything else? In fact, they’ll have contempt for you for even posing such an absurd question. ...

FP: ... Why are liberals and leftists so abusive?

Stein: I really believe it’s because they grasp on some level—we’re talking way, way, deep down, miles below consciousness—that their ideas do not stand up to rational argument. Theirs is a belief system grounded on faith, not on facts and certainly not, God knows, justified by experience. So they simply cannot afford to accord their opponents the status of moral equals; they must be attacked, and dismissed, as evil. That’s why trying to have an honest and fair-minded discussion with such people is useless, As soon as they’re cornered, they reflexively resort to name calling. ...

FP: ...Can you talk a bit about this echo chamber that the Left lives in? ...

Stein: ‘Echo chamber’ is the right term, because these views tend not simply to be endlessly repeated in such environments, but amplified through the repeating. Something that strikes many of us who live in such environments is how blithely unaware they are of conservative views. What they think they know about who we are and what we believe, picked up from the likes of NPR or The New York Times, is invariably distorted; we’re reduced to crude caricature, so as to flatter their own smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

Lizzie Widdicombe, in this week’s New Yorker, describes the beautiful people taking in the Bactrian Treasure Horde (fresh from darkest Afghanistan) at the Met, nibbling mutton at La Grenouille, and lamenting still another of Darth Cheney’s enormities.

Elisabetta Valtz-Fino, the exhibit’s curator, led a tour of the treasures, which included tiger, dolphin, and ram designs (the nomads loved animals). There was a jeweller in the crowd—Tim McClelland, of McTeigue & McClelland jewellers, which helped sponsor the event—and he studied the back of a collapsible gold crown. “This is the Hubble space telescope of jewelry,” he said. Adrianne Dicker-Kadzinski, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, said she had done a stint in Afghanistan, in 2004, with the U.S. Army Reserve. “Kabul itself was very sad,” she said. “The whole country is like a moonscape—brown, brown, brown.”

Afterward, there was a lamb dinner at La Grenouille (“I feel very Afghan eating this,” the writer Ann Marlowe said) and a raffle: all the guests received little keys; one of them opened a treasure chest containing a special gold-and-lapis bracelet made by McClelland. (The winner was a J. P. Morgan asset manager named Sophie Bosch de Hood.)

As excited as people were to have seen the Bactrian jewels, a sadness wafted over the evening: because of security concerns, the hoard can’t be displayed in Afghanistan. “I’m so mad at Dick Cheney,” said Caroline Firestone, an eighty-year-old philanthropist, who has known the former Vice-President for a long time. “I once gave him my house in Wyoming so he could stay there at Christmas. And he never let me come and talk to him about Afghanistan.”

Barack Obama did not explain precisely why he believed that an acceptable alternative to victory existed, when he contradicted General Douglas MacArthur’s famous dictum (War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.), but he did contend that simply not being successfully attacked was good enough for him.

President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but “victory” in the war-torn country isn’t necessarily the United States’ goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview.

“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.

The enemy facing U.S. and Afghan forces isn’t so clearly defined, he explained.

“We’re not dealing with nation states at this point. We’re concerned with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Al Qaeda’s allies,” he said. “So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like Al Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can’t attack the United States.”

Obama’s view on war objectives would never have sold in America in times gone by. Today… well, Barack Obama’s opinions and perspectives coincide perfectly with those of a very elite and influential American constituency.

Everybody today is watching this amusing skirmish in the culture wars.

Butler, Missouri car dealer Mark Muller turns the tables on oh-so-superior CNN interviewer Carol Costello foiling an attempted slam interview. Costello was intending to put Muller on the spot by confronting him in a live interview over a sales promotion at his dealership awarding a AK47 semi-automatic rifle with the purchase of a new pick-up truck.

But Muller quickly proves to be a lot more likable than the smarmy and condescending Costello. He answers frankly, as she continually targets him with hostile questions invariably presented as what “some people might say.” And the rube car dealer proves entirely capable of embarrassing the slick professional reporter by demonstrating repeatedly her weakness on details (like his name).

5:51 video

From Suzanna Logan.

Richard A. Clarke, in the Wall Street Journal, discusses, from a professional’s perspective, the political wars over US Intelligence Operations, describing recent events as “part of a 60-year historical pattern of manic swings of opinion in Washington about the efficacy of covert action.”

Most Americans might not think it was a big secret that CIA agents were trying to kill al Qaeda members, but in the weird world of Washington intelligence, it was.

For over a decade, in three different presidencies, there has been an ongoing debate about whether and how to kill al Qaeda terrorists and what part of the U.S. government should have the mission. The 9-11 Commission report details how President Clinton decided that killing Osama bin Laden and his supporters was not a violation of the ban on assassinations, how he authorized attacks, and how the CIA failed successfully to use that authority. Several media accounts this week indicate that after 9-11, the CIA put together a more serious effort to take out terrorists, but that the program was variously activated, deactivated, and put on hold by the four directors the CIA has had since 9-11. Senior CIA officers have been reluctant for years to create hit squads, fearing that a wave of CIA assassinations of terrorists would provoke a major al Qaeda retaliation against U.S. intelligence officers worldwide. They have also, with good reason, doubted the ability of their own agency to successfully kill the right people and then escape. Some have pointed to the Israeli terrorist targeting effort as evidence that such killings can be counter-productive, providing the terrorist groups with propaganda victories. Israeli experts are themselves split on the effectiveness of their killings, but it does seem likely that it has made it harder for terrorist leaders to operate.

It is puzzling that some people object to U.S. personnel killing terrorists with sniper rifles or car bombs, but have little apparent problem with CIA and Department of Defense personnel tracking down specific terrorist leaders with Predator drones and then killing those leaders with the unmanned aircraft’s Hellfire missiles. The terrorist groups probably see little difference in how we choose to kill their leaders.

Clarke is perfectly right. Outside the nation’s capital and beyond the circles of the chattering class elite, no one in America would ever understand why there is (supposedly) some kind of a legal and moral problem with US covert intelligence killing al Qaeda terrorists. You need elite education, real sophistication, and a habit of reading important publications to understand these things.

Takuan Seijo (presumably using an alternative reading of the name of Takuan Soho as his pen name), at Brussels Journal, finding himself inflamed by haute bourgeois Boston-area friends responding to sneezes with the blessing “Barack you!”, delivers the sort of brilliant, linguistically prismatic rant that only well-educated Russians can produce.

He is pessimistic to a Spenglerian degree on the fate of the West, which he finds incapable of self defense either politically or culturally against the moral jui jitsu of ressentiment employed by the left to justify the erection of the socialist Leviathan.

It is fun to ridicule the sheer lunacy of the Body Snatchers. But in fact, the yin legumes (feminized contemporary pod people -DZ) are part of a motivated and cunning coalition phalanx. That phalanx has a masterly grasp of tactics, the morals of a wolverine and the size of Leviathan.

The Looter Coalition can run circles around its opposition because of its multiple, interlocking rings. The opposition is comprised of single-issue groups: counter-jihad, anti-socialists, traditionalists, anti-secularists etc. This is like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon trying to beat the evil Han in the hall of mirrors. Until the mirrors are broken, the underlying unity of the foe cannot be seen. The foe therefore cannot be defeated.

Those who are counter-jihad are pummeled not by jihadis but by socialists. Those who are anti-socialist are pummeled not by socialists but by immigrant demographics. Those who are traditionalists are pummeled not by nihilists but by global capitalists. Those who are social conservatives are pummeled not by libertines but by the very symbol of rectitude, the Law. Those who are declining fertility activists will be defeated even if they succeed, for any number of Western children would still be compelled to spend 12 – 18 years turning into Pods in the Snatchers’ zombie farms. It’s in light of all this that I see the tactical retreat of Exodus.

When Reality becomes taboo, and fiction becomes an official totem, civilization has driven itself into a swamp. From then on, it’s the flotation coefficient of the lying totem versus the suction force of Reality’s swamp. That is a contest with only one possible outcome, as gravity and entropy work for the swamp.

