As promised, I’m back with one more “last post”. The project and website I mentioned in my previous post can be found at thecultureproject.org. We are extremely happy with how the site turned out, and extremely excited about the potential impact of The Culture Project. The timing could not be better. Many people on the right are as bummed out and depressed out as I’ve seen in my almost 30 years of cultural and political engagement. But too many of them still think the answer lies in politics. If we only get the right candidate, or the right person in Congress or the right Supreme Court justice everything will change. No it won’t. The left controls all the most effective means of cultural influence, and unless we engage there in a systematic and effective way the right will always be spitting into the wind.

If you want to find out more go to The Culture Project website and give us a look.

Posted by Mike @ 12:34 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

I mentioned recently a project I’m working on, and it’s come to a point where I’m going to have to dedicate some considerable time to it. Blogging here takes time I simply can no longer afford to take. Plus there are a zillion blogs that discuss politics and associated cultural issues from a conservative perspective. I’m looking to do something that can really make a difference, and I believe I’ve found that vehicle. It is called The Culture Project, and in due course when we have that website up I will introduce it here. The concept is simple yet profound, and we are convinced there is nothing like it in all the vast right wing conspiracy. So I will leave this site up for a while until we have things up and running at TCP. It’s time to move on.

So come back periodically so I can introduce you to The Culture Project. You’ll be glad you did.

Thank you for visiting these last three plus years.

Posted by Mike @ 3:00 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

There has been quite the little hubbub created by a confessional written by David Mamet, the great writer and director, in which he claims he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal.” And this was in the Village Voice no less; a left wing rag if ever there was one. As I was reading the piece I couldn’t help thinking this was some kind of a joke. He can’t really be serious. Yet he was making a very solid argument for conservatism. When he praised the writing of Thomas Sowell and called him “our greatest contemporary philosopher” I figured he wasn’t joking. He also mentioned Paul Johnson and Milton Friedman, two towering figures of the right. Maybe he really was being serious. I think in psychological terms I was experiencing cognitive dissonance.

What interested me most was that it seemed his whole rationale for leaving the left is a proper understanding of human nature. He was, like other liberals who’ve come right, mugged by reality.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

He understands now that although people are generally decent, they are not fundamentally good. This is a crucial distinction that has been the fault line between the right and left for over 200 years. The left side of that line gave us the failure of the bloody French Revolution, and the right the still successful American Revolution. The former sees human beings as perfectible, and as fundamentally determined by social structures, while the latter sees flawed human beings constricted by law, social mores and traditions, but free to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No social engineering, no government fiats to dictate every area of life.

Of government Mamet further writes:

Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

After saying something like this he is certainly out of the club now. He says above that he thought government was corrupt, but the modern political left, embodied in the Democrat Party, believes government can do no wrong. So maybe Mamet has always be a bit out of step with his comrades on the left.

Culturally and creatively some on the left are reacting to losing one of their prized possessions as a loss of the powerful creative spirit found in a leftish worldview. That is laughable. The left loves to look at itself as infinitely nuanced, as not stuck in looking at the world as black and white like Neanderthal conservatives do. One example I found of this is from a Brit who laments the loss:

I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right. In an essay for the Village Voice, Mamet claims he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal” and increasingly espouses a free-market philosophy and social conservatism. As a citizen, Mamet is free to do as he likes. What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.

Is this not rich? Only conservatives can be locked into a “rigid ideological position”. No wonder there aren’t any talented conservatives in our world. They are just all locked up! It so happens that I’m reading a book on Shakespeare, and he was actually one quite conservative fellow. He lived in Elizabethan England after all, and was also quite religious. Back then, depending on which government happened to be in power the wrong religion could cost a person his or her head, or maybe charred flesh. After all this he still became Shakespeare! Those creative juices were not all locked up by his religion or his “conservative” views.

In fact, ideologically rigid describes best what passes for modern liberalism. Have they even changed a position in the last 40 years? And everyone across the political and cultural spectrum would agree that there is an awful lot of crap, movies, books, TV shows, music, art, etc., produced by supposedly flexible liberals.

