Whither The GOP: A Short History

In the 1930s, the progressive craze nearly destroyed the Republican Party. The twin crises of the stock market crash of 1929 and World War II frightened the nation into accepting enormous amounts of government control, taxation, and spending, and the Democrats owned it all. The Republicans, still embracing the classical liberalism of the 1800s and 1920s, were nearly destroyed, left at one point with 18 senators in total.

The GOP, however, managed to retake Congress once the war ended, but the damage was done. The sweeping new powers of government could not be turned back. Truman continued the New Deal policies, and Eisenhower sustained them. Classical liberalism, now termed "conservatism," was on the decline. In this environment, William F. Buckley lighted a small candle called the National Review, in the hopes of pushing back the lengthening shadow of government control against which no one else resisted. This candle grew into the flame of Barry Goldwater, the first representative of the "New Conservatism" and the first victory over the old conservatism of anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and elitist big government policies on the other. National Review grew in influence among Republicans, but still the GOP tactic of being watered-down Democrats dominated with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the nomination of Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The flame was fanned into a wildfire by 1980, as the big-government policies of James Carter and his predecessors sent the economy into a downward spiral that defied Keynesian analysis, featuring both inflation and unemployment--previously considered an impossibility. The New Conservatism, by now firmly entrenched in the Republican Party, pushed Ronald Reagan into the presidential nomination and then into the White House after a crushing victory over Carter. This new paradigm in the Republican Party tolerated a more moderate George H.W. Bush to ascend to the presidency, then made an impact on the Democrats as Bill Clinton moved his party to the right with his "New Democrats." Newt Gingrich counterattacked by pointing out the big-government policies that Clinton, despite his promises, actually pushed through, and his 1994 Contract With America, based primarily on decreasing government spending and term limits for legislators, unelected a sitting Democratic speaker of the house and retook both houses of Congress. The partisan battles roared on until 2000, when George W. Bush promised to move his party to the left with "Compassionate Conservatism." Winning the 2000 election by a sliver, Bush proceeded to enact several large federal programs while simultaneously paying slight attention to conservatism with two modest tax decreases. This method of taking over previously Democratic territory by moving left worked for a few elections, as Republicans saw unprecedented mid-term election gains in 2002 and even more in 2004.

However, the price was steep. Demoralized conservatives, after having campaigned against Kerry and Gore, found themselves with no one to turn to. The excitement of 2004 evaporated and was replaced by a serious malaise, manifesting itself first in the massive electoral defeat of 2006. While conservatives weren't paying attention, congressional Republicans became first-class purveyors of pork barrel spending and big-government solutions. They became indistinguishable from Democrats, and this shift was led by none other than Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham.

With the presidential primary approaching, consevatives tried to determine their course. Mitt Romney was a successful Republican from a very blue state, but his serious lack of consistency was problematic. Rudy Giuliani seemed solid, but had never held even statewide office, and his pro-choice and pro-gay marriage views were worrying in regard to Supreme Court appointments. John McCain was a war hero and an old stalwart among the conservative ranks, but his 2000 rejection of conservatism, his craving for the media's love, and his decided lack of higher conservative principle were troubling. Huckabee related well with the evangelical element of the GOP base, but outside of his rhetoric, there wasn't much real conservatism to be found. Ron Paul, of course, represented the conspiracist, anti-Semitic, isolationist Old Right. Fred Thompson was conservative in all the right ways, had a good track record, and was a phenomenal speaker, but he didn't have the energy or dedication for the campaign trail.

The result of all this confusion was John McCain, mostly because people liked his toughness and believed him to be the most electable due to his centrism.

We find ourselves today not with a conservatism that fails to excite, but with a GOP leadership that fails to be conservative. This is the fundamental failing of the GOP, that they are trying to steal the Democrats' natural territory--a doomed effort, to say the least--by giving up their own ground. They have failed to be an alternative, so no one is choosing them.

We need to give conservatives a choice again. But how? Tune in for the next blog post!

Today's GOP: The Problem

My little series about the future of the GOP happened, luckily, to coincide with a fantastic but depressing column by Robert Novak about congressional Republicans' latest lunacy:

On May 9, Flake sent Boehner a candid letter: "We need more than individual
members of the Republican leadership to state their opposition to the bill. We
need the leadership to use its good offices to explain the importance of
sustaining the president's veto as opposed to advising members to 'vote their
districts.'"

Boehner, waiting four days before responding, last Tuesday
rejected the "vote their districts" escape for House Republicans: "I believe
they should also vote their consciences, and cast their votes in a manner
consistent with the small government principles upon which our party was
founded." Boehner took the floor Wednesday to speak against the bill.