Read the whole thing.

Spiegel editor Jan Fleischhauer grew up in a haute bourgeois left-liberal family, the kind that boycotted Hollywood movies, Pepsi Cola, and oranges, all on grounds of US or right-wing associations. Converting to Conservatism, he reports, was not easy, since doing so required breaking ranks with the entire community of culture and fashion.

Go to any theater, museum or open-air concert, and you’ll quickly realize that ideas beyond the mindscape of the left are unwelcome there. A contemporary play that doesn’t critically settle scores with the market economy? Unthinkable. An artist who, until George W. Bush left the White House, could associate anything with America other than Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the Washington’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol? Out of the question. Rock concerts against the left? A joke.

The left has won, across the board, and has become the happy medium. When we search for a definition of what left means, we can draw on an impressive array of theories. Leftism is a worldview, as well as a way of explaining the world and how everything is interconnected. Most of all, however, it is a feeling. A person who lives a leftist life is living with the appealing awareness of being in the right, in fact, being right all the time. In Germany, leftists are never truly called upon to justify their views. In fact, their views have become the dominant views, not within the population, which stubbornly adheres to its prejudices, but among those who set the tone and in circles where they prefer to congregate. ...

In the business of opinions, where I earn my money, there is practically nothing but leftists, and anyone who is not is well-advised to keep it to himself. One reason for the cultural dominance of the left may be that the other side has nothing to say or leftist ideas are so convincing that everything else pales by comparison. But I would hazard to guess that many are to the left because others are.

Man’s tendency to assimilate, though well-documented in experimental psychology, is a trait routinely underestimated in everyday life. What we call conviction is often nothing but adaptation in an environment of opinions. Opportunism is an ugly word that doesn’t apply here, because it assumes that we adopt opinions for purely calculated reasons. Let’s call it social instinct instead. No one wants to be the only person in an office who isn’t asked to join the group for lunch.

The liberal family has many clans competing sharply with one another, but in the end it remains a family, and it sees itself as a family. The left, with which I have dealt throughout my life, is a milieu that could be described as the leftist bourgeoisie. In English-speaking countries, terms like “chattering class” or “creative class” have taken hold. Middle-class socialism or leftist chic are other attempts at description, but they all mean the same thing. This milieu is inhabited by a type of person easily recognized by his consumption and cultural habits (even if he prides himself on his nonconformity), and who is characterized by a pronounced elite awareness, even though the word elite is much as a taboo for leftists as words like nation, homeland or ethnic group.

Liberals in Germany rave about Obama, fear climate change and the surveillance state, do their best to eat organically acceptable food and read the opinion pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the arts section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s Sunday edition and, with a certain amount of feigned contempt, the political section of SPIEGEL. Their children attend exclusive schools, even though they are fundamentally in favor of public schools. They like to spend their weekends visiting friends in the country who have been renovating a stone cottage for years—with attention to historical authenticity, of course—and in Italian restaurants they always order in Italian, no matter how well they actually speak the language. Of course, liberals and conservatives probably share some of these traits, but not to the point of excluding everything else, and certainly not as one of the prime attributes of a lifestyle.

Members of this social class are critical of the market economy, and yet are unable to specify an alternative. In their view, the current economic crisis is a gift from God, because it provides perfect fodder for all kinds of prejudices and practically eliminates the need for argument. All it takes is to mention words like “Deutsche Bank” or “Wall Street” in any discussion in which someone has dared to voice a cautious objection, and everyone standing around will quickly nod their heads in agreement, causing the troublemaker to withdraw, while mumbling apologies. In secret, however, they hope that this crisis of capitalism will not progress too far, because their own prosperity depends on capitalism and because, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to demonstrate that a comfortable retirement was possible under good old Karl Marx.

Read the whole thing.

His book, Unter Linken: Von einem, der aus Versehen konservativ wurde (The Left, From the Perspective of an Accidental Conservative), has not so far been translated into English.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

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.

Morning rejoinder on enhanced interrogation to an email list:

The contemporary intelligentsia, existing in a historical void and devoted to extravagant and conspicuous moral posturing, obviously will not countenance any (publicly-debated) form of coercive interrogation. The real answer is not to involve countless numbers of spoiled, pampered haute bourgeois Americans in these kinds of life and death decisions.

It is not America’s old lady cat lovers, her pansy leftwing bloggers, her Ethical Culture Society members, or her nice idealistic young coeds who have the knowledge, perspective, experience, and fortitude required to decide what is necessary to protect the lives of American civilians from terrorist plots and American soldiers in the field from primitive bloodthirsty fanatics. These kinds of decisions should be made in secret by the necessary rough men willing and able to do what needs to be done to allow the ethically concerned at home to sleep safe in their beds.

The great torture debate is just an anti-Bush Administration propaganda campaign which has successfully set off a grand series of echoes in the empty heads of our chattering classes. There has always been coercive interrogation. There will always be coercive interrogation when lives and the outcome of wars is at stake.

Sympathy for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who sawed off Daniel Pearl’s head with a dull knife and who played a principal planning role in the 9/11 attacks which very cruelly killed more than 3000 innocent American civilians, is absurd. He is a foreign enemy, an unlawful combatant, a systematic violator of every form of law and all the rules and customs of war, and a mass murderer. There is something seriously wrong with the moral outlook of people who have a problem with slapping him in the face, pouring water on his head, or frightening him into divulging information on his schemes and accomplices necessary to prevent further mass attacks.

Happily, now that the Obama Administration has eliminated any form of “enhanced” interrogation, we can console ourselves that the result will be no terrorist prisoners being taken, since they will have no value as information sources. And the philosopher can reflect that, if the result of our new, more edifying intelligence policies proves to be renewed successful attacks on US urban centers, well, those are the locations filled with sanctimonious democrat voters, aren’t they?

The inimitable Frank J. Fleming summarizes the liberal establishment position of moral superiority on coercive interrogation.

If the CIA torture memos tell us anything, it’s that Americans still have a long way to go towards civility. When disenfranchised youths flew planes into buildings, it should have been a time of quiet introspection. Instead, Americans gave into baser emotions and demanded vengeance against our “attackers.” Since we had the barbaric Bush administration in charge, they gave into those demands and soon loosed the sadistic Cheney, who took a break from blasting his friends in the face with a shotgun to turn his violence on foreign minorities. Pretty soon our intelligence agencies had grabbed some random Arab terrorist masterminds off the street and started inconveniencing them, making them uncomfortable, and — dare I say it — torturing them.

And now we are no better than they are. Less better even.

A civilized nation should never torture. Period. Ever, for any reason. No matter how many lives are at stake. It always just reduces us to animals that thirst for the pain of others. We say we want it to stop “terrorists” from killing us, but if in the process we murder our own humanity, what’s the point? And anyway, torture doesn’t work. I don’t care what basic logic or common sense or history tells you. It never works. Ever. That’s what studies say. Scientific ones where, to test the efficacy, they tortured monkeys to see if they could get the monkeys to talk, and none of them ever did. So with that issue settled, for what other reason could we be seeking torture but inhuman sadistic pleasure?

Yes, some are claiming that the torturing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed saved thousands of people from a plot to blow up the Library Tower in Los Angeles, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, if they really got useful information, then they obviously didn’t use torture because it’s a well-known fact that torture doesn’t work (remember the studies I mentioned). But they claimed they used waterboarding, which they say is not torture but we all know is totally torture. I mean, they hold someone down and pour water — real water — on his face; try that on a cat and see if it acts like that isn’t torture. Thus, since waterboarding is torture, it obviously didn’t cause KSM to give up information because torture doesn’t work. Thus, he must have given up the information for reasons completely unrelated to the waterboarding.