Here is the point our Brit above, and many on the left (and maybe a bunch on the right too!) just don’t get: ideological predispositions or assumptions have very little to do with the quality of one’s art. Great artists, no matter the medium, are great observers of the human condition. They refuse to make their art a propaganda vehicle for their political agenda, to fit it into a mold that reality just won’t fit. Mamet, a great observer, finally saw reality for what it is and decided he needed to leave his “brain-dead” liberalism behind.

Posted by Mike @ 5:48 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

If you are an evangelical atheist there really is nothing new under the sun, at least not for three or four hundred years. Dr. Benjamin Wiker at tothesource writes a short article about Benedict Spinoza who was a noted religious skeptic of the late 17th Century. In it he tells of what he calls the Radical Enlightenment and the vehement anti-Christian tirades of these atheists. It’s amazing to see that our modern day atheists haven’t learned anything in 300 years. Speaking of a treatise that mocks religion, Wiker says that

For the authors of The Treatise of the Three Imposters, all religion was a travesty perpetrated by imposters upon the ignorant masses. It is time to throw off the chains of superstition, and embrace reason!

Sound familiar? The Treatise circulated all over Europe, and became a kind of atheist underground bestseller, spreading unbelief to the like-minded. Just like Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ The End of Faith, Hitchens, God is Not Great, and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

There is very little difference between the ideas and aims of the underground Radical Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century, and the ideas and aims of our contemporary Four Horsemen of Atheism. There is a simple reason for this. It’s just the same old thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There is a lot of truth to this. But in a sidebar the author of “God and the New Atheism” points out a very interesting difference between our modern atheists and many or most of the old and dead ones. The modern guys want to rid the world of religion, especially the Western Jewish and Christian kind. Once that is accomplished, after all we religious folk are swayed by their overwhelming reasonableness and embrace the light, they think a world run by sweet unalloyed logic and reason would look a lot like the current one, but without the messy religious fanatics.

One very large problem with this is that the modern world, and all the prosperity and relative peace we enjoy is in large part a result of the religious thought and values they despise. There is a wonderful side bar quote in the tothesource post I reference above, but unfortunately I can’t copy and past it here, and I can’t find the Christian Century article it came from. Basically he says that the old atheists saw atheists like our current crop as another form of religion. In effect they are wimps, because they refuse to deal with and think through the real consequences of the death of God. If they were really logical and really honest they would probably end up in a mental institution just like Friedrich Nietzsche.

Posted by Mike @ 11:40 am   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Eliot Spitzer is a timeless example of the basic conundrum of government: the fact that anyone who really wants to wield power is, by that very fact, the last person who should be allowed to do so. I call this the Washington Conundrum, named after George Washington–who is arguably the first man in history to demonstrate the solution: the only person who can safely be allowed to wield power is someone who seeks it out of dedication to the cause of liberty.

But take away the love of liberty–and the ideological framework of individual rights that supports it–and we return to the squalid pattern of most of human history: power not only corrupts, but attracts, rewards, and promotes the most corrupt types of human character.

Without the love of liberty and the principles of liberty, we don’t get George Washingtons in public office. Instead, we get the Emperor’s Club VIPs–self-aggrandizing thugs like Eliot Spitzer.

–Robert Tracinski, “Eliot Spitzer’s ‘Emperor’s Club’”

Posted by Mike @ 11:34 am   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Terrorism is a nasty, terrible virus and very difficult to defeat. Maybe it will always be with us. Who knows. But what we do know is that as with any bully, weakness invites aggression. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan insisted that we achieve “peace through strength,” because he knew that the Soviet Union would only respect massive force to deter its universal aggression. Jihadists also respect only one thing: strength. The infamous “weak horse” statement by Bin Laden revealed one of the motivations for Islamic terrorists thinking they could slay “The Great Satan.”

