Utah Senator Robert Bennett has lost the Republican Party nomination. He finished in third place in the second round of voting behind Tim Bridgewater and Tea Party favorite Mike Lee.
I’ve been searching Bennett’s Wikipedia page to see where he may have angered his base. According to the Politico “Bennett was dogged by his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and for co-sponsoring a healthcare bill with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.).” Could that be all? Bennett supports a flat tax, blames government meddling for high health insurance prices, wants to build a fence with Mexico and takes the Bushian view of war and terrorism. The bill he co-authored with Wyden, however, looks like universal healthcare. “Although he has voted in favor of expanding funding to women and minority-owned businesses, Bennett has generally rejected affirmative action proposals involving quotas.” Does anybody vote against funding women and minority-owned businesses and thus oppose the whole diversity agenda?
So how do the two remaining candidates compare? On the first issue, immigration, it appears both of them want to seal the Mexican border, defeat any amnesty attempts and revoke birthright citizenship. Good enough. The second most important issue is opposing empire. While neither is exactly Rand Paul here, Bridgewater uses phrases like “cut and run” and “war against international terrorists whose goals are to kill us and destroy our way of life” while Lee seems a bit saner recommending that we “[ask] the hard questions on strategy” and make sure soldiers have a “clear mission,” which I read as no nation building. Both say they love the Constitution. Bridgewater’s website looks a lot better, indicating that he’s more competent and would be a more effective champion of conservative values. Then again, he has a Twitter page, on which he writes like a twelve year old girl.
Thx 4 all of the candidates in this race - good run! And thank you to the supporters of other candidates who voted 4 me too
This video shows that Lee is good on states’ rights but has no charisma.
However this ends up, it's always fun to see incumbents lose, especially when they're warmongers.
Update: It looks like the Tea Party went after Bennett partly because he voted for the Wall Street bailout.
The late, great George Kennan was not only one of the most influential and important diplomats in American history, but he was also a serious man of the Right in every important aspect of his thought. With regards to foreign policy, he combined humility with unsentimental realism. Kennan recognized the ideological threat posed by Soviet Communism, but considered the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and extravagant interventions in places such as Indochina to be an inappropriate and unnecessary response. He was particularly opposed to entangling American foreign policy objectives with ideological crusades. In an interview with The New York Review of Books in 1999, the 95-year-old Kennan remarked, "This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as un-thought-through, vainglorious and undesirable." What was Kennan's preferred alternative? He insisted, "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders."
In his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, Kennan described the United States in its present condition as a "monster country" that suffers from "the hubris of inordinate size" and proposed that America be ""decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment." He further suggested that the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago should become the equivalent of semi-autonomous city-states. Kennan's vision was not far removed from that of the self-proclaimed "left-conservative" Norman Mailer, who ran for mayor of New York in 1969 on a platform having the city become the 51st state and devolving the municipal government to the boroughs by re-constituting them as independent townships. More recent thinkers, such as Vermont's Thomas Naylor, have gone even further, calling for full-blown secession of particular states or regions from the authority of the federal government altogether. Indeed, Naylor's colleague Dennis Steele is currently running a maverick campaign for governor for the sake of advocating completely independent nationhood for the Green Mountain State. While the Vermont secessionist effort has a left-libertarian flavor to it, the emerging regional independence movements in various corners of North America transcend the left/right paradigm. Texas' Larry Kilgore, an unabashed Christian theocrat and a proponent of complete secession by the Lone Star State, won 225, 897 votes in the 2008 Texas Republican Senate primary.
The most serious arguments against such efforts offered by a thinker on the genuine Right were those of Sam Francis. He dismissed secessionism as an "infantile disorder" and remarked, "I do not believe that secessionism will prosper as a serious political movement, but I do worry that it will prosper to the point of becoming a serious political distraction; a distraction from the imperative that Middle Americans now face of constructing their own autonomous political movement that can take back their nation rather than assisting the new underclass and the globalist ruling class in breaking it up." Dr. Francis preferred instead the more moderate but still radical by contemporary political standards goal of reasserting the Tenth Amendment. I do not know which is the least feasible objective, full-blown secession or restoration of an authentic federalism. Either way, it appears that the revolution by the "Middle American Radicals" that Francis hoped for is dead in the water and, as John Derbyshire has recently written, the Tea Partiers are well on their way to being just another arm of the neocon-friendly establishment.
Still, interesting things are happening in American society. A work published in 2008 by Bill Bishop, a center-left journalist, and titled "The Big Sort," showed how Americans are in the process of self-separating into more or less segregated enclaves along the lines of political ideology and party affiliation, religion, culture, race, ethnicity, income, age, and other such demographic concerns. Further, this process is taking place less at the state level, and more on the level of counties, towns, municipalities, or even precincts and neighborhoods. Efforts by the elites to the contrary not withstanding, Americans are apparently doing what human beings naturally do anyway: seeking out others of their own kind with whom they form communities. This state of affairs seems to fit fairly well with the decentralist vision offered by Kennan, Mailer, and the Vermont independencias. A 2008 Zogby poll likewise indicated that one in five Americans holds favorable views regarding the possibility of secession.
One thing is certain. If the Alternative Right were to embrace secession or radical decentralization of this kind, it would surely serve to separate the wheat from the chaff, i.e. those on the supposed Right who really wish to bring down the rule of the managerial-therapeutist-welfarist-multiculturalist elite as opposed to "conservative" careerists and main-chancers.