Now look at what we (and by we, I mean you, because I’m not a part of this) have become. Torturers. And what did we gain? Information on a terror plot that was probably never going to happen in the first place. And even if it was going to happen, it’s not like thousands of people don’t die in LA every year anyway. Plus, “Library Tower” isn’t actually a library. So we gained nothing, and we debased ourselves by becoming nothing more than common Cheneys. Just because someone masterminded a plot that killed thousands doesn’t make it right to pour water on him.

So I hope your bloodthirst has been quenched, you mindless barbarians. You may say Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is “evil,” but then I ask, “Who is holding whom hostage and pouring water on his face?” No wonder the rest of the world looks at us and sees who the real terrorists are. This is what our torture has done to us. And I weep.

Read the whole thing.

National Review’s Julie Gunlock responds with dudgeon to some haute bourgeois foodie condescension from Berkeley, California restauranteur Alice Waters, suggesting that just possibly not everyone can actually afford terroir and that “fresh, local, and organic” may not fully address the difficulties faced by American families in bad economic times.

Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”

Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester, Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who — in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground, and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food.

Her condescension is typical of a food culture that is increasingly withdrawn from mainstream America — a food culture that increasingly preaches to the average American consumer that eating non-organic food is bad for you. The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources. Those who can afford it and want it should have it, but organic food is not a panacea for the world’s ills.

It may be easier for Ms. Waters and her cadre to simply label Americans stupid and ill-informed than to tackle the real reason people are not eating more organic and locally grown food — i.e., most Americans simply are not able to afford it. Even 60 Minutes — known for asking tough questions and making interviewees sweat — basically punted on this issue. Highlighted on the program earlier this year, Waters introduced Lesley Stahl to a man that grows organic grapes and sells them for a staggering $4 a pound (to give non-shoppers some perspective on this price, grocery-store grapes usually cost under $2 a pound, and even most meat comes in under $4 a pound).

While Stahl did seem surprised at the high price, Waters never directly addressed the cost issue; instead, she made an offhand remark that people would simply have to make the choice between expensive grapes and Nike tennis shoes. What she fails to appreciate is that some people can’t buy those tennis shoes either.

In the American Enterpise Institute’s 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture, Charles Murray argued that the key to preventing America’s descent into European-style permanent class division and economic paralysis beneath the rule of a technocrat bureaucracy must lie in overcoming the provinciality and disloyalty to the American project of the American elite.

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close. ...

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, and it has been wonderful. But it isn’t something in the water that has made us that way. It comes from the cultural capital generated by the system that the Founders laid down, a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with each other. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we love about Americans can go away. In some circles, they are going away.

Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. When I visit the small Iowa town where I grew up in the 1950s, I don’t get a sense that community life has changed all that much since then, and I wonder if it has changed all that much in the working class neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens. When I examine the polling data about the values that most Americans prize, not a lot has changed. And while I worry about uncontrolled illegal immigration, I’ve got to say that every immigrant I actually encounter seems as American as apple pie.

The center still holds. It’s the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it’s the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it. The fact is that American elites have increasingly been withdrawing from American life. It’s not a partisan phenomenon. The elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities—”gated” literally or figuratively—where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class.

Haven’t the elites always done this? Not like today. A hundred years ago, the wealth necessary to withdraw was confined to a much smaller percentage of the elites than now. Workplaces where the elites made their livings were much more variegated a hundred years ago than today’s highly specialized workplaces.

Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers—and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn’t gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There’s nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America. ...

What it comes down to is that America’s elites must once again fall in love with what makes America different. I am not being theoretical. Not everybody in this room shares the beliefs I have been expressing, but a lot of us do. To those of you who do, I say soberly and without hyperbole, that this is the hour. The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. And so it is our job to make the case for that reawakening. It won’t happen by appealing to people on the basis of lower marginal tax rates or keeping a health care system that lets them choose their own doctor. The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.

Read the whole thing.

Chuckie Lemos, at the bolshie My DD blog, thought that Rick Santelli’s Chicago Board of Trade rant (4:57 video) was just typical of those white ethnic traders who attended all the wrong schools.

I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics – Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others- and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet. Nor could any of them ever get my name right. “My name is Charles, not Chuckie” was something I would repeat whenever I had the misfortune to have to interact with them. Some of these folks made William Buckley appear moderate.

Don Surber admires the condescension of the elites who want to give away the money and take the bows toward the humble peons who actually earn it.

William Veogeli, in the Wall Street Journal, contemplates liberalism as the politics of snobbery.

Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in “just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces. . . . The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them.” Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents’ religion. Instead, wrote Mr. Doctorow, a “third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world.” Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, “giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys’ clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals.”

We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.

Political parties have traditionally been coalitions held together by beliefs and interests. The modern Democratic Party may be the first in which the mortar is a shared sensibility. The cool kids disdain the dorks, and find it infuriating and baffling that they ever lose a class election to them.

Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.
—quipped Columbia University political science professor Wallace S. Sayre (well before Henry Kissinger).

Allen Guelzo argues, however, that those stakes, which include the opportunity to form the background assumptions and fundamental perspective of society’s educated elite, may not really be so petty after all.

The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Until recent times, for most people, both food and sex were considerably less available than they are today.

In the Hoover Institute’s Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt meditates on the curious way in which, at the present time, the community of fashion has come to place a strongly principled ethical focus on eating, just when old-style sexual morality has been replaced by total latitudinarianism.
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Yuval Levin, in Commentary, reflects on Sarah Palin’s candidacy and what it revealed about class and politics in contemporary America.

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is… subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Both economic and cultural populism are politically potent, but in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has always been much more powerful. Americans do not resent the success of others, but they do resent arrogance, and especially intellectual arrogance. Even the poor in our country tend to be moved more by cultural than by economic appeals. It was this sense, this feeling, that Sarah Palin channeled so effectively. Her appearance on the scene unleashed populist energies that McCain had not tapped, and she both fed them and fed off them. She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the “the real America” she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her. Palin channeled these cultural energies more by what she was than by what she said or did, which contributed mightily to the odd disjunction between her professional resume and her campaign presence and impact. ...

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

This form of intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society since World War II. It is not as exclusive or as anti-democratic as cultural elitism is in other countries, because entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not as difficult as it once was, at least for the middle class. Indeed, most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. They can speak of growing up in Scranton, even as they raise their noses at dirty coal and hunting season.

Nor is membership in the intellectual upper class determined by diplomas hanging on the wall. Palin could have gained entrance easily, despite the fact that she holds a mere degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog’s Best Essays of the Year.

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

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.

One of my classmates this morning was demanding that I explain why Conservatism has taken an anti-intellectual turn (Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber). I replied:

Conservatism isn’t anti-intellectual. Conservatism is anti a pseudo-intellectual community of fashion following the lead of the treasonous clerks who have hijacked the academic establishment. Why should it be surprising in this “the-great-professor-has-no-clothes” era, when the elite university class rushes to support drivelling nonsense like Global Warming catastrophism and Socialism, that the contrast between the educated fools and the wiser representative of ordinary Common Sense has become a standard cultural meme?

Elite education used to be aimed at producing leaders capable of rational and independent judgement, familiar with the broad sweep of Western culture, men of integrity willing to defend their civilization, their country, and the right. What our elite institutions have been producing for a very long time is a cadre of adequately glib functionaries, nominally acquainted with the standard cultural heights (from a Cliff notes, test taking perspective), opportunistic and calculating and conformist, with no fixed principles beyond sentimentality and a watchful eye constantly fixed on the decrees of the community of fashion. The older elite could be calculated to rebuke folly and resist popular enthusiams. The current elite only aspires to prominent positions near the front of the mob. Our generation grew up more spoiled and pampered than any generation in previous human history. We were favored with greater ease and opportunity than our parents and grandparents ever dreamed of, so, when we went to college, what did the overwhelming majority of our generation do? They rebelled against the terrible tyranny of middle-class American life, betrayed their country and their less-privileged contemporaries fighting and dying in the field to support… Communism. What an opportunity for dramaturgy and self-righteous poses the Vietnam War provided! Any snot-nosed, spotty-faced adolescent could get up on a soapbox and commence denouncing his country and its adult leadership from a supposedly morally-superior high horse and catch himself later in his glory on the 6 PM Evening News. And the generality of today’s American elite hasn’t changed one bit with age.