My how things have changed in a few short years. Despite what you hear from the left’s disciples running for the Democrat nomination, al-Qaeda is on the run. An incredible article in the Financial Times, “Al-Qaeda is losing the war of minds,”(requires registration) paints a very encouraging picture, not only about the terrorists military defeats, but that they are losing the PR battle as well:

[I]n large measure because of what is unfolding in Iraq, the tide within the Islamic world is beginning to run strongly against al-Qaeda – and this, in turn, may be the single most important ideological development in recent years.

It seems some Islamic bigwigs are telling their flocks that they’ve had enough of the death and destruction that has come in the Jihadists wake. Far from the Iraq war emboldening and strengthening Islamic terrorism, al-Qaeda is suffering a disastrous defeat. Iraq, one day, may be seen as the turning point in the war against terror. President Bush may not look so bad to history as his present enemies insist. Speaking of the bigwigs, Peter Wehner, the author states:

These criticisms by prominent voices within the jihadist movement should be seen in the context of an even more significant development: the “Anbar Awakening” now spreading throughout Iraq. Just 18 months ago Anbar province was the stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq; today it is known as the birthplace of an Iraqi and Islamic grass roots uprising against al-Qaeda as an organization and bin Ladenism as an ideology. It is an extraordinary transformation: Iraqis en masse siding with America, the “infidel” and a western “occupying power”, to defeat Islamic militants.

This was supposedly impossible. It could never happen, but it has. Who would have ever thought that a people, no matter their religion, would tire of totalitarian butchery? And this it not only in Iraq. All of the Middle East according to surveys is tiring of constant war and bloodshed. Are these people not all that different from their fellow human beings around the world? They want to live in peace, take care of their families, and enjoy life a little. Fanatical ideology is not something that the vast majority of human beings can put up with for very long. Sooner or later the utter futility of it all just becomes too much.

That the tide is turning against Islamic terrorism is all the more reason to resist the calls of Democrats to cut and run from Iraq. The Democrats are calling for a strategy of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Let us hope that the American people don’t give them that chance.

Posted by Mike @ 9:03 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

It’s a bit strange because the so-called New Atheists are really not new at all. There is very little that Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens say that was not already said by Jean Meslier prior to his death in 1729. If Sam Harris didn’t talk so much about Islam and make so many egregious errors, you’d think that he was Bertrand Russell’s parrot. I suspect the reason is related to the current state of physics and the increasing uncertainty scientists feel about the universe based on the very, very low probability that the universe randomly happened to turn out the way it is now observed to be. Atheists have felt that science was on their side ever since the Enlightenment, and now they see it slipping away from them. So, this recent explosion of atheist books is not a sign of strength; it’s a sign of desperation.

–Vox Day, Author of “The Irrational Atheist”
HT: Tothesource.com

Posted by Mike @ 12:48 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Well I would say that lean is a bit of an understatement. It’s more like Academe is dominated by the left, but the point of a recent Wall Street Journal article is why this is so. The article reviews a study about exactly this question. They make some interesting anecdotal points and conjecture on others. The author of the Journal article, Naomi Schaeffer Riley, concludes that it may just be because conservatives don’t like hanging out with people who get doctorates and thus don’t pursue careers in academia.

That’s all well and good. But the real question, the most important question isn’t why this is so, but is it a good thing. Should conservatives abdicate higher education, and K-12 public education for that matter, to the left? The obvious answer should be, hell no! At least I think the answer should be obvious. The vast majority of America’s children spend from four years old until they are 18 or 21 being indoctrinated by a liberal education industry. There are plenty of classically liberal and conservative alternatives, but not many are able to take advantage of them. And most kids do not have parents who teach them to question the liberal bromides, platitudes, silliness and outright lies they hear daily, let alone teach them to resist and think for themselves. The consequences of this are obvious: the left to a very great degree sets the cultural and political agenda in America.