What strikes me as indicative of the phoniness of the "conservative renewal" now being preached by FOX-news, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the movement noisemakers, is its inseparability from the group that ran this country between 2001 and 2008. It is hard to watch the GOP-peanut gallery parading as redeemers of the Right, without noticing familiar faces from the Bush II years. Assisting in the spectacle are Karl Rove, Cheney, and Cheney's kin, Bush's press secretaries, and in fact just about every GOP operative of the last decade who has been reinvented as a FOX contributor. No one from our side has been recruited for the show and as far as I can see, there is very little space there for Ron Paul-enthusiasts.
My GOP loyalist friends have explained that this repackaging of neocon-controlled and centrist, reaching-out-to-minority Republicans is necessary to build a new coalition. But these friends are so emotionally wedded to the GOP that they refuse to notice what is happening, even when Sarah Palin has been revealed as a feminist tool of neocon powerbrokers. Moreover, the GOP did not always behave in this truckling way. When Reagan became a serious presidential candidate, he did not suck up to those in the Nixon and Ford administrations who had pursued what Reagan considered a policy of appeasement toward the Soviets. Reagan would have nothing to do with Henry Kissinger, whom he rightly or wrongly linked to a misguided policy of détente.
The present misnamed "conservative" renewal sponsored by FOX is largely an ingathering of tired old faces, and mostly from the properly discredited Bush-neocon administration. The addition of the emoting Glenn Beck to the mix doesn't change things. For one thing, Beck's guests are usually the same old partisan neocons that one can see on other FOX programs, or else sycophants who echo what Beck has just said. For another thing, Beck never challenges the neocon-Bush foreign policy and seems quite happy with what W did to expand our collective crusade for democracy. He also has an annoying habit of belaboring certain phrases about "taking back America," "returning to the vision of the Founders" or references to the 18th-century radical Tom Paine. And then we have Glenn slobbering over Sarah Palin and Jonah Goldberg, who are his frequent honored guests.
In my view, which I have expressed repeatedly, there is no way to chart a new course on the right, unless the neocon advisors and neocon subsidizers and Bob Dole look-alikes can be thrown out. Until this happens the "conservative renewal" that we hear is coming in the wake of Obama's ascendancy will never take place -- or it will be simply a repeat of Bush II, with Romney or Huckabee fronting for the folks who ran the last GOP administration. Barring change at the top, that is the most we can hope for, after the Tea Party demonstrations -- and Sean Hannity-Mike Huckabee book tours are over
On another, not quite related note, Richard Spencer is entirely correct about the mendacious treatment of the murder by bludgeoning of the former South African white activist Eugene Terre'Blanche. Not surprisingly, the most one-sided account, and by implication the most pro-ANC one, that I've seen was in the neoconservative, Murdoch-owned New York Post. Not content merely to reproduce the biased interpretation of the murder and the relatively modest goals of the Boer separatist group which Terreblanche headed, the paper identified the murdered Boer farmer as a "hate monger," and it showed him beneath a symbol on a flag that we were supposed to mistake for a Swastika.
The ANC and the current South African president Jacob Zuma are depicted in the same coverage as a peaceful force genuinely disturbed by the "terrible deed" against Terre'Blanche. We are never told that black rule in South Africa has resulted in the increasing and sadistic slaughter of the remaining whites, on a scale that Ilana Mercer reveals in a forthcoming book, which is still looking for a (neocon?) publisher.
Clearly the New York Postwould find such vicious behavior to be unacceptable, if Arabs were perpetrating it against Israelis. Why is it more acceptable if Bantus are slaughtering Dutch and English Protestants? Don't those endangered people have a right to protect themselves? It is this odious double standard -- Larry Auster, please take note! -- which has turned erstwhile friends of Israel on the real right into often carping critics. As for the neocon lackey class, I wouldn't expect them to notice such glaring hypocrisy.
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I can't say that I have any expertise in the history of South Africa, or that of the Afrikaners. I learned most all of what I know about the slain leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, Eugene Terre'Blanche, from obituaries in the mainstream press. For these reasons, and others, I'm hesitant to write about this man.
A couple of things have stood out in the media coverage, however, which I think are worth commenting on.
Firstly, Terre'Blanche is almost always referred to as a "white supremacist"; indeed, this moniker usually appears in the first couple of sentences of every report. Now, it's true that a supporter of South Africa's Apartheid system can correctly be called a "supremacist"-- as well as advocates of Southern Segregation and Israel's military occupations, for that matter. But in these mainstream papers, the term "white supremacist" sounds like it roughly translates as "evil," "backwards," or even "probably deserved to die anyway."
I've never once heard South Africa's current president, Jacob Zuma, or Zimbabwe's dictator, Robert Mugabe, referred to as "black supremacists," even though both seek the aggrandizement of their people at the expense of others -- in the latter's case, to the point of outright confiscation of property. Israel, too, is engaged in actions that, regardless of what one thinks of them, are clearly designed to secure the prosperity of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people. "Supremacist" seems to be a political term that can only be preceded by "white."
At any rate, at the end of his life, Terre'Blanche doesn't seem to have been a "white supremacist" at all. After grasping that hopes of conserving the Apartheid system were completely lost, he began pursuing the revolutionary goal of founding an all-Boer homeland. Much as with "supremacism," having a nation-state of one's own is considered wicked, harmful, and impossible if advocated by whites -- but then lofty, noble, and deserving of foreign aid if advocated by Palestinians or Albanian Kosovars.
