The bill making English “the official language” of the United States was a meaningless piece of political puffery designed to appease voters, but Dennis Prager’s comments on the liberal method of argument are dead on.

The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as “racist.” And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill “xenophobic.”

Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.

One-word put-downs of opponents’ ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual — their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors — liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.

This is easy to demonstrate.

Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:

Racist
Sexist
Homophobic
Islamophobic
Imperialist
Bigoted
Intolerant

And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:

Peace
Fairness
Tolerance
The poor
The disenfranchised
The environment

These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways.

First, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person.

Second, these words make it easy to be a liberal — essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy.

A left-wing web-site has posted a 20 minute video of a stuttering supposed Army Ranger named Jesse MacBeth, who is peddling stories of “killing 30-40 women and children a night,” and all sorts of other atrocities.

Mudville Gazette noted these discrepancies:

1. Special Forces Combat Patch (Wrong)
2. Two “Tabs” sewn above SF patch (Wrong- Only One)
3. No Ranger Tab
4. No Airborne Wings
5. No Unit Crest
6. No Sewn on Rank
7. No One in the Army rolls their sleeves like that.
Bonus: 8. Mustache is out of regulation by extending past the corner of the mouth.

Jeff Goldstein has collected a lot of debunking information: we now know he works in a Wendy’s and fancies himself a socialist revolutionary.

John McCain was jeered and booed by New School graduates at his speech at their commencement. His host, university president and Medal of Honor winner, former Senator Bob Kerrey was called “a war criminal.” And student speakers attacked McCain’s speech (which the Senator chose to deliver also at Columbia and at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University) even before he had delivered it.

Jean Rohe, blogging on Huffington Post, was proud of hersef and her fellow students.

Yes, McCain was undoubtedly shouted-out and heckled by people who were not politely absorbing his words so as to consider them fully from every angle. But what did he expect? We could’ve all printed out his speech and chanted it with him in chorus. Did he think that no one knew exactly what he was about to say? And it was precisely because we listen to the views of others, and because, as I said in my speech, we don’t fear them, that we as a school were able to mount such a thorough and intelligent opposition to his presence. Ignorant, closed-minded people would not have been able to do what we did. We chose to be in New York for our years of higher education for the very reason that we would be challenged to listen to opposing viewpoints each and every day and to deal with that challenge in a nonviolent manner. We’ve gotten very good at listening to the views of others and learning how to also make our views heard, even when we don’t have the power of national political office and the media on our side.

I think we must remember that as big as this moment may seem to me today and perhaps to other supporters who are reading this article, this is a very small victory in a time when democracy is swiftly eroding under the pressure of the right wing in this country. We all have much work to do, and for the most part the media do not represent us, the small people who don’t hold any special titles but who feel the weight of our government’s actions on our backs each and every day. I never expected to get the opportunity to speak the way I did yesterday, but I’m so glad that I did. I hope that other people found strength in my act of protest and will one day find themselves in my position, drawing out their own bravery to speak truth.

Mark Salter, Senator McCain’s chief of staff, was moved to reply to the young lady’s blog comments:

Ms. Rohe and those of her fellow graduates who hailed their school’s President as a war criminal and who greeted the Senator’s reference to a friend’s death with laughter proved only one thing, one sad thing, that they could learn a thing or two about tolerance and respect from the students of Liberty University. Like the protestors at the Garden, many in the audience at Liberty University disagreed with various of the Senator’s views. Some disagreed with his support for campaign finance reform. Some disagreed with his support for comprehensive immigration reform with a path toward legalization for undocumented workers. Some disagreed with his position of climate change. Some disagreed with his opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment. Whatever their differences with him they listened to him attentively and respectfully, as one American to another, divided in some respects, united in much more important ones.

Let me tell you a little bit about the Senator, the man you dismiss so derisively. Once upon time, even among the young, the words courage and hero were used more sparingly, more precisely. It took no courage to do what you did, Ms. Rohe. It was an act of vanity and nothing more. And please don’t worry about the Senator’s discomfort with you. He has managed to endure much worse. McCain was once offered release from imprisonment and torture because of his father’s position as a senior military officer. He declined because he would not leave his comrades behind, and thus, willingly, accepted four more years of hardships life will spare almost all of us from. In his political career he has shown the same character he showed as a Navy officer all those years ago. He has, over and over again, risked personal ambitions for what he believes, rightly or wrongly, are in the best interests of the country. What, pray tell, have you risked? The only person you have succeeded in making look like an idiot is yourself.