But we, speaking of conservatives and the conservative movement, can’t control who chooses to go into higher education, right? Of course we can’t, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything we can do. I’ve decided to do something about this, and the general cultural weakness of the conservative movement and conservatism in general. Culture will always trump politics. If we are to move America back to the founding principals that made this country the greatest on earth it won’t be through politics, or through the intellectual foment around politics, at which conservatives are very good. Rather, it will come through what I call the four great cultural influence professions. These would be:

· Hollywood, entertainment, and the arts;
· academia and education;
· law the legal profession, and the courts; and
· Journalism and media.

Conservatives should not only think about how these cultural influence professions affect culture, they should recruit young conservatives to make their careers within them. Until culture reflects conservative and traditional values political change will not bear very much fruit. We’ve tried changing America through politics, from the top down if you will. Memo to conservatives: It doesn’t work! The frustration among conservatives today is palpable, because in spite of the magnificent growth of the conservative movement and the growth of conservative voices all over the media, it is the philosophy of liberal statism that dominates American politics, and this in both political parties, although less so in the Republican Party.

How about a conservative or classically liberal movement from the bottom up? How about if we seek to influence culture first, maybe the politics will take care of itself. Or at least our political efforts will bear more fruit; America will come to look more like the society our founders envisioned, and less like the society FDR and the Un-American Civil Liberties Union have given us today.

I have something in mind, well, more than in mind, but I’m not ready to share it with the world yet. It is a project that takes into account the failure of politics to accomplish the kind of society in which we wish to live. One that respects the principals of our founding, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, of ordered liberty before a Creator that gave us rights, not government. Of government that is limited in it’s scope, one that maximizes personal responsibility and denies the temptation of victimhood. We will not get such a government until we have a culture that feeds its people the positive vision of such a society. A culture project is what we need.

Posted by Mike @ 6:44 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

I wrote about the “Global Warming ‘Deniers’ Conference” last week. Here is a report by Marc Sheppard over at The American Thinker. It’s worth reading, because the implications of the climate change religion taking over society are truly horrifying. Because most Americans get their news and information from the mainstream media, they think Global Warming is happening and human beings are causing it. So they are convinced we need to “do something” about it. The politicians jump on the bandwagon, and shamefully some of those are Republicans, and before you know it policy will be implemented toward that end.

Here is Mr. Sheppard’s conclusion from the conference:

Earlier that morning, the president of the Czech Republic, Hon. Vaclav Klaus, received a standing ovation when he declared Europe’s emission reduction goals impossible to meet without lowering populations or creating widespread poverty.

So, they’re wrong on the science. They’re wrong on the solutions. And, implementing their wrong solutions will impede freedom, retard growth and, ultimately, destroy economies. All while changing global mean temperatures not one single degree.

Not one.

As I hopped on the train headed for home, it struck me — I may well have just left the only place on Earth where walked, however briefly, more sane-thinkers on the subject than not.

The chill the thought sent up my spine is not completely gone.

Most Americans have no idea the price they will pay for marching in lockstep with the liberal elite on this hoax. They will be marching right off a cliff.

Posted by Mike @ 3:09 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

[Barack] Obama’s 100-day agenda would be designed, in part, to improve America’s global image. But there is something worse than being unpopular in the world — and that is being a pleading, panting joke. By simultaneously embracing appeasement, protectionism and retreat, President Obama would manage to make Jimmy Carter look like Teddy Roosevelt.

Which is why President Obama would probably not take these actions — at least in the form he has pledged. Sitting behind the Resolute desk is a sobering experience that makes foolish campaign promises seem suddenly less binding.

But it is a bad sign for a candidate when the best we can hope is for him to violate his commitments. And that’s a good sign for John McCain.

–Michael Gerson, “Obama’s First 100 Days”

Posted by Mike @ 12:08 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

I am fond, as are many conservatives, of bashing Hollywood for their blatant liberal, anti-traditional values bias. And most actors and directors are on the far left end of the political spectrum. However, occasionally they do get something right, and this article in the Washington Post by Angelina Jolie is one such instance. It is titled, “Staying to Help in Iraq: We have finally reached a point where humanitarian assistance, from us and others, can have an impact.”