And let's not forget that the plight of whites in Africa, on which Terre'Blanche based his later political career, is quite real. As the London Timesreported last month,
Death has stalked South Africa’s white farmers for years. The number murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994 has passed 3,000.
In neighbouring Zimbabwe, a campaign of intimidation that began in 2000 has driven more than 4,000 commercial farmers off their land, but has left fewer than two dozen dead.
The vulnerability felt by South Africa’s 40,000 remaining white farmers intensified earlier this month when Julius Malema, head of the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) youth league, opened a public rally by singing Dubula Ibhunu, or Shoot the Boer, an apartheid-era anthem, that was banned by the high court last week.
The second thing that caught my attention in the media reports was that the murder was consistently described as resulting from a "wage dispute." Terre'Blanche was hacked and bludgeoned to death in his sleep, almost to the point of being unrecognizable. This doesn't sound like any "wage dispute" I've been involved in... Needless to say, the media want to avoid giving the bloody deed any more of a "Mistah Kurtz, He Dead" quality than it already has. But it's hard to imagine that the murder wasn't at least partially motivated by a political-racial animus.
Poignant as well is the fact that the media are writing about a dispute over wages -- and not about Terre'Blanche bringing on the attack by, say, dropping the Dutch equivalent of the N-word or inciting hatred with one of his impassioned speeches. It seems that this horrible embodiment of intolerance was offering blacks gainful employment on his estate.
Eugene Terre'Blanche was probably a tough guy to work for, but in engaging in legitimate commerce with Africans, he no doubt did more for raising black living standards and fostering co-operation between the races than any Truth and Reconciliation commission.
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I'm beginning to get a sense of how Washington and the media outlets are going to spin the recent attack in the Moscow subway -- It's a case of "domestic terrorism" (and it has nothing to do with Muslims, all of whom are wonderful citizens.) And guess who the "domestic terrorists" are here in the United States: right-wing, gun-owning, Middle American Christians who don't like the government.
This story was posted today at the New York Times's website at 5:48 PM ET:
WASHINGTON — Nine members of a Michigan-based Christian militia group have been indicted on sedition and weapons charges in connection with an alleged plot to murder law enforcement officers in hopes of setting off an antigovernment uprising.
In court filings unsealed Monday, the Justice Department accused the nine people of planning to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer, then plant improvised explosive devices of a type used by insurgents in Iraq to attack the funeral procession.
Eight of the defendants were arrested over the weekend in raids in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. A ninth remained at large, the Justice Department said. The indictments against them were returned last Tuesday. The defendants were identified as members of Hutaree, described by federal prosecutors as an anti-government extremist organization based in Lenawee County, Mich., and which advocates violence against local, state and federal law enforcement. The group saw local and state police as “foot soldiers” for the federal government, which it viewed as its enemy, along with participants in what they deemed to be a “New World Order,” according to the indictment.
“This is an example of radical and extremist fringe groups which can be found throughout our society,” Andrew Arena, an F.B.I. special agent in charge in Detroit, said in a statement. “The F.B.I. takes such extremist groups seriously, especially those who would target innocent citizens and the law enforcement officers who protect the citizens of the United States.”
A law enforcement official said that the alleged plot was unconnected to recent threats against Democratic members of Congress who voted for legislation overhauling the nation’s health care system.
One shouldn't take any satisfaction in the American Enterprise Institute's firing of David Frum, for shortly after Frum got the boot, AEI hired another former Dubya speech writer -- "enhanced interrogation" enthusiast Marc Thiessen. Jonah Goldberg is also now an AEI fixture... (I can't say that I'm well acquainted with Thiessen's work, but there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's shoddy, if not mendacious.)
And one shouldn't conclude that AEI's firing of Frum proved that the institute is serious about opposing socialized medicine. Though I found Frum's argument in his now-famous "Waterloo" piece rather puzzling, he did hit the mark with this comment about think-tank hypocrisy on healthcare:
[W]e do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.
Indeed. On the fundamental issue of mandating health insurance, the differences between Obamacare and Romneycare are slight. (My friend Jack Hunter has a good video blog on this.)
Bruce Bartlett has also sounded off on the idea that many "conservative intellectuals" actually liked Obamacare, but decided to bite their tongues
Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.
Bartlett argues that the censoring of these scholars marks "the closing of the conservative mind"... which is a pretty Frummy thing to say. If this story is true, it also reveals the degree to which AEI, which was founded by Big Industry in the early '40s to push back against the New Deal, is now honeycombed with welfare-statists and has a rather limp commitment to free enterprise.
But opposing Obamacare politically was important to the GOP and its movement operatives. For here (and perhaps only here) they were presented with an issue around which all aspects of the GOP-conservative movement could rally: the GOP leadership, the Religious Right, the libertarians, the Tea Partiers, even the neocons and country club types -- they all came together on this one.
In turn, if John Boehner had decided to make a deal with Obama -- much like he supported Bush's Medicare extension in 2003 -- all hell might have broken loose, including mass defection from the party. (Which, of course, would have been great!) AEI felt it needed to put the kibosh on anyone who put the coalition at risk.
This is all reminiscent of what David Frum was writing about immigration in 2005, some two years before the grassroots rebellion against George W. Bush and amnesty:
No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration...There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders.. Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.