This is the American intellectual community, a tree hugging, Socialism-embracing, holier-than-thou, cause-loving, empty-headed collection of noisy poseurs and conformists. American Conservatism is simply a movement applying a critical gloss to the mass politics of the last century and attempting a serious defense of the traditional values of the European West and the principles on which the Government of the United States was founded. These days you have to be an extremist radical to argue that state and federal constitutions should be read to mean what they actually say, not interpreted so as to turn seasonal rain puddles into “navigable waterways” or equal protection before the law into a mandate to coerce your fellow citizens.

Mencius Moldbug, most prolix of bloggers, goes on at great length, but is still often worth a read.

The mysterious Moldbug, it has been learned, is a 1992 Brown graduate who majored in Computer Science. Further details here.

In this alleged introduction to his blog, Moldbug accurately identifies the enemy (complete with whimsical H.P. Lovecraft allusions).

[I]n post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, “public opinion.” This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the 45-year lag.

Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of “public opinion.” Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response, as in this case the Supreme Court did in 1967, and synchronize directly with the universities.

This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty. ...

There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history – the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift. Nor, most important for our hypothesis, did they come from the universities; in the 20th century, periods of reaction are always periods of anti-university activity. (McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that McCarthy didn’t exactly win.)

The principle applies even in wars. In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field.

And we are starting to piece the puzzle together. The leftward direction is, itself, the principle of organization. In a two-party democratic system, with Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, etc, the intelligentsia is always Whig. Their party is simply the party of those who want to get ahead. It is the party of celebrities, the ultra-rich, the great and good, the flexible of conscience. Tories are always misfits, losers, or just plain stupid – sometimes all three.

And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral – although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with. ...

Whatever you make of the left-right axis, you have to admit that there exists some force which has been pulling the Anglo-American political system leftward for at least the last three centuries. Whatever this unfathomable stellar emanation may be, it has gotten us from the Stuarts to Barack Obama. Personally, I would like a refund. But that’s just me. ...

intellectuals cluster to the left, generally adopting as a social norm the principle of pas d’ennemis a gauche, pas d’amis a droit, because like everyone else they are drawn to power. The left is chaos and anarchy, and the more anarchy you have, the more power there is to go around. The more orderly a system is, the fewer people get to issue orders. The same asymmetry is why corporations and the military, whose system of hierarchical executive authority is inherently orderly, cluster to the right.

Once the cluster exists, however, it works by any means necessary. The reverence of anarchy is a mindset in which an essentially Machiavellian, tribal model of power flourishes. To the bishops of the Cathedral, anything that strengthens their influence is a good thing, and vice versa. The analysis is completely reflexive, far below the conscious level. Consider this comparison of the coverage between the regime of Pinochet and that of Castro. Despite atrocities that are comparable at most – not to mention a much better record in providing responsible and effective government – Pinochet receives the full-out two-minute hate, whereas the treatment of Castro tends to have, at most, a gentle and wistful disapproval. ...

[T]he problem is not just that our present system of government – which might be described succinctly as an atheistic theocracy – is accidentally similar to Puritan Massachusetts. As anatomists put it, these structures are not just analogous. They are homologous. This architecture of government – theocracy secured through democratic means – is a single continuous thread in American history.

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.

Joseph Epstein has taught for too many years to believe that conspicuous success in today’s elite universities is commonly a testament to good character. Au contraire, Epstein argues: “Some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools.”

Last week the excellent David Brooks, in one of his columns in the New York Times, exulted over the high quality of people President-elect Barack Obama was enlisting in his new cabinet and onto his staff. The chief evidence for these people being so impressive, it turns out, is they all went to what the world—”that ignorant ninny,” as Henry James called it—thinks superior schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the London School of Economics; like dead flies on flypaper, the names of the schools Obama’s new appointees attended dotted Brooks’s column.

Here is the column’s first paragraph:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

This administration will be, as Brooks writes, “a valedictocracy.” The assumption here is that having all these good students—many of them possibly “toll-frees,” as high-school students who get 800s on their SATs used to be known in admissions offices—running the country is obviously a pretty good thing. Brooks’s one jokey line in the column has it that “if a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.” Since my appreciation of David Brooks is considerable, and since I agree with him on so many things, why don’t I agree with him here?

The reason is that, after teaching at a university for 30 years, I have come to distrust the type I think of as “the good student.” ...

Read the whole thing.

Mark Stinson, in the Chatham (North Carolina) Journal Weekly, laments the invasion, and take-over, of Siler City by intolerant representatives of the contemporary community of fashion.

We have a certain number of people that are transplanted here because they wanted some space. We have others that have money that wanted space too; that like the city life but want to live in the country. These people use their wealth to force the rest of us to do what they want. ...

Bobby Smith of S&W Speed Shop in Siler City has occupied the same corner lot for almost 40 years. He has been a constant tax paying citizen and local fixture around this area. ...

This brings me to the invasion of the jug making pot heads that want to turn Siler City into a smaller version of Chapel Hill. You see the arts incubator has grabbed a chunk of mid down town Siler City and proceeded to start transforming the town into a Chapel Hill / Carrboro clone. Bobby never in 40 years had one complaint about a vehicle sitting in his parking spots beside his shop or parts of vehicles stored in his lot behind his shop until the artsy bunch cleaned up town (as they put it) and located a pottery next to him. They have constantly whined and complained to the town forcing Bobby to move just about everything off his property to accommodate their desires to make downtown visually pleasing to them.

Recently they sent a police officer because Bobby had his truck. which he is repairing sitting in his parking spot “turned the wrong way” and they didn’t like the looks of that truck so they wanted it gone. ...

Kenny Clark is feeling the effects of their constant complaints as well and Clapp Brothers will be next on the hit list if something isn’t done to balance things out again. They have already complained about things such as shipping crates temporarily stored in Clapps lot.

I personally love arts n crafts. I enjoy learning new ways to be creative but not at anyone else’s expense. If I want to see pottery I go to Jug Town where it is done the right way. I may be wrong, but in my opinion anyone can learn to make a pot. Not everyone can fix a bull dozer, build engines or repair a truck that helps members of our community make an honest living. ...

does it make sense to bully the small established businesses out just because you want to make pots? The Arts incubator could never draw the kind of money some of these business have and never will. People involved with the Arts Incubator may have millions but that money isn’t being spread around the community. I was all excited about the arts incubator coming to Siler City until I saw how it grew to push people aside and trample those that are established in the community just to add “culture” to Chatham. ...

I went through town to see a naked blue lady on top of a building, a half a naked man and a naked anatomically correct statue of a man on a street corner and honestly was upset. I don’t want my children to see such things in what is supposed to be a public place. I find it offensive. Is it better to be offended by art or annoyed with an eyesore of machine parts that are supposed to be outside a garage anyway?

Philip Terzian, in the Weekly Standard, waxes ironical on the dawning of the Chosen One’s Brave New America.

You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.

Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc.). But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it’s a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things.

An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn’t know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!

Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension—Tip O’Neill to Ronald Reagan: “You’re in the big leagues now” (1981)—is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton—”Bill and Al’s Excellent Adventure,” the Washington Post (1992)—a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation’s capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.

Catherine Vogt

John Kass, at the Chicago Tribune, has a little story of a middle school student’s experiment which tells us a lot about life in America today. Catherine Vogt’s Oak Park, Illinois could just as easily have been any other fashionable upper middle class community from coast to coast.

Just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

“McCain Girl.”

“I was just really curious how they’d react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters,” Catherine told us. “I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be.”

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain’s name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

“People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn’t be wearing it,” Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

“One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,” Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

“In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,” Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college. ...

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

“He said, ‘You should be crucifixed.’ It was kind of funny because, I was like, don’t you mean ‘crucified?’ ” Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election.