Maybe she hasn’t gotten the Democrat Party talking points, but staying in Iraq doesn’t seem to be a very popular position on the presidential campaign trail. Ever since public polling against the Iraq war went over 50% Democrats have been falling all over themselves to get us out of there, or at least promise they would if they had the power. That didn’t work too well in the Congress, and we’ll have to see how it works if a Democrat becomes president. They may talk a tough, pandering to the wacky left game now, but neither Obama or Clinton will want to be seen as presidents who oversaw snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.

Be that as it may, Jolie addresses what is a very real problem in Iraq that must be addressed if a further regional conflagration is to be avoided. That is what is to be done with the millions of Iraqi refugees.

My visit left me even more deeply convinced that we not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis.

Today’s humanitarian crisis in Iraq — and the potential consequences for our national security — are great. Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced people, in the heart of Middle East, won’t explode in violent desperation, sending the whole region into further disorder?

Isn’t it amazing that it takes a liberal Hollywood actress to put Democrat presidential candidates to shame? Not once have I heard any real concern for the consequences to Iraq, or the region, or American’s national interests expressed by the “pull out” crowd. It seems they are determined to waste all the money, lives and blood shed so far in the pursuit of pandering to the left-wing base of their party. They won’t even admit, despite all the evidence, that there has been any progress because of the surge. Ms. Jolie can only say what she saw:

As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.

It seems to me that now is the moment to address the humanitarian side of this situation. Without the right support, we could miss an opportunity to do some of the good we always stated we intended to do.

Posted by Mike @ 5:43 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options… We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

–Jurgen Habermas, Complements of tothesource.com

Posted by Mike @ 5:43 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

If a conference of global warming skeptics takes place in the media capital of the world happens would anybody hear of it? This reminds me of the old saying, if a tree falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound? With the current state of affairs in the global warming religion, chances are the answer is no. Starting March 2, the Heartland Institute is sponsoring such a conference right in the belly of the beast, NYC. There are several objectives of the conference, several of which obviously were not thought up with the value of the maximum public relations in mind.

One is “To bring together the world’s leading scientists, economists, and policy experts to explain the often-neglected “other side” of the climate change debate.” Are you kidding me? Other side? What other side? Isn’t the debate over, as Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore declared? Isn’t deleterious climate change the unchallenged consensus? It’s not? This must be a conference of “deniers,” you know, those benighted souls who simply refuse to see that our planet is on the cusp of destruction, that capitalism and the human race are a virus on this once pristine planet.

Another objective is “to sponsor presentations and papers that make genuine contributions to the global debate over climate change.” How funny, these poor folks think there is still a “debate” about global warming. Obviously they’ve never seen the nightly news on ABC, CBS and NBC, or obviously never read the New York Times. Very sad.

Yet another is “to set the groundwork for future conferences and publications that can turn the debate toward sound science and economics, and away from hype and political manipulation.” Will these people never learn that “sound science and economics” is what the elite “consensus” says it is?

Earlier this week John Fund of the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece called “Chilling Effect: Global Warmists Try to Stifle Debate.” He explains well the Alice in Wonderland world of the Warmists:

You’d think this would be a rich time for debate on the issue of climate change. But it’s precisely as sweeping change on climate policy is becoming likely that many people have decided the time for debate is over. One writer puts climate change skeptics “in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial,” another envisions “war crimes trials” for the deniers. And during the tour for his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore himself belittled “global warming deniers” as unworthy of any attention.

Unfortunately, the “objective” observers or our mainstream media, from which the vast majority of Americans get their news, believe such a conference is certainly “unworthy of any attention.” One day the truth will eventually win out, but until that time who knows what damage these true believers will do to our way of life.

Posted by Mike @ 9:51 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

If you would like to read a very nice obituary of Mr. Buckley, in the New York Times no less, check this out. It gives a wonderful sense of just what an amazing life he lived, what an incredible person he was, and his abiding influence on the American experiment.