As Sam Francis wrote at the time, Frum was deathly afraid of the damage the immigration issue could inflict on the Republican Party, less so of the damage mass immigration might inflict on Americans.
Whatever the case, Frum got it then, and it's been quite surprising to me that he hasn't gotten it this time around, too -- that he was willing to forfeit the base that supported all his favorite candidates and Middle East wars in hopes of making nice with liberals and being called a "contrarian" by Christopher Buckley.
Whether the GOP will one day actually do something about socialism and mass immigration -- and not just talk about it in hopes of keeping the electoral coalition together -- remains to be seen.
UPDATE: In a WSJ op-ed, Norman Podhoretz proclaims that he'd "rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party" and "rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama." This is clearly a man who understands how much he benefits by holding the current GOP coalition together. In Podhoretz's mind, Palin "seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership." "Wise leadership" can be roughly translated as "good on Israel."
The president wants to extend a ten-month moratorium on new settlements in the West Bank and has voiced opposition to the ones in East Jerusalem. Larry Auster is now sure that Obama's Washington is "an enemy of Israel" and that PM Bibi Netanyahu should declare so openly. Citing Commentary's Noah Pollak and Powerline's "Paul," Auster frets that once the administration's anti-Israel animus comes to a boil, actions like these might soon follow:
1) U.S. support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood, 2) active U.S. opposition to a strike on Iran, up to and including the Brzezinski threat of shooting down Israeli aircraft, 3) Israel's diplomatic isolation in the UN and Europe, and 4) an escalating administration campaign to portray Israeli "intransigence" as a threat to the United States' regional and international security.
In other news, a one-time volunteer to the Israeli Defense Force, Rahm Emmanuel, is still Obama's chief of staff and -- this just in -- former Obama aid Lee "Rossy" Rosenberg, another Chicago boy, has been appointed as the new head of AIPAC. Reports have also surfaced that Israel has captured Joe Biden's heart.
With "enemies" like these...
Seriously. Speculations that Obama might start ordering Israeli planes shot out of the sky, isolating Israel at the UN, or bad mouthing the Jewish state in the press are beyond ridiculous. Moreover, Obama isn't even the most Israeli-critical president in recent memory: George Bush the Elder and James Baker literally threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel due to its settlement policy. American conservatives like Auster and the Powerline people want Obama to be wildly anti-Israel because this fits their preconceived image of him as representing everything they're against. They will be disappointed. And memo to Bibi: "You are not alone!"
Obama inherited a political climate in which most people don't want to even think about foreign policy, their minds focused on domestic matters and the economy. Knowing this, Obama has striven to thread the needle and please -- or rather, not upset -- both antiwar and pro-war/neo-liberal/neocon forces: he thus drew down troops in Iraq, which was scheduled anyway, and expanded the war in Afghanistan in order to prove that he's tough. My sense is that, at least at this point in time, Obama won't make any bold foreign-policy moves and instead focus all of his political capital on destroying the country from within.
This being said, big wars often come in the wake of economic turmoil -- often when prices for resources spike or when the international balance of power is unstable and ambitious powers want to move up. I expect that we won't just have a "double dip recession" but something much, much worse in order to finally cleanse all the bad debt from the system. I'm reluctant to make long-term predictions, but when this happens, whether it's because Washington wants to distract Americans from the collapse of their standard of living, or make a last, frantic assertion of its "unipolar" authority, Larry and the neocons might get more wars in the Middle East after all.
CORRECTION: I originally wrote that in 1992, President Geroge H. W. Bush threatened to withhold "foreign aid"; in fact, he threatened to withold loan guarantees.
Amidst the torrent of anti-white press coverage surrounding the Tea Parties and Obamacare protests, Albany's Times Union has published a fair account of Obama's white male problem. In "White men shun Democrats," David Paul Kuhn eschews knee-jerk accusations of "racism" and instead outlines the statistical evidence and aims to find a race-neutral explanation for Obama's declining support among white men. In doing so he gets the issue about 50% right; he leaves race out of the white side of the equation but refuses to acknowledge the impact race has on Obama and his agenda.
Kuhn outlines the looming midterm crisis the Democrats face:
For more than three decades before the 2008 election, no Democratic president had won a majority of the electorate. In part, that was because of low support -- never more than 38 percent -- among white male voters. Things changed with Obama, who not only won a majority of all people voting, but also pulled in 41 percent of white male voters.
Polling suggests that the shift was not because of Obama but because of the financial meltdown that preceded the election. It was only after the economic collapse that Obama's white male support climbed above the 38 percent ceiling. It was also at that point that Obama first sustained a clear majority among all registered voters, according to the Gallup tracking poll.
It's no accident that the flight of white males from the Democratic Party has come as the government has assumed a bigger role, including in banking and health care. Among whites, 71 percent of men and 56 percent of women favor a smaller government with fewer services over a larger government with more services, according to ABC/Washington Post polling.
So, despite what many have said, Obama's unprecedented success among white men can be largely attributed to the political circumstances of the 2008 election and John McCain's shortcomings as a viable alternative, not his status as "post-racial." On the prominent issues at the time (economic stimulus and creating jobs) Obama and McCain were virtually identical, as they were on another issue that plays well with "angry white men," immigration. White guilt and the manufactured willingness to "look past race" and elect a black man certainly played a role, but this was no doubt aided by liberal-warmonger McCain and his policy prescriptions.
