A college classmate this morning sent me a link to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne‘s somewhat premature attempt at dancing on American Conservatism’s grave.

Dionne is not entirely wrong, of course. He notes correctly that George W. Bush never was a real conservative in the Goldwater, Reagan, or Gingrich sense. But, personally, I wouldn’t waste my time constructing elaborate theories about Hamiltonian “big-government conservatism,” or using “government as a means to achieve conservative ends.” It’s really much simpler than that. George W. Bush is simply an old-fashioned garden variety practical politician (what we used to call an Eisenhower Republican), bringing to his Presidency his family’s traditional flexibility in governing, flavored with just enough red-state populism and Republican impulses to secure the GOP base’s support.

The American left has remained mobilized and afflicted with a paranoid sense of wrong ever since their favorite son’s sexual scandals metastasized into perjury and impeachment. Disappointment with the outcome of the 2000 election and US military actions following 9/11 have continued to keep the left as angry and active as a nest of red ants thoroughly poked with a stick. The larger part of George W. Bush’s perceived conservatism really amounts to mere reciprocated animosity.

Dionne is not inaccurate in describing this Congress.

The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred last night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.

Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism than this measure. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.

The Republican Senatorial majority unfortunately includes a number of liberal Republican-in-name-only senators, and has been effectively paralysed by joys-of-incumbency induced timidity and the democrats’ willingness to abuse the filibuster.

Dionne contends that the repeal of the death tax failed “because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.” Rubbish! There certainly is a majority in this country in favor of not taxing away a family’s assets simply because someone has died.

Poll after poll proves it.

a 1999 poll by Worthlin Worldwide found 70 percent of voters favoring a phase-out of the estate tax. — A 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center found 71 percent of voters supporting elimination of the inheritance tax. — A 2001 CBS News/New York Times poll also found 71 percent of people opposing imposition of an estate tax at death.

Dionne would like to believe that libertarian versus traditionalist divisions are in the process of splitting the right on issues like immigration and stem cell research. Sorry, Mr. Dionne. It’s true that I disagree strongly with Michelle Malkin and Victor Davis Hanson about immigration, but our differences do not materially diminish my admiration and respect for those two traditionalists, nor are they likely to persuade Michelle, Victor, or myself to start voting for democrats. I don’t have a problem with stem cell research myself (being irreligious), but I believe President Bush was quite right to veto spending the tax dollars of religious people funding things they find morally repugnant. Let’s just finance this kind of research privately. There’s no shortage of rich atheists or leftists.

Dionne is off-base looking for a conservative split over religious issues these days. I’ve had plenty of differences within the Conservative Movement with religious traditionalists in days gone by, but there is no particular Religious Right agenda we libertarians have a major problem with today. I do have problems with organs of the left, like the ACLU, waging intolerant campaigns to eradicate any form of private religious expression in the public space, eliminating religious symbols, or persecuting the Boy Scouts for political incorrectness. In short, I expect most of us making up what Dionne calls the “big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives” are likely to continue to vote with the ordinary hometown Americans rather than with the coastal community of fashion indefinitely on into the misty future.

He’s right in saying this Congress is a disaster, and many of its members deserve to be defeated. I’ve said the same thing repeatedly myself. But what will lose in November will not be conservative principles, but the exact opposite. The losers will be the unprincipled, the compromisers and trimmers, and the opportunists.

The Conservative Movement, Mr. Dionne, has experienced setbacks and electoral defeats before. Those of us who lived through the Goldwater campaign of 1964 are not especially perturbed by the prospect of this coming November. We will be back.

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Hat tip to Steve Wagenseil.

We’ve all seen the bullet versus katana videos. The same guys evidently did a more recent Japanse television appearance featuring a test of a katana versus a modern industrial water jet cutter. This one is overly long (6:68 minutes), but the sword’s performance is very impressive.

We previously linked one of the earlier videos:

pistol versus katana

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Hat tip to Neil Lanteigne.

Reuters reports:

A group of mostly Democratic U.S. senators blocked legislation on Thursday that would have raised the federal minimum wage for the first time in a decade, because it also would have permanently cut estate taxes paid by the rich.