Posted by Mike @ 5:45 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (20) | Permalink

It happens to us all. Death. Yet, some people seem so much larger than life that you somehow expect them to live forever. William F. Buckley, Jr. was one of those larger than life figures, especially for those of us who embrace the label of conservative. When I learned this morning that he had passed away in his study I thought that fitting for a man who accomplished and experienced enough for several lifetimes. He was a renaissance man driven to accomplishment.

I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Buckley back in the early 90s when he spoke at a college I worked at in Pennsylvania. I was his host, so picked him up at the airport and chauffeured him around. That time I spent with one of my heroes I will never forget. What stood out to me wasn’t his erudition, as great as that was. He simply took a genuine interest in my family, my life, and me. Perfect “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Blew me away. Of all the people I hosted in seven years in that position, he stood out to me the most because of this. Not because I was a fellow conservative.

It’s hard to fathom if you know about his life just how much he did: Sailing, skiing, traveling all over the world. Not to mention founding a movement that upended America’s politics, or writing a zillion books, founding and running a bi-weekly conservative magazine that always looses money but continues to be influential, hosting one of the longer running political chat shows on PBS, giving speeches, writing several syndicated columns a week, playing the harpsichord (he was lugging one of those when I picked him up from the airport, because he needed to practice for a recital he was giving that week), and who knows what else. It boggles the mind that one man could accomplish so much.

It so happens that I just went out to my mailbox and found my latest issue of National Review. I was introduced to the magazine 25 years ago, and thus conservatism, and have been reading it faithfully ever since. We take it for granted today that the plethora of conservative voices in our varied media landscape is the natural order of things. Hardly. Back in the 1950s when Buckley founded NR the conservative movement didn’t exist, and conservatism was a few voices crying in the wilderness that didn’t seem to get along very well with each other. Without Buckley conservatism would most likely never have taken concrete, practical and effective form. With him, the movement hijacked the Republican nomination in 1964 with Barry Goldwater, and 16 short years later took over the party with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Unfortunately, conservatism has not had the cultural success that Buckley unleashed in the political and public policy arena. Conservative influence in American culture will not happen from the top down, from politics into the hearts and minds of the American people. This has happened on some level, but every conservative knows the frustration, especially in this political season, of having their principals repudiated wherever they look. It’s about time for someone to take what Buckley did in politics into the cultural arena. We have a great foundation from which to build.

WFB, RIP.

Posted by Mike @ 1:56 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

With Sunday’s worst ever viewed Academy Awards in the rear view mirror, it’s a good time to reflect on the violence-dredged movies that were at the top of Hollywood’s heap this year. In fact one of the most violent, “No Country for Old Men” won all the marbles. One critic rightly points out that the film can be difficult for audience members to watch because of the “powerful violence.”

I haven’t seen any of the nominees for Best Picture, but have heard plenty about them. An article in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal caught my attention with it’s title, “And the Oscar Goes to . . . Blood and Guts.” The article points out that most critics have no problem with the violence, seeing it as “cinematic artistry,” as one critic put it. The author, Jason Riley, doesn’t mind violence in movies per se, but he finds the startling realism and the objective of filmmakers to “disturb” audiences troubling. Violence in movies used to be more like “movie violence,” something that propelled the story forward and pumped up the spectacle, rather than practically being an end in and of itself.

I didn’t think much about this until it struck me some time after reading the piece that a few years ago critics were not so sanguine about movie violence. Well, one movie’s violence to be exact: “The Passion of the Christ.” I remember several critics railing against Mel Gibson’s use of violence as being “pornographic.” Plenty of other critics found the violence offensive, but used other terms to convey their displeasure.

I find it interesting that when graphic violence is used to reflect on the Christian savior’s suffering it is unacceptable, but when it is used in the service of Nihilism it is artistic and perfectly justified no matter how salacious. Of course the hypocrisy and double standards of the mainstream media is old news, but it is hard not to comment on such an obvious example, especially with the beating Gibson took from critics. Other than the subject matter what really is the difference?