Back in the days of Dwight Eisenhower, we had Me-Too Republicans who were simply too timid to challenge a conventional liberal orthodoxy for fear of being labeled radical. Tony Blankley finds today a new form of Me-Too Republican motivated by snobbery and misplaced loyalty to the community of fashion.

Sam Schulman, in the Weekly Standard, contemplates the crucial role of class solidarity in this year’s election, concluding that Sarah Palin (the Admirable Crichton of 2008), not Bill Ayers, is the real revolutionary.

A must read.

Mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated—but why? He hasn’t, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term. He doesn’t even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon. Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs. Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction. What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of upper-middle-class solidarity. You can see the ranks close around them in the texture of Richard Stern’s elegant prose. Stern, a novelist and a long-serving University of Chicago English professor, reassures us:

I’ve been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weather-men’s Dolores Ibárruri (“La Pasionaria”), a fiery, beautiful muse. .  .  . Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones.

Carefully, Stern engages with the glamorous couple on equal terms, before judging them:

At dinner, thirty-eight years later, Ayers and Dohrn did not seem to hold [my criticism of the 1970 University of Chicago student uprising] against me, and I didn’t hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov’s wonderful story “Old Age,” time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms.

As the Ayerses’ social equal, Stern can estimate them fairly.

As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor. They’d raised the child of a Weatherman who’d been jailed, they were taking care of Bernardine’s ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing.

What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of “educated community activists.” Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose). Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses “have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.”

Read the whole thing.

Biden: “I don’t have any Joe the Plumbers in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year and are worried.”

1:12 video

Of course he doesn’t. How many plumbers (even those grossing $250K per annum) could possibly afford to live in Delaware’s Chateau Country like Joe Biden?

Delaware Online:

First elected to the Senate 36 years ago, (Biden) lives off Barley Mill Road in Greenville—northern Delaware’s priciest area—on a four-acre lakefront estate in a 7,000-square-foot custom home. Biden also owns a smaller carriage house on his property, where his widowed mother lives.

Local real estate agents said the Biden property is worth at least $2.5 million.

The People’s Cube documents the reaction of Manhattan Upper West Siders to the passage of a McCain Campaign march through a local street fair.

The number of middle fingers in a “progressive” crowd is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten block radius.

5:00 video

via Rusty Shackleford.

Larisa Alexandrovna, at HuffPO, demonstrates that her political assimilation as a recent immigrant has been less than successful. Remedial work in both Civics and American History is in order.

Alexandrovna obviously never learned to understand the Electoral College system, and she is clearly unaware that the election of 2000 was the fourth in which the candidate with the larger number of popular votes was nonetheless defeated. If George W. Bush, as Alexandrovna alleges is “a man the citizens overwhelmingly rejected” on the basis of a .5% popular vote margin in his opponent’s favor, what would be her position on Bill Clinton who assumed the presidency despite a 4% larger margin of voters rejecting him than supporting him?

Huffington Post accepts opinion pieces from the oddest sources.

Here is a recent Russian Jewish immigrant, with a literary background, who has apparently sought asylum not in the normal America most of us inhabit, but in the deepest depths of the paranoid fever swamps of the left, who is now setting up shop to tell the rest of us Americans that we must make haste to impeach the current president (in the 5 remaining weeks before the next election) or there is no alternative to violent Revolution.

As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.

No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?

The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won’t act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us – the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger – then what is left for us to do? I don’t want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will. Put your party politics aside right now. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few.

Possibly this young lady may have insights on the work of stylistic geniuses like “Vladamir Nabkov” which are worthy of attention. She obviously is fundamentally incapable of approaching US political issues at any level more sophisticated than the repetition of leftie slogans and irrational raving.

Worse, she hasn’t even got the minimum intellectual integrity required to take political positions.

When she posted her bizarre “summons to the barricades” yesterday in response to the prospective federal bailout, she provoked a little feedback from elements of the right Blogosphere.

Jeff Goldstein identifies the young lady’s political perspective, accurately, as antidemocratic progressivism.

What the progressives want is a type of non-filial aristocracy — an aristocracy of region and school and manner and argot. Once established, this ruling class will act in the interests of all — at least, in the interests of all as those interests are defined by that ruling elite.

Voting, democracy… messy encumberances that keep those fit to lead from leading, all because too many US citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interests. As decided upon by those who would rather the rubes not vote at all if they aren’t going to vote the “right” way. Hence the outrage when certain “types” wander off the liberal plantation.

This is the face of progressive fascism. Which for all its high-sounding political importance is, at heart, nothing more than temper tantrums being thrown by those who aren’t quite as clever as they’ve always been taught to believe.

Sad, really. But then, such is the burden of being an elite in this country. STOP HATING US BECAUSE WE’RE BETTER THAN YOU!

Further negative commentary was provided by Confederate Yankee, MacRanger, and others.

How did she respond to criticism? With the radical left’s customary defenses of insults, sneers, and foul language, and, ridiculously enough, with disingenuous “Who, me? I didn’t say any such thing!” protestations.

We need advice on politics from her?

Bradley Burston, winner of the the Eliav-Sartawi award for Middle East journalism

Bradley Burston, award-winning member of the chin-stroking International liberal commentariat, provides a very striking illustration of the truth of the old rustic apothegm in his What is truly frightening about Sarah Palin editorial.

It was in the taxicab this morning that it finally struck me about Sarah Palin.

I get it. I get that millions of Americans have a crying need for someone to stand up and say the things that Sarah Palin has been telling them.

I get that many, many Americans are fed up with big government and shame in patriotism and energy dependence and media condescension. I recognize that there are many on the right who are galvanized by a woman addressing the nation in condemnation of gun control and abortions. It’s clear that many in the heartland and even on the Blue State coasts have been waiting years to hear someone take a take-no-prisoners verbal lash to Beltway waste and liberal political correctness and, by implication, to cultural pluralism and tree hugging and the very mention of the word Washington.

But it wasn’t until I got into the taxicab this morning, that I realized what the American voter truly faces this November.

The radio was playing a clip from her ABC News interview, the one in which she was asked about the Bush Doctrine.

The problem was not that she was unacquainted with the doctrine. Millions of Americans are unacquainted with it.

The problem is that Sarah Palin was also asking those millions of Americans to put her first in line for the most important position in humankind. ...

Asked during the interview if she had the ability and the experience to serve as president of the United States, she replied without hesitation, without reservation, without contemplation – and without knowing, on a profound level, what that would, in fact, entail. “I’m ready.”

Here is the answer that is truly frightening. It lets us know that the nation may be in danger of electing another leader bearing the most profound of George Bush’s shortcomings: blindness to one’s own shortcomings.

Blindness, that is, to the breadth and depth and height and shape of what one does not know. Say what you will about Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary knew an unknown unknown when he saw one. Sarah Palin, for whom appearance is understandably significant, has one in her mirror.

But what about Bradley Buston’s blindness to his own shortcomings: his unjustified certitude, his complacency, his arrogance, and his misinformedness?

First of all, George W. Bush never identified any proposition as the “Bush Doctrine.”

That there is a Bush Doctrine at all is a pure journalistic invention, and wide-spread disagreement exists as to which of several formulations represents the alleged Bush Doctrine. Even how many alternative Bush Doctrines have been referred to is uncertain.

Charles Krauthammer, who claims to have been the first to use the phrase, identifies four versions of the Bush Doctrine.

Michael Abramowitz, in the Washington Post, quotes Paul D. Feaver, a member of the National Security Council, as having identified seven versions. Wikipedia used to agree, stating, as of September 13th:

The Bush Doctrine is a journalistic term used to describe some foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Scholars identify seven different “Bush Doctrines.”

But this inconvenient portion of the discussion has been edited away and the entry locked to prohibit further alterations. The old text is presently visible in Google.

This little case of journalistic malpractice could serve beautifully as a metonymy for the numberless cases of factual error, false interpretation, and complete misstatement served up by the establishment journalistic community as Truth and Wisdom during the Bush Administration’s years in office.