You took exception to the paragraph in which he lightly deprecated the vanity of youth. Well, Ms. Rohe, and your fellow graduates’s comical self-importance deserves a rebuke far stronger than the gentle suggestions he offered you. So, let me leave you with this. Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber. And if you are that fortunate, you might look back on the day of your graduation and your discourtesy to a good and honest man with a little shame and the certain knowledge that it very unlikely any of you will ever posses the one small fraction of the character of John McCain.

Diana York Blaine, a Senior Lecturer in the University of Southern California’s Writing Program, uses Flickr to host her photos, and ill-advisedly (but in keeping with her personal philosophy) chose to upload and display three topless photos of her middle-aged self.

Dr. Blaine’s anatomy came to public attention as the result of her proclivity toward public expressions of feminist victimhood. Blaine took several occasions of accusation of rape by members of the USC football team (all of which were subsequently dropped or dismissed) to declare the USC team and the entire USC male population obliged to stop rape by attendng feminist rallies.

So if a few bad eggs don’t respect women’s right to decide if to have sex with them, why should I hold the whole football team accountable? Because I do. Because I hold every single male on this campus responsible. Because every single male on this campus has the responsibility for stopping rape. Every fraternity brother, every science major, every professor, every one of them. Because they all rape? Of course not. But because only men rape and only men can stop other men from raping.

Annoyed by Blaine’s persistent accusatory rhetoric and narcissitic posturing, a student group blog called Cardinal Martini began publishing a series of postings quarreling with the professor’s statements, and characterizing them as FemiNazi-ism. One of these posts recently outed Dr. Blaine’s topless photos on Flickr, in the course of commenting on the inappropriateness of the lady’s linking to these from a blog she says she created for the benefit of USC students.

My blog is for the 100s of USC students who have told me they wish they could have further exposure to my ideas once our class time together has ended.

And the martyred matron responds:

Many people continue to contact me to express surprise at the outpouring of hatred against me and my unmutilated middle-aged breasts, which I had the audacity to have photographed in several spontaneous life moments and the unmitigated gall to share with others.

The nerve of some people! Don’t I know my place?

But seriously, I am not surprised at all. My life work has centered on researching the ways that sexism functions as a method of control, benefiting a few at the expense of the many. As women in the United States, we are encouraged to serve men, making them happy in ways often detrimental to our own well-being. Feminist scholars write about the many forms such institutionalized sexism takes, all the way from unpaid labor in the home to underpaid labor in the workplace. And because our scholarship opposes current patriarchal ideologies, we threaten the system and therefore are viewed as enemies rather than legitimate contributors to knowledge. Hence the attempts to silence us.

Worse than a Feminist, Dr. Blaine also styles herself a “thanatologist,” and visitors to her blog will find even more dreadful and appalling nonsense on the subject of attitudes and behavior associated with death and grief.

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H/t to PJM.

Skookumchuk, writing at YARGB, shares one of those personal moments of enlightenment.

A long time ago, during my freshman and sophomore years in college, I didn’t have a car. And for a good part of that time, I lived at home. So going home I would ride the bus. Number 88 began its route someplace in West LA and then wound around the east and north sides of the campus, picking up the few ostracized car-less students like me and the Hispanic maids and others who even then worked in the mansions of Brentwood. After that, it headed for the San Diego Freeway, lugging its way north up the hill and down the other side, where it exited and turned east on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

Having grown up speaking Spanish and English at home, I had decided to take a Latin American history class. It was taught by some renowned Ivy League white guy Latin Americanist whose presence had attracted a sprinkling of Che wannabes and similar types. Pretty predictable in retrospect. Completely new to me then. Brown people good. White people bad. Brown people downtrodden. White people racist. Brown people authentic, spontaneous. White people soul-dead, industrialized. Well, I had never heard any of this before.

I left class with my books and walked to the bus stop. Once on the 88, I settled into a seat on the left hand side. At the next stop, three Hispanics got on the bus, two men and one woman who probably worked in one of the estates in the hills. The men sat across the aisle, and the young woman sat next to me. They chatted among themselves and I read my book as we wound our way over the hill and into the Valley.

At the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys, there used to be an open air newsstand. It always attracted people who thumbed through the magazines waiting for the bus. The bus turned left at Van Nuys and braked at the stop. It filled with people. As it pulled away, we could hear the sounds of a person running to catch the bus. The driver looked in his mirror and slowed to a crawl. Up the steps came an Orthodox Jew, conservatively dressed, yarmulke on his head. He plunked himself down across from the two Hispanic guys, red faced and winded.

Mirelo. Con su gorrito parece obispo. Look at him. With his little hat he looks like a bishop.

Cuanta plata tendra bajo de su cama. I wonder how much money he has under the bed.

Then they started in on the rest of the bus, including me, secure in their belief that they were among Martians unable to understand their language.

As I got to my transfer stop, I decided the opportunity was just too good to pass up. I reached for the cord above the window, stood up, looked my Hispanic seatmate in the eye, smiled and said con permiso. Her pupils turned into saucers as she quickly looked away and whispered Santo Dios. Holy God.

It was one of those times in young adulthood where in ten minutes you grow up a little bit. All of the sudden. Getting off the Number 88, I wasn’t quite the same kid as I had been when getting on.

(Amazon-US is using the wrong book picture. This correct one is from Amazon-UK.)

Former Monty Python comedy troop member Terry Jones has developed a latter-day career producing popularizing history programs for British television. Jones is trying to offer an original and witty version of history, but the result (being representative of the contemporary leftwing demotic culture of which Jones himself is a product) inevitably proves fragmentary, misleading, and vulgar.

His latest (a sequel to an earlier series on the Middle Ages) focuses on the Roman Empire. Jones proposes to tell the story of Roman history as seen by the Britons, Gauls, Germans, Hellenes, Persians and Africans. His approach consists of serving up selected anecdotal details (typically obtained from recent academic papers) designed to support arguments for barbarian cultural equality, and moral superiority, to Roman Civilization.

A Times press release associated with the impending book pubication provides the central Jones thesis:

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

In the past 30 years, however, the story has begun to change.

There you have it. Rome did not triumph over the barbarians by virtue of superior civilization. It was just that same evil Western militarism, overcoming peaceful (morally superior) agrarian societies. Why, the Britons, Jones contends, had better shield, helmets, and chariots than the Romans, built roads (alas, with wooden, not stone foundations, old boy), and (assuming somebody’s interpretation of a bas relief is correct) may have developed some sort of wooden harvesting contraption.

Jones overarching thesis rests on his ability to persuade his audience that the existence of some vestigial technology, in the Celtic case, establishes the equality of illiterate wooden-road-building Celtic barbarism to the Classical Civilization which read Homer and Virgil and built in marble and concrete.

Such is contemporary trans-Atlantic culture. A state-funded national television network provides a platform for an utterly unqualified celebrity to dispense competently-assembled, but factually dubious “histories” arriving at politically correct conclusions.

Varifrank has been following news reports and listening to Congressional democrats, and is able to sum up the rules.

Don’t fight before Ramadan as it interrupts the UN sponsored peace process.

Don’t fight during Ramadan because it shows disrespect to an honored people and a great religion.

Don’t fight after Ramadan since so many civilians will simply be caught in the potential crossfire.

And so on.

Newsmax, anticipating the democrat capture of the House in November, is warning that John Conyers will become Judiciary Committtee Chairman, and John Conyers is proposing a bill leading to the payment of reparations for pre-1865 Slavery to persons of Afro-American descent.

I agree with Rupert Birkin:

If,’ said Hermione at last, `we could only realise, that in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there — the rest wouldn’t matter, there would be no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only destroys.’

This speech was received in silence, and almost immediately the party rose from the table. But when the others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter declamation, saying:

`It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit — it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie — your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars — therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.

`But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: “Now you’ve got what you want — you’ve got your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don’t obstruct me.’

–D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Chapter 8:16-17.

Why not take Birkin’s suggestion?

Pay Slavery reparations. Whatever they want. $100,000 per person. $500,000 per person. But, along with it, we abolish welfare, repeal the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and end Affirmative Action. Everyone is equal. No one any longer has anything to complain about. And everyone has full use of his property, the choice of whom to serve or not serve, hire or not hire, rent to or not rent to. Complete freedom of association, and the right of private persons to discriminate, is restored. The Civil Rights Era, the Cuture of Complaint, is over and done with forever.

The New York Times reports one of the more dubious psychological studies I’ve heard about to date, purportedly demonstrating that merely handling a gun increased aggressiveness. It seems actually to show that people who handle guns wind up preferring spicy foods.

“(A) Lack of Geographical Knowledge and Low Support for War (is) No Coincidence,” concludes relievedebtor at a group blog I haven’t previously seen, titled Architecture and Morality.

If it is true that Iran has been a ticking time bomb for every administration since Carter’s, every president has likely been waiting for the opportunity and the justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, if for no other reason, to surround Iran. Forget “blood for oil,” WMDs, or even the truly good reasons to invade both struggling countries. Geography is enough justification as far as I’m concerned, given that Iran is the gravest threat out there, and 9/11 provided all the justification we needed to establish bases around Iran.

So why is support for the War on Terror waning? Well, it seems most American children, and I would imagine even more of their parents (since they haven’t even been to school in 2 decades) don’t understand that Iran is surrounded by Iraq and Afghanistan! If they don’t even know where these countries are, how they understand the very basic strategic advantage of having Iran surrounded?

In the clearest English I can muster, suppose you’re a psychic police captain, and you know at 4:00 today a bank will be robbed by a madman with a gun, who will kill every teller and customer without hesitation. Would you rather have the place surrounded by 3:00, or wait until the alarm sounds from the bank after everyone is already dead to respond? Of course, you (being the savvy police captain that you are) want to have the place surrounded clearly and loudly, so that the madman will never rob the bank to begin with, or if he does, he will be quickly overwhelmed. Iran is the bank robber, America is the police captain, and it doesn’t take a psychic to know that Ahmadinejad is spoiling to kill as many Israelites and Israelite sympathizers he can find. If we had moderate geography skills, this would be as plain to us as killing Jews is to Iran’s president, and support for the War on Terror would undoubtedly be higher.

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Hat tip to Jose Miguel Guardia via PJM.

Connecticut, once the land of steady habits and Yankee common sense, has become another state inhabited by suburban numbskulls ready to react to every news meme with coercive action at the state level. The Connecticut legislature on Thursday responded to the progressing peril of portly pubescents by banning carbonated soft drinks, including diet sodas (!), from all elementary, middle, and high schools, starting in July.

Reuters:

Connecticut’s state legislature voted on Thursday to ban sales of sodas and other sugary beverages in state elementary, middle and high schools as part of an effort to stem teen obesity.

Gov. Jodi Rell has pledged to sign the bill, which would make Connecticut the fourth U.S. state with a strong law in schools to trim the growing American teenage waistline.

The ban includes all regular and diet sodas, along with “electrolyte replacement beverages” such as Gatorade. The only drinks allowed to go on sale in schools would be bottled water, milk or 100-percent fruit and vegetable drinks.

“The bill clearly won’t solve all food and beverage questions that lead to the increase in excess weight and obesity that we are seeing among children and adults in our society, but it’s a good start,” said state Rep. Andrew Fleischmann.

The House approved the bill on Thursday by a slim 76-to-71 vote margin largely on party lines in the Democrat-controlled state Legislature. Last week it passed the Senate 24-to-8.

Republicans proposed multiple amendments that were all voted down and said the issue should be left to local communities and not decided by the state.

It’s becoming just as bad as California back there.

Today’s New York Times editorial mendaciously asserts that the widely-adopted contemporary approach to execution featuring lethal injection, like all other forms of capital punishment, is “unconstitutional.” The editorialist is clearly historically illiterate. They executed convicted felons in every single one of the 13 states at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.

The same authority ascribes cruelty to lethal injection, on the basis that Human Rights Watch has declared that “there is mounting evidence that prisoners may have experienced excruciating pain during their executions.” One wonders exacty what that mounting evidence might be, since no reports of executed murderers coming back to complain have been so far appeared in the newspapers.

But, if lethal injection is too cruel for liberals, there is an obvious answer.