Posted by Mike @ 9:50 am   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

It is thus no surprise that the young are enamored of Obama. He’s a rock star. A telegenic, ultra-bright redeemer fluent in the planetary language of a cosmic generation. The force is with him.

But underpinning that popularity is something that transcends mere policy or politics. It is hunger, and that hunger is clearly spiritual. Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent — hence thousands of years of religion — but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.

And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.

–Kathleen Parker, “Obama the Messiah of Generation Narcissism”

Posted by Mike @ 2:02 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our “very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.”

Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?

–Charles Krauthammer, “Democrats Dug In For Retreat”

Posted by Mike @ 2:12 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (1) | Permalink

By now most politically aware Americans know about Michelle Obama’s statement at a rally a couple days ago, that for the very first time in her life she is proud of her country. Since then she and her presidential candidate husband have tried to explain away the comment, but that’s only because they’ve had to. Most normal and apolitical Americans would look at such a statement and think the woman must be out of her mind. So for the rest of her 44 years on this earth, or 26 because she did say “adult life,” she has been ashamed of America? Why, they might think. What’s so bad about America? Sure we’re not perfect, but there is definitely more good than bad. Well, not if you are well left on the political spectrum, as the Obama’s are.

I would like to use this opportunity of liberal foot-in-mouth disease to talk about something called American Exceptionalism and the difference between the liberal and the conservative perspective on America. There are many differences between modern liberals and conservatives, and their perceptions of America are one of the most fundamental of differences.

The word exceptional can be defined as “forming an exception or rare instance; unusual; extraordinary: unusually excellent; superior.” Conservatives, and even most apolitical Americans, can easily see this word applied to America and the American experiment. Those on the left, and that would include most liberals nowadays, would include so many caveats that they could never embrace the phrase American Exceptionalism.

The phrase itself, I’ve read, had its origination in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. There is no doubt that de Tocqueville saw America as something quintessentially different, unique in its experiment of organizing mankind into a society of cooperation and advancement. After over 230 years it is apparent to most objective observers that this experiment has far more positives than negatives. Why then would we be talking about trying to build walls to keep people out, instead of walls to keep people in? Yet those on the left for at least a century have seen something sinister in America. In 1984 Jeane Kirkpatrick talking about the Democrat convention in San Francisco that year called them the “blame America first crowd.”

I think John Podhoretz says it well in speaking of what Michelle Obama said:

[I]t suggests the Obama campaign really does have its roots in New Class leftism, according to which patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first refuge as well — that America is not fundamentally good but flawed, but rather fundamentally flawed and only occasionally good.

It’s hard for most Americans, especially those who are not intellectually, politically or cultural engaged to believe that there are actually a large number of their fellow citizens who literally hate America. If you can stand it, here is one example I found of a “progressive” rant against our country:

America is not a better country than any other. Its citizens and residents are as venal and as great as any others in any other part of the world. The only thing that sets us apart is our wealth. The only reason we have that wealth is because we stole it. God didn’t give it to us, nor did any greater American intelligence or know-how. Robbery is what our foreign policy is based on, just like our racial policies. It’s not the policies that need to change, but the foundation upon which those policies flourish. Until US activists accept this and give up their conscious and unconscious acceptance of the myth of American exceptionalism, any movement against war, racism, and other ills of our world is bound to fail.

It is hard to fathom that such blind stupidity exists in a large swath of otherwise intelligent people, but it does. And although many liberals and Democrats would never express such sentiments in public, I would argue they exist in their hearts nonetheless. It was not always so.

Old school liberals like FDR, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (and the aberration of today Joe Lieberman) were American patriots. They believed without reservation that America was the greatest country on earth, in the history of the world, and were willing to defend it against any foe. Vietnam and the rise of the 1960s counter culture changed all that. With the takeover of the Democrat Party by the radical left and the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 the change in the party became permanent.