But nobody cracked the party whip. On the contrary, Minority Whip Roy Blunt voted
for the bill. So did Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam, who was seen
whipping votes for passage. House Republicans voted 100 to 91 to approve the
bill (with only 15 Democrats in opposition), assuring an overriden veto.
Similarly, in the Senate, Republicans voted 35 to 13 for the bill, and the only
Democrats opposing it were Rhode Island's two senators.

If you can stomach it, read the whole thing. We've come a long way since 1994! (Although, for my friends who hold the fantastical belief that Democrats are more committed to low spending: I don't know what to tell you.)

As Novak writes, the story of this bill's passage is the story of today's GOP. It is a party currently without a philosophy apart from how best to get elected.

Unfortunately for them, that philosophy is, basically, idiotic. The track record for Republicans when trying to become Democrat Lite--"We'll spend a lot, but not as much as the Democrats because we're small government people!"--they lose. But they don't seem to get that.

House and Senate members of both parties understand that earmarks and pork barrel spending for their districts is a way to buy votes and make constituents dependent on them and their built-up seniority and committee membership spots. If all you want to do is win elections, you know that's a tool in your toolbox, and both parties partake generously.

But you have to understand, as well, that high spending and low congressional restraint are exciting on an intellectual level for the Democrats' liberal electoral base. On the other hand, high spending is fundamentally demoralizing to the Republicans' conservative electoral base. So if this is your chosen strategy as a Republican, there's a built-in disadvantage in it if you have an R next to your name.

This is precisely what we're seeing: Republicans are not excited about this election. Why should they be? We have a presidential candidate who is to the left of every presidential candidate we've run since Nixon and Ford. We have a president who defends conservative principles only when convenient, and otherwise seems to take a default welfare-state tack--think No Child Left Behind, on which he worked closely with Senate Democrats, or the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or countless other bills. We have a congressional caucus that punishes members for being too conservative fiscally: Jeff Flake is likely the nation's staunchest and most courageous opponent of congressional largesse, and is deliberately kept out of the party leadership.

Meanwhile, Democrats are winning with very little pandering to political opponents; in fact, they've espoused a platform that is likely more left-wing than any platform since Woodrow Wilson promised to remake American society in 1912. (Perhaps even more left-wing than that.) Why? That is a subject for tomorrow's post.

Political Philosophy Matters

John Hinderaker of PowerLine posted this attack on John McCain made by Iowa Democratic Senator Tom Harkin:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain's family background as the
son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military,
"and he has a hard time thinking beyond that," Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said
Friday.

"I think he's trapped in that," Harkin said in a conference call with
Iowa reporters. "Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always
having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous."

Harkin said that "it's one thing to have been drafted and served, but
another thing when you come from generations of military people and that's just
how you're steeped, how you've learned, how you've grown up."

Hinderaker notes that this comment functions to exclude any military volunteer--much like all of our currently serving soldiers--from political discourse. Fair. But there's a bigger point to be made here about how Leftists think, what their philosophy is.

I once had a friend tell me that I wouldn't oppose government social spending if I was poor. This argument always takes me aback, a bit, but that's because it doesn't adhere well to rules of logic. (It's a sort of ad hominem fallacy.) But the entire Leftist philosophy is based on ad hominem fallacies that come down from such thinkers as Karl Marx. Socialism, Feminism, and Critical Race Theory all depend on a sort of identity politics: You can't understand racism, sexism, or class exploitation unless you're an oppressed person. You're an oppressed person by belonging to a certain group. Not in that group? Don't think oppression exists? Well, you just can't see or understand it because of who you are. It's easy to see the epistemological problem here; is the Emperor really wearing clothes?

One of the favorite oppressed underclasses of Democrats is military draftees who oppose(d) the war they participated in. American war heroes are in precisely the opposite camp. The only truly legitimate voices, to the modern liberal, are those of select "oppressed" groups--oh, and the modern liberal himself, since he/she is their protector and spokesman. It should never be a surprise that a war hero is denigrated for being a war hero.

To the modern liberal, the United States is often symbolic of imperialistic, racist, sexist, and capitalist hubris--bear with my caricature--and in a similarly symbolic way, those who fight us are the heroes. Thus Che Guevara--now-famously honored with a poster in a Houston campaign center for Barack Obama--and Alger Hiss are idealized and romanticized, while true heroes like John McCain and Oliver North are despised.

Falling Off Of...THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY!

In keeping with DBD's Princess Bride theme for the day.