On a 56-42 vote, the Republican-led Senate failed to get the 60 votes needed to clear the way for final congressional passage. Earlier approved by the House of Representatives, the bill would have raised the $5.15-per-hour minimum wage to $7.25 over three years.

It doesn’t matter in this country if you elect Republican majorities to both houses of Congress, you still can’t reform Social Security, confirm a Republican president’s nominees, or abolish the death tax.

Finding themselves in the minority, the democrats simply held a secret meeting in which they amended the Constitution without telling the rest of us.

The secret and undisclosed XXVIIIth Amendment reads: “When the democrat party is in the minority in the Senate, all controversial or significant legislative acts will require a Supermajority of sixty votes for passage.”

Probably efforts are actively underway to give democrat senators in future Congresses the famous Liberum Veto, a right (once accorded Polish senators, which had a great deal to do with the Partitions that eliminated Poland from the map of Europe) to dissolve the legislature and negate all legislation passed during the current session, simply by uttering the phrase nie pozwalam “I do not allow it!”

Even the Republican leadership’s spineless compromise with democrats agreeing to the economically fallacious raising of the minimum wage could not obtain the concession of the majority’s right to legislate.

If the democrats can run Congress as they please from a minority position in both houses, what won’t they be able to do once they regain majorities? Anyone who thinks that the sacred Senatorial filibuster will successfully impose the same 60-vote Supermajority requirement for major democrat legislative objectives or confirmations of appointments is living in a dreamworld.

We elected Republican majorities. The problem is that we failed to elect any Republican Senatorial leadership.

This kind of thing makes one wish one could send Bill Frist and Mitch MConnell off to a Swiss clinic where they would give them a series of injections of masculine sex hormones, and install some backbones.

From the Borowitz Report:

In his boldest bid yet to apologize to the Jewish community, actor Mel Gibson today announced that he had converted to Judaism.

The news took many Jews aback, since conversion to Judaism is a demanding process that can take months or even years of study, and Mr. Gibson accomplished the feat in a record time of forty-five minutes.

But a spokesman for the “Lethal Weapon” star explained how Mr. Gibson pulled off his lightning-fast conversion: “This is Hollywood — a lot of things can be done by special effects.”

Moments after his conversion to Judaism, Mr. Gibson paid a visit to the registrar’s office in Los Angeles County and had his name legally changed to “Mel Gibstein” in a show of commitment to his new chosen faith.

Then it was off to Malibu, where the 50-year old actor was bar mitzvahed on the beach in a small, private ceremony.

“Today, I am a man,” Mr. Gibstein said before a gathering of friends and well-wishers from the local watering hole Moonshadows…

Mr. Gibstein, whose Lexus LS sedan now sports a license plate reading “LCHAIM,” said that he was “thoroughly enjoying being a Jew” and vowed to only shop wholesale from now on.

The actor added he would begin production of a new film, “Mad Matzoh Beyond Thundershalom,” as soon as he kicks his drinking problem.

Atrios is calling someone a wanker again this morning. What with the blogosphere’s profusion of exiled poms and pretentious asses, British slang and vulgarity abound. This online dictionary is likely to prove useful from time to time.

Hat tip to Ratty.

video

The Wall Steet Journal’s liberal reporters wonder who made it. Must have been oil company lobbyists, they conclude.

Slate commentator Seth Stevenson argues that the commonly used homophobic pejorative has become legitimized by the frequency of its application, could have other linguistic origins (right!), and is simply too useful to avoid.

Are you offended by the word sucks? Do you loathe the way it’s crept into everyday conversation? Are you shocked that preteen children and primetime television shows blithely employ a vivid slang term for oral sex? Do you wish sucks would just fade away, like other faddish colloquialisms that were eventually discarded?

Well, sucks to be you.

Sucks is here to stay. And what’s more, it deserves its place in our lexicon, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s impossible to intelligently maintain that sucks is still offensive. The word is now completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act…

What’s far more interesting to me is the word’s utility.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy.

Vital Perspectives has a video of the IDF raid on Baalbek which took five Hezbollah prisoners, killed a number of terrorists, and captured a trove of Hezbollah documents.

Another of those totally demented Japanese television shows. This one features a contest of just how heavy a fish Japanese cats will carry away. They start small, and slowly increase the size of those fish a few grams at a time, and the obliging Japanese tabbies keep rising to the occasion right up to the 2 kg. (4.4 lb) mark.

Long (10:42 minutes), but amusing.

video

Thomas Lifson, at American Thinker, raises the question of the complicity of mainstream Western Press with the deliberate murder of their own people by terrorists for propaganda purposes.

Something is very, very wrong with the reporting on Qana, for the moment, the worldwide symbol of Hezbollah’s media offensive. It is already reasonably clear that major media photographers were willingly made into tools of propaganda, accomplices in the hideous desecration of corpses of children. The timing of the building collapse hours after the actual air attack raises very awkward questions. Why were women and children kept inside the building for so long? Were they murdered?

Now, the previously-announced toll of 57 appears to be as phony as the picture of the dust-covered baby with a sparking clean pacifier.

But, as Charles Johnson reports, the wire services responsible for disseminating the staged photos are refusing to admit the obvious.

An eleven year old boy fishing in Shady Lane Pond in Kalispell, Montana, a less than tropical location, hooked a 5 foot, 60 pound alligator, which was subsequently brought ashore and dispatched by a crowd of local Montanans.

The question is: how did the alligator manage to reach that size without encountering a Montana winter?

Daily Inter Lake

Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl is an agreeable example of High School/Adult Chick lit, with benefits.

(In a modest effort at discretion, names have all been changed.)

Smart and spirited Amy Haskell is a junior at “Eli University” (Yale), where she edits the “Lit Mag” (Yale Literary Magazine), and resides at “Prescott College” (Davenport or Pierson), and so on.

Amy had been expecting to be tapped for the humble literary Senior Society “Quill & Ink” (Manuscript), but instead receives an unexpected (and irresistible) invitation from the dreaded and all-powerful “Rose & Grave,” described as follows:

You’ve heard the legends, I’m sure. We’re the Ivy League’s dirty little secret. We run the country, even the states you wouldn’t think we’d care about, like Nebraska. We start wars, we coordinate coups, and we have a hand in writing the constitution of every new nation. Every presidential candidate is a member—that way, whoever wins, they’ll always be under our thumb.

The media fears us, which is silly, since the CEO of every newspaper and television network in the country is already a member of our brotherhood. We’ve been controlling every aspect of the media for more than a century, from deciding which movies get greenlighted to choosing the next American Idol. (Do you actually think your text-message votes count?)

We own most of the buildings of the university, as well as most of the land in the city, and we’ve got a good proportion of it bugged. The local police work for us. The mayor lives in our pocket. There’s not a student on campus who isn’t afraid to walk past our imposing stone tomb.

Election to our society is a ticket into a wildest dreams. Success is our birthright from the moment we emerge from our initiation coffins into our new lives as members of the society. Any job we want is within our reach, and any job we don’t want our enemies to have is out of theirs. We are given enormous monetary gifts upon graduation, as well as sports cars, valuable antiques, and a mansion on a private luxury island. We will never be arrested. We will never be impoverished. The society will see to that.

Our loyalty to the society supercedes everything else in our life—our families, our friendships, even our love lives. If anyone, even someone we care about with all our heart, mentions the name of our society in our presence, we must leave the room immediately and never speak to them again.

We can never tell anyone that we are members. We can never let anyone who is not a member into our tomb, or they’ll be killed.

We can never quit the society or reveal any of its secrets, or we’ll be killed.

Which of these rumors are true and which are overblown conspiracy theories?

I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

The author, Y ’01, serves up a thinly veiled, but still quite informative picture, of the customs and ceremonies of a certain nameless Yale organization (whose membership includes both candidates in the 2004 Presidential election), along with what seems to be a pretty accurate description of the interior of a certain well-known building on High Street.

She plays with history just a bit for purposes of her plot, moving the confrontation within a certain society which occurred in 1991 over the selection of female intitiates between that year’s graduating class and the society’s alumni forward to the present day.

Like many school story protagonists of earlier day, Amy Haskell experiences serious doubts about her own commitment to ancient and arcane school traditions, as her new association with these quickly produces ugly conflict and personal cost. At first, she tries to free herself by rejecting those traditions, but she soon comes to understand that they have already become part of herself, and she must defend her own right to be part of them.

Book web-page.