Kuhn diagnoses the problem as primarily socio-economic:
Obama's brand of liberalism is exactly the sort likely to drive such voters away. More like LBJ's than FDR's, Obama-style liberalism favors benefits over relief, a safety net over direct job programs, health care and environmental reform over financial reform and a stimulus package that has focused more on social service jobs -- health care work, teaching and the like -- than on the areas where a majority of job losses occurred: construction, manufacturing and related sectors.
Think about the average working man. He has already seen financial bailouts for the rich folks above him. Now he sees a health care bailout for the poor folks below him. Big government represents lots of costs and little gain.
Despite the commendable effort by Kuhn, he seems intent on dancing around the impact race has on Obama's agenda, attributing it instead to the simple shortcomings of liberal dogma. Yet even Kuhn admits that, during FDR's socialist expansions of the state, "[white] men never doubted that FDR was trying to do right by them." The inverse, of course, is that white men feel that Obama is not doing right by them.
All Kuhn needs to do to see the racial undercurrent of this conflict is ask, as Ravilla did, "Cui bono?" Who benefited from the bank bailout? Lenders who were given state incentives to loan to minorities who couldn't make good on the deals. Who benefits from Obamacare? The overwhelmingly black and Hispanic portion of the uninsured population, and the illegals who Obama now hopes to make citizens.
So, while Kuhn deserves credit for recognizing the racial undertones of Obama's declining numbers without descending into anti-white paranoia, he still misses the racial nature of Obama's agenda, and in doing so he still misses the point.
The American Enterprise Institute has apparently decided to cut its ties with David Frum, whose "letter of resignation" from the organization can be read here.
It's always a shock to see a neocon bastion turn on one of its own... but the truth is, over the past year and a half, Frum has been attempting to carve out a position that's as bizarre and inexplicable as it is unnecessary.
Operating in a conservative movement that's been consistently moving leftward, and consistently losing the culture war, Frum has become an "independent voice" for the worst possible issues. Frum's website extolled conservatives who support gay marriage, conservatives who believe in Global Warming -- and want to censor "deniers" -- conservatives who take offense at the unruliness of the Tea Parties and Glenn Beck.
I mean really, what's the point!?! Just give the GOP a few election cycles, and I'm sure you'll get what you want. And that Frum would bash the movement that (so stupidly) supported the neocons' preferred candidates all these years and preferred wars is the height of arrogance and ingratitude.
Just this week, using a line of reasoning that I still fail to understand, Frum insisted that last Sunday marked the GOP's "Waterloo" because the party failed to negotiate with Obama and share power and perhaps earn the chance to ... I dunno ... insert some nifty free-market solutions into the Obamacare bill?
There was, of course, little to be gained by nipping around the edges of the massive bill whose salient feature is that it un-Constitutionally requires everyone to buy health insurance and health insurance companies to insure everyone. Moreover, all signs indicate that with this move, the GOP has endeared itself to both its base and independents, two groups that are rightfully scared of Obamacare.
Frum's latest dissent apparently was the last straw for AEI, which signaled to all, as if there were any doubt, that the neocon establishment is firmly attached to the GOP.
Is this the end of Frum? I'm tempted to use the analogy of cats always landing on their feet... but with the neocons, I think a better comparison would be to the proverbial cockroach that survives nuclear winter. So, no, I'm afraid that we haven't seen the last of David Frum.
I find myself ambivalent about an issue that perhaps should concern me more than it does. The FOX-news contributor and Republican controversialist Ann Coulter was kept from speaking at the University of Ottawa by protesting leftist students. She had been warned before her trip by the university's provost, Francois Houle, that "freedom of speech is defined differently in Canada from the way it is in your country." Houle was referring to the fact that Canada and especially the province of Ontario, where Coulter would be speaking, has a complicated speech and publication code criminalizing politically incorrect language.
Richard Spencer seems as smitten with the tall blonde lady as was the late Sam Francis. I'm afraid I can't second their affections.
Saying something negative about a gay or a Muslim in Canada can land one in jail or at the very least render one subject to steep fines. The Canadian situation is exactly what some of my academic colleagues would like to see instituted in this country. It already exists in such progressive places as England, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Belgium. And to refer to these illiberal practices as a slippery slope leading to totalitarianism would be an understatement. Such speech, and by implication thought, codes are the Western equivalent of the Soviet dictatorship, which the Eastern Europeans were fortunate enough to have overthrown. The "democracies" may not be so lucky.
But in the case of Anne Coulter, this is all show. She is a Republican fixture who goes around slamming Democrats, and as soon as her nasty comments generate negative reactions, FOX and National Review go into high gear telling us how badly the Democrats or the Left have treated her. Certainly nothing detrimental has happened to Ann because of her snub in Ottawa. She has been able to parley the incident into additional guest appearances, in which she has gone back to badmouthing the Democratic opposition.
Needless to say, she's not the only partisan playing this game. The Dems have plenty of them, including Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and, whether or not he's a U.S. Senator, Al Franken. What all of these personalities do for a living is go after the other party in the two-party oligarchy that organizes American politics. The political shock jocks get people roaring mad about contests that otherwise would put most of us to sleep.
The last presidential election was the exception to the rule, although no matter which presidential candidate won in 2008, our national politics would likely have moved leftwards. Although Obama stood more clearly on the left, McCain brought a very mixed record on most social issues, and he even voted for one bailout (with a Republican president). The national health care issue has allowed the GOP to put some distance between itself and the Dems, but without that issue the political debate would have come down to shouting about which side is fighting more vigorously the War against Terror or standing up more firmly against Iran.
In what is usually a tiresome partisan environment, the political shock jocks are offering a bit of entertainment. But they also distort or exaggerate what is taking place. They turn everyday politics and partisan maneuvering into a battle of Good against Evil; and they foster the illusion that differences between the sides are far more dramatic than they actually are. They also prevent real change, at least on the right (which is where I'm coming from) by engaging in empty nam-calling and by grandstanding about the yawning gulf between the Red Team and the Blue.
In this country "conservatives" like Ann Coulter should be setting forth alternatives to the political status quo, which both parties have worked to create and perpetuate. Serious debate from the Right would begin by noticing the shared blame of the two parties that monopolize our electoral system, and not by assigning white hats to one party and black hats to the other. Attacking Democrats as "atheists," as Coulter does in a recent best-seller, or demonizing their personal lives does not advance real political discussion. But getting rebuffed by a Canadian university should add to her personal fortune by exciting her fan base into buying more of her anti-Democratic diatribes.
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Whatever you want to say about Ann Coulter, I like her -- partly because she's funny but mostly because I've always sensed that she's more "one of us" than just about any other mainstream political commentator out there besides Pat Buchanan. I guess I agree with her campus detractors in that way.
Well, Ann was invited by some students at the University of Ottawa to speak on their campus and, as reported by Canada.com, before she embarked on her journey to the Great North, she received an email from the University vice-president and provost, Francois Houle, "warning her that freedom of speech is defined differently in Canada than in the U.S. and that she should take care not to step over the line." When she arrived, Leftist protestors made sure she never got the opportunity to violate any speech codes by protesting wildly and getting her appearance cancelled by the campus police.
Canada.com features some revealing quote from Ann's undergraduate detractors,
Valeriano, a 19-year-old sociology and women's studies student, said later that she was happy Coulter was unable to speak the "hatred" she had planned to.
"On campus, we promise our students a safe and positive space," she said. "And that's not what (Coulter) brings."Outside the hall, Sameena Topan, 26, a conflict studies and human rights major at the U of O, spoke to the Citizen on behalf of a group of protesters."
We have a large group of students that can very clearly outline the difference between discourse and discrimination," Topan said of the protest.
"We wanted to mobilize and make sure that's clear on campus, that there's a line between controversy and discrimination, and Ann Coulter has crossed it. Numerous times."
"We had concerns about (the event) at the beginning, but especially after we saw what happened at the University of Western Ontario, when she called out a Muslim girl there and was saying she needs to take a camel because Muslim people shouldn't fly.
That kind of stuff just reaffirmed everything that we were afraid of and that's when ... we really got worried."
Topan was pleased to hear the students behind her shout, "Hate speech cancelled!" in unison." I think that's great. I think we accomplished what we were here to do, to ensure that we don't have her discriminatory rhetoric on our campus," she said.
Fox.com reports another one saying, "What Ann Coulter is practicing is not free speech, it's hate speech. She's targeted the Jews, she's targeted the Muslims, she's targeted Canadians, homosexuals, women, almost everybody you could imagine."
Putting aside the obvious falsehood of many of these accusations, it's worth focusing in on what these leftists -- what most all leftists who get "conservative" events shut down -- are actually arguing. We're intolerant towards intolerance! Or to borrow a catchphrase from the '68ers, Fascists don't have the right to speak!
My friend Grant Havers has discussed this contradiction at the heart of " liberal tolerance" in a recent piece he wrote on another Canadian controversy, whether the country's universities had the right to be openly Christian.
Seventy-five years ago, the philosopher George Santayana zeroed in on the often contradictory nature of liberalism in this vein when he distinguished between a liberal "method of government" and a liberal "principle of thought." The first calls on all of its citizens to accept only liberalism while rejecting all other rivals to its hegemony; the second "throws the mind open to all alternatives." Santayana implied that this was a classic case of wanting it both ways: if a liberal mode of government expects us all to be liberals, then how can we be allowed to consider all other alternatives to liberalism? "In this way," Santayana wrote, "liberalism as a method of government may end by making liberalism difficult as a method of thought."
Santayana's diagnosis of liberalism's incoherence lies at the heart of the flawed attempt to censor Trinity on the grounds that it insists that all employees sign a Statement of Faith as a condition of their employment. Is it liberal, however, to impose secular liberalism on Canadian universities? If that is the case, then any real attempt at censorship would have to monitor every single university in the nation for its adherence to completely unrestricted inquiry into all fields.
Grant's gesture towards the soft totalitarianism of "tolerance" shouldn't be taken lightly. The kind of society being created by people like Provost Francois Houle -- and all those Conflict Studies and Human Rights majors who want to get jobs at the Office of Institutional Equity when they grow up -- is one in which citizens will be rigorously surveilled for the first signs "reactionary" or "racist" opinions.
"Tolerance" is just another name for forcibly silencing people you don't agree with.
If you are ever inclined to indulge certain masochistic tendencies, forget the dangerous new fads enjoyed only at the cost of life and limb; just head on over to National Review.
The premier magazine of the conservative movement provides a sure means of inciting incredulity and aggravation even in those of the most pacific temperament. Looking for a heaping dose of jingoism for Washington's postmodern empire? Victor Davis Hanson has it covered. Michael Novak, the neocons' house theologian, is always available to justify the finer points of aggressive war for democratic capitalism. How about painful attempts at keeping relevant with septic pop culture? Well, hey, they've gotthat, too! This assortment of conservative wisdom might even serve as a source of morbid entertainment, causing readers to laugh in despair for the country and our beloved West.
The mainstream Right has long been in the thrall of a powerful delusion -- namely, that it is in any way the guardian of Western cultural and political tradition. The leading lights of National Review and their movement followers see themselves as critical to stopping the agenda of the Left. Never mind that the same crowd will cheer enthusiastically for similar programs to feed Leviathan and enforce manufactured diversity during a Republican presidency.
It's well established that U.S. "conservatives" are but liberals a step behind the times, given that they embrace egalitarianism, atomizing individualism, and an implicitly materialistic worldview. Nonetheless, it is helpful when the movement's leadership openly admits this fact. In their recent essay on American exceptionalism, National Review's Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru celebrate the United States as "the spawn of English liberalism, fated to carry it out to its logical conclusion and become the most liberal polity ever known to man." But in their convoluted little document, the authors reveal much more -- that liberal democracy, like socialism, is a pseudo-religion replete with pretensions to recast the world in man's own image.
The language of Lowry and Ponnuru's exceptionalist manifesto makes it quite clear that America's drive to liberate the world demands an almost mystical faith. Here we are treated to expressions such as "a creed open to all," showing the universal aspirations of American messianism and its attendant "economic gospel."
The editors from National Review would no doubt contend that the text is in the best Lockean "tradition," and that is exactly the point. Reason, will and passion unmoored from the divine principle lead to man's disintegration, as men from Donoso Cortes to Fedor Dostoevsky well knew. The liberal system is antagonistic to true religious faith and assaults the cohesion of family, culture and ethnos; it is hostile to the Creator and His creation.
Conservatives pay lip-service to a nation "under God," a deity conceived as a far-off, non-judgmental uncle who just wants the peoples of the world to enjoy their consumer goods and the gift of democracy. A vague "religiousness" in the population therefore functions best as a reminder to America of its vocation as an agent of global revolution.
The ideology that reduces the individual to a vehicle for the assertion of desires and ever-multiplying rights in truth recognizes no authority of a transcendent nature. Yet liberal man must bow before something, so new gods are willed from the void. "Freedom," equality, "human rights", etc, reign as the unchallenged idols of our age, and National Review heads the procession to their altar. Lowry and Ponnuru eventually address the most important element of their essay -- the quest to transform the world. The ambition to impose a global Pax Americana is pseudo-religious at its core. We are presented with the standard redemption narrative:
The missionary impulse is another product of the American Revolution, which took English liberties and universalized them... Historically, [America] has responded to attacks, whether at Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, with overwhelming force and the maximum plausible effort to spread our democratic system. In this sense, George W. Bush's response to 9/11 -- two foreign wars, both justified partly as exercises in democratization -- was typically American.
Through the cleansing fire of war and revolution, America leads the forces of progress into a new era, an end to history where man can at last attend to the total organization of his earthly happiness. The new revelation of democracy replaces that of Christ, and brings peace and plenty to every tribe. If this parody of world transfiguration seems familiar, it is -- a similar eschatology was imagined by both Marx and the National Socialists. Visions of the New Earth vary among the modern political religions, but the script is essentially the same.
Lowry and Ponnuru's American exceptionalism is a false doctrine derived from a false faith. There is no blank check granted to the United States from Providence. Social chaos, astronomical debt and wars for a global imperium will inevitably generate severe, adverse consequences. Whatever National Review might propagate, no nation can forever defy divine order and the the natural law.
Funny that the other day I pointed out that David Cameron was speaking like a white American politician pandering to the blacks. Today, I found that across the Atlantic they even have a similar Google race problem.
GOOGLE has been hit by a race row after its search engine asked: "Why are black people so ugly?"
Millions of outraged users across the world saw the sickening question after simply entering the word "why".
The offensive phrase is thought to have popped up for several weeks.
Sun reader Warren Degallerie, 23, from Croydon, South London, said: "I was helping my nine-year-old niece with her homework. Before she knew it that line had appeared. We are both black and I couldn't believe something like that could be allowed to happen. I had to try to explain to a young girl how Google could let it appear."
The Sun alerted Google bosses on Thursday and they fixed the glitch, apologising for the blunder. A spokesman said it was caused by a feature which predicts what users are about to ask.
He said: "Google Suggest is an automated feature that aims to make searching easier by providing suggestions as you type, based on what other people have searched for previously.
"We have filters to eliminate inappropriate suggestions, but very occasionally an offensive suggestion may slip through. We encourage anyone who sees one to raise it through our help centre and forums."
I guess Google prioritizes black feelings over my desire for a wider audience. What's next? A British O.J.?
That unfortunately is the sad state of affairs, not just with healthcare, but with virtually any bill passed by Congress. The only people who know what is in these bills are the lobbyists who write them.
When I see videos like this one, I begin to believe that the liberals might be planning to kill us all...
In other news, here's a fascinating video from one of last year's townhalls displaying the great moral courage of a pro-life Democrat.