Chris Arndt's blog, Apologies Demanded, has led me to a fantastical land of global warming craziness exposed for the entertainment of--hopefully--increasingly many. Global Warming Insanity documents the crazy things people do and say about the upcoming secular apocalypse and the Green code of conduct. (Think the Jesus statue from Scrubs, only with global warming instead of abortion. "No candescent lights!" "But what about our freedoms?" "Oh, yeah, I forgot. That's different then." "Really?" "NO CANDESCENT LIGHTS!" And so on.) Anyway, without further ado, the relevant story that I couldn't keep myself away from posting even though I promised to start a series about the Republican Party's future:

On Monday, Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine will release the names of 31,000 American scientists who are skeptical about global climate change. There will be a statement attached to their collected signatures, the result of OISM's Petition Project.

Consensus: WHY WON'T YOU DIE!? Anyway, there will be a follow-up post to...follow. Darnit, now I've started on a different movie theme...

Can't Touch This

Obama cannot be touched, apparently.

It's not okay to hint that Barack Obama is an appeaser, even if you're really suggesting that about Jimmy Carter. Even if it actually makes a good point.

It's not okay to say that Barack Obama won't do a good job of protecting the nation. That would be an unacceptable personal attack.

There are other examples--including the racism column from The New Republic that I linked to a few days ago--but the fact is that any attack on a black politician (as long as he's a Democrat) is either a thinly-veiled appeal to Americans' supposed subconscious racism or an irresponsible lowering of the level of discourse, even when the attack is a legitimate issue.

This isn't a new politics; it's the old politics of manipulating public opinion by trying to form a certain image of yourself and a certain image of your opponent. Barack Obama is fashioning himself as the candidate who is above it all, who can work on a bipartisan basis (to enact strongly partisan legislation, shhh!), and, on a deeper level, who can absolve us all of guilt about the racial discrimination in our past. John McCain, on the other hand, represents the old way of politics (hehe, he's old!): personal attacks--how dare he say I'm less than fully qualified to run for president! for example--and the like.

Okay, end rant. My next post will be the first in a series, hopefully, about the future of the Republican Party. You stay classy, small number of readers.

Choose Your Oppressed Minority

One of the delightful features of the current Democratic primary is the battle between Democratic gender pandering and race pandering. Two columns today highlight the issue.

First, The New Republic's John Judis writes about implicit racism against blacks hurting Obama in the Democratic primary and the general election. Here's a bit of it:

What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.

You can read it yourself--though it's very long--but I can sum it up for you. Before 1970, there was explicit racism on bipartisan lines. After that, there was mostly only implicit racism all from Republicans...why, after all, did they oppose busing and affirmative action? Now, all Republican politicians that attempt to portray a Democratic opponent in a negative light are using racial code words to exploit voters' unconscious prejudices. Barack Obama will have a difficult time overcoming those Midwestern rednecks who don't even know they're racist. (By the way, how come those white blue-collar voters don't see how in-touch the Democrats are?) We've heard it all before, but this time it's backed up by university researchers whose tenured jobs are based entirely on the idea that blacks are systematically oppressed and prove it using experiments with severely flawed methodology and the useful recourse of calling your detractors racists.

What do the feminists have by way of response? Marie Cocco, writing for RealClearPolitics, decries the sexism that she says has ruined the Clinton campaign. She writes about all the things she won't miss, providing a hilarious litany of past anti-Hillary shenanigans. Then, this:

Most of all, I will not miss the silence.

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't uttered a word of public outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Here's the gist of this shorter article: Pundits and politicians are using sexist images like a scolding mother or a nagging wife to exploit voters' implicit biases, and they're getting a pass for it. In fact, they're betraying Hillary Clinton, a distinguished stateshuman who has done a lot for make benefit of glorious party of Democrats. (Instead, her campaign is not success, and she will be execute.) The truth of the matter, of course, is that the Democrats are understandably sick of the Clintons' politics of personal destruction--a tactic which, unlike what Dems would have you believe, was perfected by the pair's machine during the Nineties, long before the name Monica Lewinsky became widely known. But the dark secret that the DNC doesn't want you to know is this: the Democrats have long based their tactics on pandering to demographic groups, and they think they can afford to offend women, but not blacks. They don't think feminists will riot at the convention, the way an Al Sharpton might. (Those racists! Or are they sexists?)

This is the true greatness of this primary season. Clinton and Obama barely differ in their policy stances. They're both richer-than-rich folks who grew up as children of privilege, now trying to use their gender and race identities to appeal to regular Americans. And, magically, it's tearing the Democratic party apart.

Here's to you, Operation Chaos.

global warming is not great

John Hinderaker at PowerLine Blog posts about the inconvenient fact that the Earth has not warmed since 1998.

He also brings up the Argos temperature buoys. You know, the ones that discovered a slight cooling in the Earth's oceans over the last five years, and whose accuracy was therefore questioned because it didn't fit the capital-T Truth.