Democrat politicians nowadays are much more careful with their words. In their hearts most of them believe America is indeed “fundamentally flawed,” but they know most Americans simply don’t believe that and if they are honest think they are too stupid to recognize it. Yet once in a while, like with Mrs. Obama, it slips out; America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, intolerant hegemonic bully, and whatever good there is, is only a result of “progressive” elites enlightening its benighted masses. Of Mrs. Obama what Jesus said shows the true spirit of most modern Democrats and liberals: Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

Posted by Mike @ 12:50 am   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Fareed Zakaria is a nice little liberal journalist who I am sure likes to think of himself as “objective” and able to see beyond the constraints of his ideology. Well isn’t it funny that according to Mr. Zakaria the way for conservatives to win back power is to jettison their principals. How convenient. The title of his recent piece in Newsweek is certainly wishful thinking, but something liberals yearn for, “The End of Conservatism.” Right. The sub-title is even more telling: “Conservative slogans sound anachronistic in the context of today’s problems, like an old TV show from the 1970s.”

So I wonder which “slogans” he has in mind. I’ll go first to his conclusion so we can see how a good little liberal thinks:

Political ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. They need to meet the problems of the world as it exists. Ordinary conservatives understand this, which may be why—despite the urgings of their ideological gurus—they have voted for McCain. He seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.

Now I get it. In order for conservatism to “meet the problems of he world as it exists” they have to embrace liberal solutions, a la John McCain. That would certainly be the end of conservatism, but not like he means it. So what exactly would this “new thinking” be besides liberal bromides of tax increases (of course only on “the rich”) and ever bigger and more expansionist government?

I hate to break it to people like Mr. Zakaria, but there is no such thing as new thinking. The same timeless principals that made America great, limited government, personal responsibility, and traditional Judeo-Christian values, can apply to every new problem, yes, in the world as it exists. The shallowness of the liberal mind is breathtaking. What exactly is so “new” about this world? Those that inhabit this world, i.e. humans, have not changed and never will. Human nature is as predictable as the sunrise. But liberals don’t care about, believe in or understand human nature.

As an aside, the reason McCain appeals to liberals, moderates, and independents is exactly because he is not a philosophically committed conservative. He has conservative instincts, but they are not moored to an overarching philosophy. Thus it’s easy for him to “cross the isle” when it seems politically expedient or popular to diverge from conservative principles. To a liberal that’s called “new thinking.”

But let me get back to the shallowness of the liberal mind. The problem with Zakaria and those like him is that they have no understanding of the historical context of political ideologies, as he calls them. He claims they “do not exist in a vacuum,” but what he means is that they do indeed exist in an historical vacuum. In other words, there are no timeless principals that work, principals that have been worked out and developed throughout the ages, that one must be committed to regardless of the circumstances. So political ideologies are malleable, which really means there is no such thing, he thinks, as a political ideology (I much prefer the word philosophy).

But when you look close, as I state above, the liberal’s political philosophy never changes. It is always bigger government and more government intervention. Period. So liberals have a beautiful double standard. We conservatives have to give up our principals to meet the problems of the world “as it exists,” but liberals don’t. That’s certainly a great gig if you can get it.

Zakaria uses David Frum’s new book to make his argument, such as it is. This is pretty disconcerting considering Frum is supposedly a conservative and has always come across as such to me. I would be very nervous when some lefty like Zarkaria is saying that I’ve written a “smart new book.” Yikes! Run for the hills! I believe that too many conservatives have decided that conservatism doesn’t sell, because certain polls say that, for instance, the prescription drug benefit is popular. So instead of arguing for the conservative principal of limited government, the solution is to pander. Sell out. Boy, that sure is leadership.

Politics is the art of the possible, so of necessity it includes compromise. Being a true blue conservative doesn’t mean we never compromise, but what it does mean is that we don’t sell out our most fundamental principals in the name of “new thinking.” We defend them, sell them, and argue for them: they are timeless and they work, because human nature is what it is.

Posted by Mike @ 12:33 pm   Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink