January 22nd, 2012 by ELCore
From Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish, Wednesday:
…. Every time we bow our heads to the consensus, self-censor ourselves to stay within our prison bars and execute another tactical withdrawal to fight for some last vestige of our program that really matters, the power of the left continues to grow.
The power of the left is not political. Its political power is the least of what it is. It leverages its cultural dominance to enforce a political consensus. It uses its grip on power through government and non-governmental institutions to impose regulations and laws that politicians from both parties end up signing on to. It is an establishment, an incarnation of the power and privilege of a fossilized ideology built to destroy the country, but leveraged to give its leading members and some of its base a taste of the really good life while the whole edifice of civilization slides down the cliff.
It is important to elect conservative politicians, even feeble ones, not because they are good for anything, but because at the least they can serve as sandbags against the tide. The sandbags will not stop the tide, but they might slow it down. It is vitally important to elect revolutionary conservatives who don’t just deliver platitudes, but show that they have the fire in their bellies to confront the left. And it is even more important to undermine the values and institutions of the left. It can be difficult to undermine institutions, but anyone can undermine the values of the left by saying the politically incorrect thing.
Revolutions begin with an open contempt for and anger at the existing order. The left knows that. It is why it fears talk radio and populism more than it fears the latest set of dapper gatekeepers we send to the Senate. The contempt and anger are here, the more they go public, the more the power of the left is shaken. And the next step is to expand the cultural war to a specific disrespect and hostility for the values and sacred cows of the left. Then to challenge their institutions and regulations. And then real political change can begin with candidates who are revolutionaries because they believe it, or because they are operating under a new paradigm that is outside the left’s manufactured consensus….
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January 22nd, 2012 by ELCore
From William Tucker at the American Spectator, Friday (emphasis in original):
…. the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs — who are established in the environment, so to speak — are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have….
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January 19th, 2012 by ELCore
America Before The Entitlement State, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, at The Objectivist, Nov. 18, 2011:
Reacting to calls for cuts in entitlement programs, House Democrat Henry Waxman fumed: “The Republicans want us to repeal the twentieth century.” Sound bites don’t get much better than that. After all, the world before the twentieth century — before the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society — was a dark, dangerous, heartless place where hordes of Americans starved in the streets.
Except it wasn’t and they didn’t. The actual history of America shows something else entirely: picking your neighbors’ pockets is not a necessity of survival. Before America’s entitlement state, free individuals planned for and coped with tough times, taking responsibility for their own lives….
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January 19th, 2012 by ELCore
Malcolm Muggeridge spoke at Hillsdale College, May 1979:
…. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called “mercy killing.” This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I’m getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It’s to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time – in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory-farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well-being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That’s where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself….
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January 18th, 2012 by ELCore
“Kristor”
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January 16th, 2012 by ELCore
Historian Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay wrote a fascinating letter to Henry S. Randall, of New York, on May 23, 1857:
…. It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when, in the State of New-York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people would, in a year of scarcity, devour all the seed-corn, and thus make the next year, a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stay you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals, who ravaged the Roman Empire, came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country by your own institutions….
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January 16th, 2012 by ELCore
John Nolte
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January 16th, 2012 by ELCore
Jonathan Turley writes in the Washington Post, Friday:
…. Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?
While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company….
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January 16th, 2012 by ELCore
I can’t decide what to excerpt, so read the whole thing.
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January 16th, 2012 by ELCore
Charles Murray writes at the New Criterion, this month:
…. When people are making decisions that affect the lives of many other people, the cultural isolation that has grown up around America’s new upper class can be disastrous. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale law professors. It is a problem if Yale law professors, or producers of the nightly news, or CEOs of great corporations, or the President’s advisors, cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers….
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January 12th, 2012 by ELCore
From John Nolte at Big Journalism, today:
…. Of course the MSM hates Super PACs. Why wouldn’t they? But that hatred has nothing to do with any kind of principle. And if it does, that principle is wildly hypocritical coming from super-funded news outlets working as hard as any Super PAC to influence election outcomes. But the real reason the MSM hates Super PACS is because Super PACs are in direct competition with the MSM to control the political narative of the 2012 election season.
In general, the MSM hates unlimited free speech given to anyone other than them, because it interferes with their political agenda.
Listen, I’m not saying Super PACs are the ideal, but having them is better than not having them, and any organization that declares its biases upfront holds the moral high ground over every aspect of the mainstream media.
The less power the media has over the political narrative in this country, the better off this country will be….
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January 12th, 2012 by ELCore
Don Surber
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January 12th, 2012 by ELCore
From Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard, Dec. 5, 2011:
Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue….
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January 12th, 2012 by ELCore
Good luck with that!
From Election Day Tea Party, today:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tea Party Leaders to DNC Chair: Stop Lying About Us
Challenge Ms. Wasserman Schultz to a Debate on the Constitution
January 12, 2012 – Local tea party leaders from around the country who organized the ElectionDayTeaParty.com website today told DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz that it was time to stop lying about the Tea Party movement.
“It’s time for Ms. Wasserman Schultz to stop spreading her vitriolic and divisive rhetoric about the millions of Americans who support the Tea Party movement and its three core values of constitutionally limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility,” said Mark West, President of the Chattanooga Tea Party.
“Today, we are challenging Ms. Wasserman Schultz to a debate on the Constitution,” said Michael Patrick Leahy, co-coordinator of Election Day Tea Party. “We think the country is ready for direct and civil discourse on what the Constitution says about the proper role of the federal government in our lives. That’s the real issue. Ms. Wasserman Schultz and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party believe that the federal government should keep taxing and spending more and more. We in the Tea Party movement think otherwise.”
The first national event of Election Day Tea Party 2012 will be a celebration of the Tea Party movement’s 3rd anniversary on February 25th, 26th, and 27th. On February 27, 2009, the Tea Party movement was launched with simultaneous tea parties in fifty cities which were attended by more than 30,000 tea partiers. This was immediately followed by Tax Day Tea Party on April 15, 2009, when over 1 million tea partiers participated in rallies held in more than 900 cities.
Michelle Moore, organizer of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition in February 2009, said “The St, Louis Tea Party will be happy to host this debate on February 25, 2012, the 3rd Anniversary of the movement. We think CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews will be very interested in covering such an event.”
Lorie Medina, founder of the Frisco, Texas Tea Party and creator of the Victory in a Box Get-out-the Vote program added, “We’ll put forward the Tea Party’s view of the proper constitutional role of the federal government. Ms. Wasserman Schultz can put forward the Democratic Party’s view of the proper role of the federal government. We’ll let the voters decide which view they agree with, and which view is extremist.”
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