I graduated from Michigan State University last week. At our convocation, the speaker was Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway; she came into our country, received an honorary degree from one of our universities, and denounced an official of our government (the great Antonin Scalia, to be precise) for being a "denier." Some of my fellow students snorted in disgust as she tickled their stereotypes--that evil genius Antonin Scalia! Of course he wouldn't listen to a sainted former head of state of the enlightened nation of Norway!--but I refused to clap. This intellectual thuggery is embarrassing, but not unexpected. If we needed any proof that society needs religion, this is it: what happens when an entire continent embraces atheism? They find some other faith to grab onto and bash people over the head with.

Indoctrination High

(I'm back! Sorry for the long cessation of blogging, but I've been extremely busy post-graduation. I should now be back for regular blogging.)

This one really burns me.

My sister, a junior in high school, was watching another of our sisters in her spring play, when a classmate started goading her about why she didn't believe in global warming. After giving an answer, several other students started berating her about it. Finally, when she tried to leave, one asked her, "Why are you a Republican?" Sick of the whole thing, my sister said--awesomely--"Because I have eyes to see!" They continued to accost her, and she said that she'd tried to explain it to them for years. The teacher who was in charge of the play walked in at that moment and said, "That's the problem with rational arguments; you can't stand up under them."

This is a fantastic statement considering the anti-rational means of spreading the religious faith and zealotry of liberalism employed by this guy: a few students boisterously gang up on another--and, by the way, much better--student, then a teacher walks in and backs up those other students without recourse to rational debate. This is the same teacher that has been spouting his opinions and (often wrong) facts in class as though they were true: global warming is real, corporations are evil, religion's got it all wrong, and Alger Hiss was innocent. (That last one is especially hilarious, considering that the great Whittaker Chambers used Soviet documents to prove that he was in fact guilty of spying for the Soviets.)

This sort of behavior--and, to be completely frank, historical ignorance--is unacceptable in a high school teacher.

Blogging WILL Be Back!

Hey all. I know I've been lax lately, but hey...I'm busy! I carried the College of Arts and Letters banner at convocation at the Breslin Center on Friday then checked out and left to visit some very dear relatives in Spring Arbor around 9:30 PM. Saturday, we made it back to East Lansing and I went to the Classical Studies graduate reception at 10:00 AM, then I graduated at 1:00 in the MSU Auditorium. On Sunday I began a major organization project in my old room at my parents house in Newaygo--where I shall summer, once again--and didn't manage to finish. Today, I am in Madison Heights, visiting my girlfriend and her family before she leaves for Ecuador to study at the University of St. Francis in Quito. This is why blogging has been down, and will continue to be so for the next few days.

However--and this is a veritable promise--I shall return. Stay tuned.

Musings From The Center-Right Coalition, April 30, 2008

The Center-Right Coalition meetings are off the record, so the following is simply a series of observations and opinions about some of the issues raised today.

First, Michigan Right to Life. Soon-to-be-former House Speaker Andy Dillon (D, Redford) is a pro-life Democrat, but (surprise!) he's helping to delay an important vote to ban partial-birth abortion in the state of Michigan. Now, partial-birth abortion is a hideous procedure that even nihilistic Europeans find disgusting. Should be easy for one of the leading states in pro-life legislation to ban it, right? Wrong--and not just because the governor is pro-abortion. You see, it seems that (surprise!) the Democratic caucus doesn't really want to pass a partial-birth abortion ban. Look...I know there's nothing sexier to a conservative issue advocacy group than a Democrat who happens to stray from the party line on their issue. But the party's caucus is extremely important to them. That's why Michigan Right to Life needs to make sure that they're looking at the big picture and favoring pro-life Republicans.

Second, the Michigan Business Tax. We replaced the Single Business Tax, a horrifyingly complicated tax system for businesses that made doing business in Michigan a high-risk affair. This replacement was the Michigan Business Tax, which was supposed to be simpler and more favorably structured for investment. It turns out that they created a horrifyingly complex system that made doing business in Michigan nearly impossible unless the government picked you to win. Except this time the taxes were higher. The question here isn't how we can tweak it to make it better for businesses, or how we can make it stop hurting Michigan businesses; the idea isn't to try to make things better for businesses. The idea is to get a simple, fair, LOW tax system and then let the market chips fall where they may. In other words, let consumers decide who wins and who loses. Isn't the point to get consumers what they want?

CSW Dinner For Bloggers

So, now that I have some time...