David Walker reports on how the Atlantic made a big mistake by hiring “a hardcore democrat” professional celebrity photographer to do the portrait shot of John McCain for their October issue cover.

Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election).

Warned that the image is just the kind of thing that will stir up the anti-media vitriol in the conservative blogosphere, Greenberg said, “Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.”

That said, she goes on to explain that she’s thought about replacing McCain’s mouth with bloody shark teeth and displaying the image on a billboard with the message that the candidate is a bloodthirsty war monger.

Given her strong feelings about John McCain, we asked whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment in the first place.

“I didn’t,” she says. “It’s definitely exciting to shoot someone who is in the limelight like that. I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.”

Walker thinks that Greenberg “delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic,” but just look at it.

The photo was taken at an angle ideal for highlighting the candidate’s jowls, sagging neck, and lighted so as to capture every line and blemish in his face. His face is surreally reflective and its overall color is kind of a metallic bronze, except where some nasty emphatic pink makes his nose look runny and his mouth obscene. I doubt McCain’s motor vehicle picture is any more unflattering.

One of the less loveable features of the American left is the way its members are so little inhibited by good manners, professionalism, or ordinary decency from injecting their own vicious, self-righteous, and santimonious partisan perspective into anything opportunity places within their reach. These kinds of cheap shots are a key reason the culture wars are bitter as they are.

Another class act from Huffington Post: the screenwriter of the preachy agitprop box-office bomb North Country*, Michael Seiztman heard Sarah Palin in her ABC interview choose the George W. Bush-preferred pronunciation of nuclear, and proceeded to go ballistic on all you Americans who fail to measure up to his personal standards of pronunciation, deportment, and political correctness.

*Budget $30,000,000—Gross revenue $23,624,242

Repent immediately, or else!

I realized three things tonight. For one, if you are a McCain/Palin/Bush voter, you and I do not have a difference of opinion. We have a difference in brain power. Two, she really is as ignorant as I feared. And, three, she really is kinda hot. Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to “first wipe off Palin’s tranny makeup.” I married well.)

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You’re an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we’re going to agree to disagree. This isn’t one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I’m not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren’t scared out of your freakin’ mind, then you’re mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

But I like to think that anyone can change.

Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.

Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who inspires you. Vote for someone who has not only traveled the world but who has also shown a deep understanding and compassion for it. The stakes are real and they’re terrifyingly high. This election matters. It matters. It really matters. Let me say that one more time. This. Really. Matters.

Face it, Seitzman, George W. Bush graduated from three better schools than you did.

We live in a tragic age, in which control of far too great a portion of the arts is in the hands of witless vulgarians, like Seitzman, who respond to the quirks of fate allowing pseudo-intellectual clods like themselves too near the center of the stage with complacent self-infatuation and Neronian fantasies of the exercise of political power.

I’ve rarely seen a blog post which demonstrated, so definitively, its author’s complete lack of the supposed superiority which forms the entire basis of his diatribe.

Pat Buchanan talks a little about class warfare.

If one would wish to see the famous liberal double standard on naked display, consider.

Palin’s daughter was fair game for a media that refused to look into reports that John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president, was conducting an illicit affair with a woman said to be carrying his child and cheating on his faithful wife Elizabeth, who has incurable cancer. That was not a legitimate story, but Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is?

Why did the selection of Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that has been so in the tank for Barack even “Saturday Night Live” has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union. She belongs to a mainstream Christian church. Barack was, for 15 years, a parishioner at Trinity United and had his daughters baptized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons are saturated in black-power, anti-white racism and anti-Americanism.

Sarah is a rebel. Obama has been a go-along, get-along cog in the Daley machine. She is Middle America. Barack, behind closed doors in San Francisco, mocked Middle Americans as folks left behind by the global economy who cling bitterly to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.

Barack, says the National Journal, has the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, besting Socialist Bernie Sanders. Palin’s stances read as though they were lifted from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “no pale pastels” platform. And this is what this media firestorm is all about.

Clive Crook explains that rejection of American values and contempt for ordinary Americans really does place candidates representing America’s urban elites at a serious disadvantage in national elections.

He doesn’t exhaustively address the subject, but he’s certainly identified a major part of the left’s problem.

This article is not the first to note the cultural contradiction in American liberalism, but just now the point bears restating. The election may turn on it.

Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.

Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

Because it was so unexpected, Sarah Palin’s nomination for the vice-presidency jolted these attitudes to the surface. Ms Palin is a small-town American. It is said that she has only recently acquired a passport. Her husband is a fisherman and production worker. She represents a great slice of the country that the Democrats say they care about – yet her selection induced an apoplectic fit.

For days, the derision poured down from Democratic party talking heads and much of the media too. The idea that “this woman” might be vice-president or even president was literally incomprehensible. The popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose act is an endless sneer at the Republican party, noted that John McCain’s case for the presidency was that only he was capable of standing between the US and its enemies, but that should he die he had chosen “this stewardess” to take over. This joke was not – or not only – a complaint about lack of experience. It was also an expression of class disgust. I give Mr Maher credit for daring to say what many Democrats would only insinuate.

Little was known about Ms Palin, but it sufficed for her nomination to be regarded as a kind of insult. Even after her triumph at the Republican convention in St Paul last week, the put-downs continued. Yes, the delivery was all right, but the speech was written by somebody else – as though that is unusual, as though the speechwriter is not the junior partner in the preparation of a speech, and as though just anybody could have raised the roof with that text. Voters in small towns and suburbs, forever mocked and condescended to by metropolitan liberals, are attuned to this disdain. Every four years, many take their revenge. ...

If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier – and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

The Palin nomination could still misfire for Mr McCain, but the liberal reaction has made it a huge success so far. To avoid endlessly repeating this mistake, Democrats need to learn some respect.

It will be hard. They will have to develop some regard for the values that the middle of the country expresses when it votes Republican. Religion. Unembarrassed flag-waving patriotism. Freedom to succeed or fail through one’s own efforts. Refusal to be pitied, bossed around or talked down to. And all those other laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is.

Roger Kimball savors Sarah Palin’s arrival on the political scene as a kind of Joan of Arc of the culture wars.

Sarah’s lucky that the establishment left is so thoroughly secularist, or they’d be preparing her stake now.

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche. .. It was the smug, “progressive” liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. ...

It’s only from the eyrie of the “Harvard” Weltanschauung that a largish random sampling of citizens is found culturally deficient. And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence. Nice work if you can get it!

If you can get it? The amazing thing is that there is nothing easier. The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here):

i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.

“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

One of the favorite talking points at the democrat convention this year is “investing in green technology to create new jobs.”

Green technology, insofar as it exists, represents only significantly more expensive approaches to very ordinary things, chosen on the basis of ideology by poseurs and nutjobs. The green technology that B. Hussein and Al Gore talk about is just like fairy dust, a purely imaginary fantasy-substance useful only to gratify the desires of children in dreams.

Green technology is just one more proof of the arrested development of liberals. There is no price in dirt, ugliness, and polluted lands and streams for industrial civilization, human prosperity, and economic abundance. The calculative powers of human reason are completely omnipotent when supplemented by Leviathan’s coercive power and purse. Throw federal money at reality and all the tragedies and limitations of the human condition can be abolished. Force people to quit smoking and avoid fatty foods, and we’ll all live forever. The idle, the dissipated, and the dishonest will become just as prosperous and successful as the hard working and the prudent. The lazy and the stupid, even the mentally retarded, will not be left behind. Little boys and girls will all go to Ivy League colleges and become doctors and lawyers, if we just raise teachers’ salaries and build fancier schools.

Just grant more dollars to Obama cronies like Antoin Rezko, and desirable housing in good neighborhoods will magically become available permanently to the kind of people who shoot up and urinate in elevators. We won’t have to burn black, nasty fuels like coal or oil, or deal with radioactive substances. We won’t have to take out the ashes, change the oil filter, or fill the tank. We won’t have to dig in the ground or cut down trees. Even the most remote and worthless frozen landscapes will be preserved like fine art in a museum on Manhattan’s Upper East side. We can do anything and everything, yes, we can. And none of it can possibly have any untoward costs, drawbacks, or side effects, or impose any burdens or inefficiencies or unreasonable costs on anyone but “the rich,” and screw them.

Children. Our elite, the backbone of the moocher/looter party, consists of spoiled and stupid children, incapable of reasoning or dealing with reality. They are good at their professional specialties, which typically involve only the manipulation of words, symbols, and ideas. Outside those small and limited areas of actual competence, they are clueless, irresponsible, and destructive.

George Will notes how liberals like Obama believe government can simply order new energy sources to come into being.

Obama recently said that he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term—more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.” ...

What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon Jan. 20, 2009.

Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both—billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

Conservatives are sometimes justly accused of ascribing magic powers to money and markets: Increase the monetary demand for anything, and the supply of it will expand. But it is liberals such as Obama who think that any new technological marvel or other social delight can be summoned into existence by a sufficient appropriation. Once they thought “model cities” could be, too.

Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (see above). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: “I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming—an 80 percent reduction by 2050.”

No, he won’t. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes that in 2050 there will be 420 million Americans—40 million more households. So Obama’s cap would require reducing per capita carbon emissions to levels probably below even those “in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood.”

Liberal statism is a cult, fundamentally based on a narcissistic belief in the omnipotence of the calculative powers of human reason employed by an educated elite, to which class its subscribers by some curious coincidence invariably belong.

Megan McArdle does to the leftwing professoriate at University of Chicago who signed a letter protesting the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute (God forbid!) at their university what a Jack Russell terrier does to a rat.

I haven’t heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise.

Bob Parks was also following the left’s explosive reaction to Barry Blitt’s satirical New Yorker cover, and he thinks that Eustace Tilley inadvertently provoked a great deal of commentary that reveals only too much about the attitudes and perspective of the liberal elite.

To hell with all the thoughtful analysis; I got more out of reading the snobby, smarmy comments from the HuffPo intelligentsia who genuinely believe this is how right wingers (who always “hate” Obama) and hayseed hicks view our Number One Power Couple.

“Folks in Dumbville, USA with no help from the braindead MSM will believe this…”

“This will reinforce the images many Americans have in their reptilian and mammalian brains, the part that is NOT thinking but imaginal and symbolic, with no sense of time. The part of the brain oriented toward survival at all costs. This image is going to help mylenize the brain cells and synaptic connections to facilitate that association of Barack Hussein Obama and Michelle with terrorist/Muslim/socialist/black rage/ etc., etc. This operates OUTSIDE of conscious awareness and is very, very powerful.”

“Actually it is a slap in the face to all the stupid poeple who believe anything in the cover visual is true. That there are people in the U.S. that belive this stuff is true, is a sad commentary on the inteligence of some of the Amercian public.”

“I mean come on people, they had to know that the cover was going to get this kind of reaction. It is doing what it was intended to do…plant that seed. Do you really think that this is going to be taken as “satire” by the intolerant citizens of Kentucky and W. VA? Heck no they will see this on the news and confirm that they were right.”

“Satire presumes sophistication, reflection and humor on the part of the reader…perhaps that is the typical reader of The New Yorker, but this picture shall be circulated to and used to inflame those who do not read, are not sophisticated and lack the haute humor of The New Yorker.”

John Hawkins points to Berkeley, to Canada (where Mark Steyn is on trial), and to Europe as examples of just where we are going to wind up if our liberal friends have their way.

The liberal agenda (today) is, in many respects, the same as it was in the thirties. Whether you call it communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or progressivism, the only real difference is how much they believe they can get away with, the way they sell it to people, and the latest trendy name for what they believe.

So, once the liberals pick a policy from their stale program to push, the next step is to get it implemented. This is where liberals have problems because whether a policy makes sense, is practical, or actually improves people’s lives is of secondary importance to them. What is important to liberals is whether supporting or opposing that policy makes them feel good about themselves.

This is why liberals continue to support dysfunctional policies that have been failing miserably for decades and why they often oppose common sense programs that have been proven to work time and time again—because it isn’t about whether it works or not, it’s about how it makes them feel.

In other words, a liberal will almost always prefer a policy that’s extremely expensive, is difficult to implement, helps almost no one, but seems “nice”—to a policy that is cheap, simple to implement, extremely effective, and seems “mean.”

However, since most Americans make decisions about policies based on whether or not they believe the policy makes people’s lives better or worse, liberals have had to become habitually dishonest about what they believe and want to do to get their ideas put into action. ...

Even though this is a center-right country, we do have political cycles and there are times when those cycles favor the Left. When that happens and the Lefties start to get a bit more confident, usually a few liberals at the edges will start talking about what they want to do. At that early point, most other liberals will still vehemently deny their ideological goals to the public out of fear that it will prevent them from getting into power.

However, when the Left gains enough strength to be capable of getting one of the policies they favor implemented, all the liberals who previously denied that they supported it will unapologetically shift on a dime and vote for it en masse—while they rely on their ideological allies in the media and the fact that many Americans are ill informed about politics to cover their tracks.

So, if you want to know what liberals want to do, their words mean absolutely nothing because lying about their agenda has become as natural to them as chasing a cat is to a dog.

Instead, what you have to do is watch what other liberals have done when they have come into power. Look at Canada, where conservatives are being put on trial for hate crimes because they’ve dared to criticize Muslims. Look at European countries, where they have socialistic economies, sky high tax rates, rigid speech codes, and overweening nannystates. You can even look at liberal enclaves in the United States like Berkeley and San Francisco, where members of the military are treated like pariahs and they boo the national anthem.

If you believe the liberals in Berkeley, France, Canada or for that matter in the bowels of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post, are significantly different than, say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, you are kidding yourself. The only differences are in what they think they can get away with and how honest they are willing to be about their agenda.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Dear Lady) in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

As we see above, the inhabitants of Christendom used to have no scruples about expressing their opinion of Islam and its founder.

New York Slimes story

Can anyone imagine an American general during the late 1940s apologizing to local Germans for a private in his command using Hitler’s Mein Kampf for target practice? Can anyone imagine a similar apology being made to the Japanese for a Marine shooting up a photo of the Emperor?

And can anyone imagine US news organizations from coast to coast publishing reports treating an incident of this kind as a major news story, vehemently reproaching a US soldier serving in harm’s way overseas for insulting the enemy, and turning a trivial personal expression of opinion at a shooting range into an international brouhaha, specifically in order to embarrass their own country?

Of course, the treason of the media elite finds its expression in this particular incident upon the foundation of an almost even more objectionable habitual moral cowardice which precludes ever affirming one’s own nation, country, race, religion, culture, or cause over that of the Other. All the American left can do confronted with a hostile enemy or a rival religion is apologize and cringe.

I’m not sure New York City, and similar ideological enclaves, wouldn’t be better off if an army of Muslim primitives swept down and occupied them, beheaded a few, and imposed a more manly (if barbarous, bigoted, and primitive) faith on the rest. It would at least be a step up from their current sniveling political correctness.

Another satisfied customer of Shearman & Sterling LLP

International Herald-Tribune:

Al-Arabiya television reports that a former Guantanamo detainee carried out a recent suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

A cousin says Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti released from Guantanamo in 2005, was reported missing two weeks ago and his family learned of his death Thursday through a friend in Iraq.

The cousin, Salem al-Ajmi, told Al-Arabiya on Thursday that the former detainee was behind the latest attack in Mosul, although he did not provide more details.

Three suicide car bombers targeted Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, killing at least seven people.

Mosul is believed to be the last urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.

His Wikipedia entry lists the US Military’s Administrative Review Board’s Summary of Evidence

A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal, on (redacted) . The memo listed the following allegations against him:

The detainee retreated to the Tora Bora region of AF and was later captured as he attempted to escape to Pakistan.