I just saw Anita Dunn on Meet the Press say we have to pass health care reform because we need to cut costs. How is the bill that’s being voted on tonight supposed to do this? According to CBS News’ report on the legislation,
Major consumer safeguards take effect in 2014. Insurers prohibited from denying coverage to people with medical problems or charging them more. Higher premiums for women would be banned. Starting this year, insurers would be forbidden from placing lifetime dollar limits on policies and from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing medical problems.
This means that insurers will have to charge everybody equally, regardless of health. The healthiest individual will pay the same amount as the most gluttonous pig. This is socialism, no matter how you look at it.
While I get that, how does anybody even pretend that this will reduce health care costs? Obviously forcing a lot of people that the insurers don’t consider good risks into policies at the same price per head as everybody else will only make things more expensive for those who currently have coverage. This is why Massachusetts has the highest health care premiums in the country.
Democrats seem to disagree on whether they have the votes or not so there's still hope.
There are two possible explanations of what the Democrats are doing here. Perhaps they're trying to destroy the insurance industry so that government will have to step in and "solve" the latest problem its created with an actual public plan. Or, they're so ignorant of economics they don't understand what causes prices to rise and fall. They simply believe that what we pay for things depends on how much state benevolence there is to counteract corporate greed. I believe that the smarter ones are banking on the former, while the majority don't really know what they're doing.
Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was fined an equivalent of $4,000 on Tuesday for "insulting" the new European Union President Herman van Rompuy (r.) and refusing to apologize. In a memorable performance in Strasbourg ten days eaerlier, the Euroskeptic MEP told the former Beligian prime minister that he had "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk":
"We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure, a man who would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we got was you... The question I want to ask is: 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you."
Mr. Farage's tirade was well worth his ten days' MEP allowance. It put some spotlight on the inner workings of a monstrous bureaucracy. It gave a welcome boost to the popularity of his UK Independence Party (UKIP), which advocates Britain's withdrawal from the EU and opposes the Tory-Labour therapeutic-social-democratic duopoly. It provided a rare spark of rhetorical flair in an institution otherwise reminiscent of the Supreme Soviet, circa 1957.
But let us first consider Farage's passing reference, during his response to Van Rompuy's inaugural address, to Belgium as a "non-country," "an artificial construction" which is "breaking up." The bien-pensants were offended with that part of his statement, too, but they cannot refute the facts.
Belgium was created by treaty, ex nihilo, by the Concert of Europe 180 years ago, mainly on Britain's insistence as a buffer keeping the Channel ports neutral. (This consideration was deemed so important at Westminster in August 1914 that Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality prompted Britain to join France and Russia, thus turning yet another European war into the first truly global affair.)
Composed of Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Waloons, the "country" is less natural and less organically integrated than Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia had ever been. Most of its inhabitants identify with their ethno-lingustic group and feel no loyalty to, or affection for, the state as such. Belgium is an entity with statehood -- alebit with limited sovereignty under the EU writ -- but without nationhood, or shared memories, myths, or epics. It is noteworthy that the most famous Belgians in history were Eddy Merckx the cyclist, Leon Degrelle the SS Standartenfuehrer, and... well, as of two weeks ago, Mr. van Rompuy himself. (Of course, all those 16th and 17th century Flemish painters were as "Belgian" as Peter the Great was "Soviet," or Brian Boru -- "British").
More important is Farage's exposure of an undemocratic nomenklatura that produces the van Rompys on demand. Their mindset was aptly summarized by van Rompuy's own boast in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit that we have entered the era of "global governance": "The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet." Dixit. That one sentence is the key to understanding this little man, insignificant as he is intrinsically, and grasping the agenda of those who had made him what he is. Van Rompuy owes his position to the enactment of the Lisbon straitjacket -- by hook and by crook-- and to a backroom Franco-German deal.
The European Union is run by a coalition of multicultural fanatics, post-national technocrats, neo-Marxists and crooks. They are committed to a federal superstate, no less brazenly than the Comrades east of the Wall had been committed to the Peoples' Democracies between 1945 and 1989. In their world, only an EU freed from the obsolete shackles of national parliaments and wily electorates can guarantee the fulfillment of their ideological vision and, more importantly, the protection of their power and privileges in perpetuity.
Once hailed as a mechanism for overcoming deadly rivalries and increasing economic efficiencies, the institution Van Rompuy "heads" has morphed into a giant tool of social and political engineering. Its now defunct Constitution pointedly excluded Christianity from the Preamble, but introduced references to "equality" and "non-discrimination," and invoked the obligation to combat "social exclusion" and respect "diversity." Brussels is making opposition to the ongoing demographic change of the Old Continent not only undesirable but also illegal -- to the benefit of unassimilable, overwhelmingly Muslim multitudes, filled with contempt for their host-organism that breeds the urge to conquer it. The term "Eurabia," introduced as an intellectual concept three decades ago by Amerophobe French intellectuals, is on the verge of becoming real.
Various multiethnic states (imperial Russia, the Habsburg Monarchy, pre-World War II Kingdom of Yugoslavia) have been labeled -- often unfairly -- as "prisons of nations." That designation applies far more aptly to the European Union. Mr. Van Rompuy may look banal -- heck, he is banal -- but that makes him no less dangerous, or evil, than Tony Blair or Joschka Fischer. The "grey mouse" has been blinded by the sudden light, for which all true Europeans owe a word of thanks to Nigel Farage.
Mr. Farage's tirade was well worth his ten days' MEP allowance. It put some spotlight on the inner workings of a monstrous bureaucracy. It gave a welcome boost to the popularity of his