Last night I attended a dinner at La Senorita restaurant in Lansing to hear Paul Chesser, the director of Climate Strategies Watch, talk about an organization called the Center for Climate Strategies. Basically, what this group does is go to state governors--they've gotten to about half of them already--and offer to put together an action plan for climate change. They can do this at almost no cost to the state, because they're funded by left-wing foundations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. CCS tells the governor to declare climate change a crisis and use an executive order to form a panel dominated by global warming alarmists that is structured to put together a platform that is nearly the same for every state: costly new regulations that hurt the state's economy. All the policies advocated for are considered to be endorsed at the outset; in other words, you have to actively disagree with the platform items. Mr. Chesser notes some of the interesting procedural rules for the panel: "participants will not debate the science of climate change," "participants are expected to support the process and its concept fully"... This is a back door attempt to force costly legislation on a state already reeling economically based on inadequate scientific data with no hint of cost-benefit analysis.

Let your state representative and state senator know!

As for the rest of the dinner, it was fantastic. I met some very nice folks who are also passionate about freedom, including Jason Gillman, Sr., the author of Michigan Taxes Too Much (soon to be included on the sidebar), as well as his son, Jason Gillman, Jr., whose blog is entitled Random Rants From An Airline Employee (also soon to be included). My buddy Chris Arndt of Apologies Demanded was there (already on sidebar!), as well as my friend Karen Post--soon to join the blogging community, and updates on that will be forthcoming. Rose Bogaert of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance attended; she is the one responsible for the appearance of the Boss Hogg video on my website. (Which: Watch!) Lastly, Representative Jack Hoogendyk, the impressive candidate against U.S. Senator Carl Levin this fall and writer of Core Principles Blog, attended as well. The event was held by the indispensable Mackinac Center for Public Policy, whose director of communications, Michael Jahr, helped host the event.

More later about the CSC; also more about the Center-Right Coalition meeting I attended this morning, though since it's off the record, strictly opinion from TW2!

The Boss Hogg of Redford Township

This truly wonderful video was brought to my attention yesterday at a fantastic event that I will post about later. For now, enjoy and learn:

At Least The Dems Make The Trains Run On Time

Captain Ed Morrissey--he'll always be "Captain Ed" to me, by the way--writes in his post "The Nanny State, Explained" about some of Hillary Clinton's more frightening comments that have been overlooked. Here's the gem that he notes: "We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can't take a sick child to the doctor?" His response:

I just finished watching the excellent HBO series John Adams last Sunday. It tells the story of our nation’s birth and the sacrifice many of our founders made to create a free nation. They wanted a nation with government limited to just enough power to keep the peace and defend the nation. They didn’t conceive of the idea that a free people would trade their fortunes and freedom to create a government that would dictate choices to them in a manner far more egregious than George III.

*nodding* Actually, freedom meant a great deal to a large number of people who did not have access to the sort of medical care available to even the poorest in this nation. It meant enough that they fought and died in the war that killed the largest percentage of Americans ever against a people to whom they were intimately related. But it seems that the days are gone when the majority of Americans strongly believed there was anything more out there than life and comfort. And with the passing of those ideals, the courage of a nation is passing, as well.

Gone are the days of "ask not," replaced by the days of "you deserve." (What do people really deserve, anyway? Of course it will be more popular to enact policies based on the idea that you deserve everything the world has to offer; the only problem is that it isn't true.) The party of John F. Kennedy died with him; the commitment to freedom is no longer a bipartisan effort.

An Important Point, And An Elaboration

A couple posts ago I wrote about the infiltration of socialist philosophy into our schools of education and thence to our primary schools. My buddy Keith had a fantastic point to make, and I'd like to re-post it here and offer an elaboration of its themes from my perspective:

I don't see why this 'revolution' is a bad thing, though. I think, in a sense, it is good for students to be taught to be passionate about the inequalities in the world. Especially for those who are Christians and are instructed that true religion is to look after those less fortunate (widows, orphans) and to love those that may not be loved by others, I think it would be good for kids at a young age to understand that affluence should not be looked at as entitlement but as a privilege and see their roles not as self-indulgent capitalists but stewards of gifts that they did not receive as a result of their well doing.

In short, I agree with these statements per se. Now, in the context of Bill Ayers, the word "revolution" is scary; it doesn't mean what Christians mean by "revolution," especially considering that Bill Ayers not only bombed government buildings in the Sixties in order to usher in this "revolution,' but declared the day before September 11, 2001, that he wishes they'd bombed more buildings than they did. This man's revolution is an atheistic one, absolutely opposed to God's plan for the world and dedicated to a powerful humanistic government. In fact, this is what modern liberalism is really all about, and I am not being hyperbolic.

I believe we should teach our children to use their gifts, both talents and material wealth, to help others who are less fortunate. We should teach them this at home and in church. Maybe we should even be teaching them these things in school, though I think we should just stick to the three R's. But that's not what this is about. This is about teaching these kids that rich people are evil and poor people are good, that all inequities are caused by the free market (a laughable idea, to those studied in economic history), and that we need more government involvement to solve the problem.

When a politician utters the words "social justice," it's time to pick up the children and run. All that is is a code phrase for more and bigger government. Government initiatives to fight poverty have done nothing but cause more of it; from a pragmatic point of view, such initiatives are beneath worthless. But from a moral point of view, government anti-poverty programs are much, much worse. First, government redistribution means that people are turning for help not to churches or to neighbors, but to government. It means people give less to charity, since the government takes money from their paychecks for charity anyway. Second, and more importantly, it is a fundamental abdication of the church's responsibility in that area. It is the church, not the government, that should be in charge of such things, and as the government has taken over the job of helping the poor, the church has done it less and less. This is a predictable result, and in many ways these programs were originally designed to make sure churches have less influence in people's everyday lives. Lo and behold...

While I have the utmost respect for the motives behind any brother or sister's support of government handout programs, I think that those programs are morally repugnant and ought to be opposed by every member of the body of Christ.

ADDENDUM: I'd also like to speak up for self-indulgent capitalists everywhere. Well, okay, that's sort of a joke, but I think the "self-indulgent capitalist" is more of a trope or a stereotype than a real thing. Americans are often caricaturized as materialistic--although Americans who say this should look at Europe if they want to see materialists--but the truth is that although Americans can get caught up in celebrity hype and the biggest flat-screen TV, we are also a deeply spiritual people. Very few people here raise their children to think that material happiness is all there is. Whatever the prevailing opinion is, the truth is that the times when this country truly had economic freedom were also the times of our greatest religious and spiritual growth. Material wealth is not what stops religious growth; large earthly governments are what stop religious growth.

Yes, But WHY Are Food Prices So High?

The Detroit Free Press reports today that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declared the rising price of food to be a global crisis:

A sharp rise in food prices has developed into a global crisis, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today.

Ban said the United Nations and all members of the international community are very concerned, and immediate action is needed.

Action! Yes! Wait...how did we get here in the first place? The Freep is not kind enough to let us in on the secret, but Captain Ed Morrissey confirms what everyone already knew--at least, those who are paying attention to the current global climate hysterics:

In a way, the entire concept of biofuels as currently applied makes no sense at all. Instead of using food to actually feed people or even animals, we use it to feed our cars. Ethanol has suddenly lost its luster as an alternative energy source as food prices have skyrocketed, including in global-warming-sympathizing Europe

Who could possibly have predicted that these sorts of policies would be bad for poor countries? Hmmm. Captain Ed talks about the ethical issue of "feeding cars, not people," but the fact is that the real issue here is the power of the free market. Using corn-based ethanol to power cars is so ludicrous a way to help the environment that even college students don't support it. (Of course, considering the power of the agricultural lobby, led by Archer Daniels Midland, it was inevitable that increased government power to interfere on behalf of the environment would lead to absurd new agricultural policies.) Nothing enhances efficiency like the free market, which has already been bringing automobiles to higher and higher standards of fuel efficiency. If there is an economically viable alternative, let it flourish on its own. As it is, if people thought land use issues were important now, just wait until millions of new acres are used exclusively for corn now that prices are skyrocketing.

But instead, the government will simply wash its hands of this experiment in economic management and move onto the next failure. Wait and see.

The Revolution Comes To Your Schools

Michelle Malkin notes that Bill Ayers is not just a former terrorist who wishes he would have blown up more American buildings. He is also a professor of education in Chicago, and the readings he assigns borrow heavily from Marxists of all stripes. He himself models his political beliefs on such humanitarians as Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, and talks openly about going to the anti-war Camp Casey because he thought that might be the site of the beginning of the "revolution."

This shouldn't be surprising. It isn't just Bill Ayers who is pushing Marxism on future educators; every single education school in the country--Michigan State's is no exception--indoctrinates prospective teachers to believe that their job is to mold students' ideologies and to fix social inequities between classes, races, and genders. No wonder the quality of our education is declining--teachers aren't being taught that their main job is to teach. If you don't think that there is a concerted effort to use schools to indoctrinate students, well...you just aren't paying attention.

What can we do? Well, first and most basic, participate in your local school board meetings and elections. Best of all, run for that office yourself. Pressure your congresshumans to eliminate the requirement that teachers join the local teachers' union, as these unions are working to promote this agenda. We need to dismantle a significant portion of the current education establishment, including the Department of Education. There should be no more government money for schools of education that promote radical left-wing indoctrination of future teachers.

To echo Captain Ed's post on the subject, the idea of evolution does not threaten my Christian worldview. I myself do not believe in a six-day creation--though God is certainly powerful enough to have done it that way, and I do not believe in human evolution. As it is currently constituted, I do not think that intelligent design "theory" is a valid theory for teaching; it does not provide a model that makes predictions that can be disproved through testing. There are important models embracing the Christian viewpoint that do make such predictions--notably the Reasons To Believe model.

I do, however, find the dogmatism and ruthlessness of the philosophical Darwinists in academia to be disturbing because of their lack of interest in real free inquiry. So here is a fantastic TV commercial for Ben Stein's documentary, Expelled:

Iraqi Army Takes Down Mahdi Stronghold

Ed Morrissey relays the news:

Despite the news media’s apparent insistence on clinging to their narrative of defeat and disaster in Basra, Nouri al-Maliki’s operation to restore control of the city to the elected government achieved its major goal today with the fall of the Mahdi militia’s stronghold in the city. An early-morning offensive against the Hayaniyah district of Basra netted dozens of arrests as the central government took control of the area for the first time...

And Captain Ed notes the way things work in mainstream media these days:

Of course, others will likely continue to spin this as more disaster because “violence” has occurred. At some point, though, the central elected government had to displace the militias and ensure that they had an indisputable monopoly on force in the nation if they expected to remain credible and keep Iraq in one piece. They gave the Sadrists at least four years to disband on their own, and they refused to do so. Maliki’s confidence in his armed forces appears to have been justified, while the Mahdis look more like the paper tigers the IA was supposed to be.

There are only four reasons, as I see it, why one might want to withdraw from Iraq immediately:

1. You don't know crap about what's going on there. This is a side-effect of Bush-hatred or of using only news gathered from the New York Times and CNN.
2. You're rooting for the jihadists. This applies to a very, very small percentage of the American population, including both native jihadis and long-time anti-Americans like Bill Ayers.
3. You're a pacifist. I disagree, but respectfully: pacifism has a long and honorable tradition within Christianity.
4. You have political reasons for doing so, i.e. you think you can win an election. This applies to a large-ish number of American politicians.

Anyway, perhaps you simply disagreed with the Iraq War at the beginning. (Though that's a pretty poor reason for wanting to get out now. In fact, it's just about the worst possible reason for wanting to get out of Iraq, in logical terms, since...well...the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Just saying.) Michael Yon, an independent reporter and the best correspondent of this war who has been there for most of its duration, has something to say to you:

"We can win this war," Yon declares. "And if we do it will be a victory of the same magnitude as the fall of the Soviet Union. It will not be a victory for the Republican Party. It will not be a victory for America and Great Britain and others 'against' Iraq. It will be a victory for freedom and justice. It will be a victory for Iraqis and for the world, and only then will it be a victory for us."

(This is Yon quoted in the New York Post, itself quoted on PowerLine Blog. Read both articles in their entirety; the Post article is a review of Yon's book, Moment of Truth In Iraq--$29.95 at Amazon.com.)

RedState.com offers this little bit of humor about a cop in our very own home state of Michigan--Dearborn, to be precise.

The Company You Keep

We do it all the time, sometimes unconsciously. If you want to know more about somebody, you look at his friends. Whom one surrounds oneself with is important, says a lot about you. And I don't think that anybody should come under as much scrutiny in this regard as a president or prospective president of the United States.

Suddenly, Democrats disagree. And no wonder: Barack Obama has been shown to have friendly ties to so many vile, America-hating radical leftists that he's being legitimately called "out of touch" by a woman who once embarrassingly affected what she must have considered a "black accent" to appeal to African American voters. Alan Colmes last night tried to suggest that Republicans were using only a few relationships in the Obamessiah's life to characterize the man as a whole, then went on to talk about how he grew up in Kansas. Newt Gingrich immediately pointed out that Barack Obama grew up in an expensive private school in Hawaii, had a brief stint in boarding school in Indonesia, went to (I think) Columbia and then Harvard Law, then attended a black separatist church in South Chicago and became a state senator. His relationships with the racist, anti-American Jeremiah Wright and with the socialist, anti-American Bill Ayers aren't outliers, they are part of a pattern.

But it's no wonder that he won't seem out of touch to people in college. To them, it will seem mainstream, seem like common sense. Sadly, he also won't seem out of touch to a large portion of the Democratic electorate, who don't see America as specially good or extraordinary. Hopefully voters do realize that Barack Obama does not share their belief, and mine, that America is an exceptional nation in the history of the world. Judging by some recent poll results, I think that they will.

Possible New Cure For Bush Derangement Syndrome

Michael Barone helpfully reads Douglass Feith's new book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (Amazon.com, $18.45) and notices some interesting points. Here is an excerpt from the book that he posts on his blog:

Readers who have invested time and faith in the current public affairs literature may find it jarring to discover that key Administration figures—Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, myself, and others—made arguments and advocated policies that run directly counter to the positions usually associated with them. For example:

• It was the Pentagon "neocons" who continually urged the President to tone down his democracy rhetoric.