On September 2, 2003 (just under two years after 9/11), four of Shearman & Sterling’s finest Thomas Wilner, Neil H. Koslowe, Kristine A. Huskey, and Heather Lamberg Kafele filed a Petition for writ of Certiorari on behalf of Al Ajmi and eleven others.

Mr. Wilner wrote:

All these prisoners have asked for is a fair hearing, one in which they have the chance to learn the charges against them and to rebut the accusations before a neutral decision maker.”

Subsequently, the prisoner denied everything:

Al Ajmi denied participating in Jihad.

Al Ajmi stated he went to Pakistan to learn and memorize the Koran—he never traveled to Afghanistan.

Al Ajmi denied any contact with the Taliban. He acknowledged that he had previously confessed to the allegations he was being asked to comment on—but those were false confessions:

“These statements were all said under pressure and threats. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t bare [sic] the threats and suffering so I started saying things. When every detainee is captured they tell him that he is either Taliban or Al-Qaida and that is it. I couldn’t bare [sic] the suffering and threatening and the pressure so I had to say I was from Taliban [sic] .”

Al Ajmi denied participating in military operations against the coalition.

Al Ajmi denied being placed in a defensive position by the Taliban:

“I am not an enemy combatant. I said this only because I was under pressure and threats and suffering.”

In response to the allegation that he admitted spending eight months in the front line at the Aiubi Center in Afghanistan, Al Ajmi responded:

“I never entered Afghanistan. I never fought with anyone. My intentions were to stay four months only but under the circumstances I had to stay for eight months. I never fought. My intentions were never to go to Afghanistan my intentions were to go to Pakistan.”
————————————————————————-

Appearing again before an Administrative Review Board, he responded to board member questions:

Al Ajmi My role was [sic] in this Tabligh [sic] to call people to pray, to do good. To let people know that there is an end to this world so they can pray and do well.

Board Member Is it a religious organization?

Al Ajmi Yes it is.

Board Member Al Ajmi I believe that your dedication to your religion is genuine, what direction or path will that dedication take should you be released?

Al Ajmi For peace.

————————————————————————-

Al Ajmi was repatriated to Kuwait November 3, 2005, where he was freed on bail, while he awaited trial. His trial began in March 2006, and he and five others were acquitted on July 22, 2006.

On April 26, in Mosul, seven members of the Iraqi security forces were killed by suicide car bombing, thus proving the excellence of the legal services provided by leading American law firms like Shearman & Sterling.

————————————————————————-

Hat tip to Major DRH.

Not even the Lithuanian ones who went to Yale.

Mary Grabar answers him back on behalf of Polacks everywhere.

We know who you’re talking about, Barack Obama, when you talk about Pennsylvania and the Midwest, about small towns where the jobs have left. We know who you’re talking about when you talk about those who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.”

You’re talking about “those people.”

You’re talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you’re talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories. We know the code words.

You’re talking about people whose culture is little known. We have been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the curriculums.

We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovenian halls.

We never wore buttons declaring “Slav Power” or grouped together for purposes of intimidation or violence.

The power we asked for was the power of the paycheck which we earned in factories, steel mills, coal mines, or by cleaning houses. Yet, we were taken aside and told that because of affirmative action it was no use trying to advance off the assembly line; we were told in “diversity workshops” that people of color had to be promoted over more qualified white people. ...

We paid cash for our houses and kept impeccable yards, yet saw the value of our homes plummet after marauding hoodlums came into our neighborhoods in riots that were celebrated by the intelligentsia in Manhattan penthouses, who saw such violence as justified expressions of outrage over past discrimination.

We went to public schools in those same neighborhoods only to be accosted for our skin color and the presumed “privilege” that teachers said we had. Rather than teach us what was good and beautiful about Western Civilization and the country to which our parents had fled, teachers gave us Marxist nonsense, if they bothered to teach at all. Our schoolmates saw the evening news, mimicked their elders by wearing “Black Power” buttons and felt justified in roughing the white kid who didn’t seem tough. Because we were “privileged”—despite washing our fathers’ sooty work clothes while our mothers went off to clean offices and houses in the suburbs—we were not eligible for scholarships, not even to the Catholic schools. Teachers never cut us any slack. Guidance counselors told us to be secretaries or work in the factory, despite our volunteering and demonstration of academic abilities. Our brothers, cousins, and uncles went off to fight in Vietnam, while those from your class took up arms against their campus administrators.

True, we had our problems, as all people do, with such things as alcoholism and family violence, but we handled those ourselves, and never blamed “society” or a history of oppression. Still, many of us did carry legacies from the old country, of hunger and persecution, of watching family members and villagers murdered by atheistic regimes. So we were grateful for the opportunity to work and buy our own little patches of the American Dream.

We were happy to use a welding torch, shovel, or broom to get them. We didn’t insist that we should all get college degrees. We didn’t have our documents translated for us or get bilingual instruction. If we didn’t know English we made sure our children did and we relied on them.

Your white friends in San Francisco, Barack, probably had cleaning women like my mother (and me when I accompanied her and then had my own cleaning jobs from age 12). As white people from a certain class and with certain connections, your donors knew that their futures would be secure because of their inheritances and the connections they could make in the media, politics, and business. In fact, it would benefit them in the world of “radical chic” to hang around those like you and support your policies. (Great opportunity to be photographed next to a black person!)

Your black friends there, like your wife, see no end to the amount that this country owes them because of what happened to their ancestors. It makes no difference that many of the whites in previous generations also had experienced persecution and hunger and worked in dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs. Or that blacks and Native Americans were among the slave owners.

In fact, you and those wealthy donors sneer at white people who have had to do manual labor and who have paid for tuition at community colleges with the money earned that way, while our classmates received special scholarships and government grants—from our taxes.

You sneer at those like us who put our faith in God and not in those like you who would presume to know what’s good for us and tell us what to do with our money and our children, and leave us with no ability to defend ourselves.

Well, Barack, coming from your Ivy League world, you would not know much about us. You would not have learned that because we come from people who, rather than letting their communist benefactors redistribute the food, burned the crops in their little fields before they were forcibly “collectivized.” In Slovenia, they fought Tito’s Partisans from the woods and held mass at night when the Communists banned church services. They remember what it’s like to be hungry, ill, and living in little more than huts, while Marshall Tito and his communist cronies lived in villas. Now you live in a Chicago mansion and sneer at those like us who simply want to keep and defend our little three-bedroom ranches. You don’t know what it’s like to have family members die for the right to attend mass.

I know your liberal cronies, Barack; they make me check off my skin color on job applications and ask me during job interviews of how I teach multiculturalism, yet don’t know where Slovenia is on the world map. They couldn’t care less about my culture, nor about Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, or Lithuanian culture. Your supporters often feel free to mock my Slovenian heritage in letters and comments on the Internet when they disagree with me. I guess it’s like being called a “dumb Polack”—something that has never gained quite the opprobrium of other ethnic epithets.

See, Barack, we know the system: Some are more “equal” than others.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

the ineffable Michael Pollan

The New York Times rather outdid itself on Sunday in serving up its traditional ration of stupidity and cant, but Earth Day occurs this week and provided the occasion for the Times to devote the entire Sunday Magazine to an Enviro-PC-Fest of preening libs.

Michael Pollan, for instance, took a long, hard look into his own navel, and understood that changing the world, the choices, habits, lifestyles, and behavior of all of the world’s 6 and a half billion inhabitants, reversing the course of history, and rejecting capitalism, consumerism, and modern industrial civilization might be only a matter of setting a personal good example.

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. ...

f you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on.

And even if what you do personally doesn’t actually have any real impact on the world, you should, of course, do all this goofy green stuff anyway, since even if you can’t meaningfully change the world, you can change yourself into an environmentally-PC member of the more-enlightened-than-thou elite, a nobler, finer being, capable of experiencing the orgasmic sense of narcissistic self-righteousness that only comes from composting.

Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.