• The most powerful analysis of the downsides of going to war in Iraq came not from the State Department or the CIA, but from Donald Rumsfeld.

• The Pentagon-CIA dispute over the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship began with objections by Defense officials about the CIA's politicization of intelligence, not the other way around.

• The work of the State Department's Future of Iraq project on post-Saddam political transition was opposed not by Defense officials, but by Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.

• It was CIA officials who predicted that Iraqis would launch pro-U.S. uprisings after the start of the war.

• It was State Department officials who advocated a multiyear U.S. occupation of Iraq.

What would Bush-haters have if it were not for preconceptions? Not much, one suspects.

Not Just Sports Journalism

Bryan at MGoBlog says something interesting about sports journalists:

This might also be the place to relate that when Michigan was in Denver preparing for their semifinal against Notre Dame, they made it clear Billy Sauer didn't really want to talk about the North Dakota game last year. The first question (from a knob at the Denver Post) was basically "how do you feel about being such a g**d*** failure in the North Dakota game last year?"

It's one thing to ask a "tough question" when there is the possibility of an enlightening response or someone has undertaken ethically questionable activities. Tough questions in the context of the Ann Arbor News' investigation into independent study and the like are fine. (That the Ann Arbor news passed on the opportunity to ask those questions because they didn't want an email interview is another matter entirely.) A "tough question" to a 20-year-old kid when the answer to that question is going to be the standard athlete cliche boilerplate about taking it one game at at time is just being a dick.

But journalism has this weird machismo thing going on where that's prized: see any anti-blogging screed that claims the basement-dwellers inferior because they don't say rude things directly to the players themselves. I've always found it interesting that said screeds contain the implication that bloggers are wantonly negative because they don't have to face repercussions. Newspapers, meanwhile, are full of people who are wantonly negative because they like being wantonly negative even in the face of social approbation.

Ummm, yes. Dare I say this problem isn't just in the area of sports journalism?

Anyway, blogging is the ultimate in-touch news reporting by actual normal people. There's no pretense of objectivity--for pretense is all it ever is--just news reporting and commentary. It works better in sports reporting than in politics; after all, it's always more fun to read a sports article or column by someone who's fired up about their team, like Bill Simmons. But political news is also placed into a larger narrative, and anyone who thinks that narrative is objective is fooling themselves. Blogging is especially valuable for understanding others' narratives, while the national media gets stuck in whatever narrative favors its own (liberal) bias.

But because they're in print or on TV, the mainstream media has become proud and arrogant. It was only a matter of time before a Rathergate happened, or any of the other media debacles that have occurred in the last half-decade or so. For many, "fake but accurate" said it all. There will always be snobbery attached to print, to national syndication, and to prestigious journalism schools, but bloggers will inevitably play a larger role in national politics from here on out.

The Green Religion

Karl Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses," suggesting that rulers used religion to keep the lower classes from realizing they were being exploited. Well, his successors--or usurpers, if you choose to look at it that way--found out that it's a pretty powerful drug, as Pope John Paul was one of the trio of world leaders (the others being Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) who brought down the Soviet sphere. His outspokenness, his survival of their assassination attempt, and the courageous, historic mass he gave in Soviet-dominated Poland inspired millions who longed for the freedom to practice their religion.

So the Marxists realized they needed to use religion rather than scorn it, and the results have been stunning. But at least some whose minds are truly trained for skepticism--sadly, I'm not now talking about many scientists--are sounding alarms after initial enthusiasm. Here is an excerpt from Simon Jenkins writing in The Guardian:

Farewell the age of reason, welcome the idiocracy. Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so.

The consequences of the RTFO have been much trumpeted on these pages. It says enough that one car tank of bio petrol needs as much grain as it takes to feed an African for a year, or that a reported one-third of American grain production is now subsidised for conversion into biofuel. Jeremy Paxman pleaded the cause of this latest green wheeze on Monday's Newsnight, while the United Nations food expert, Jean Ziegler, screamed for it to stop: "Children are dying ... It is a crime."...

If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation.

Just now, for reasons not all of which are "green", commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.

Read the whole fantastic column.

Conservatives have known for years what this man is only discovering: almost no matter what the issue is, the government is worse at solving problems than free associations of people. Michael Crichton points out in his well-researched novel State of Fear that human efforts have failed nowhere more spectacularly than in trying to control environments. Moreover, the green movement is creating a massive new opportunity for lobbying that is currently being used by Toyota to destroy American manufacturers and by the agribusiness lobby to raise corn prices and profits to the detriment of American consumers. Americans are wealthy and will muddle through, but the true crime is the grinding poverty Africa is being kept in because of enviro-fads. But it's all wrapped in a cloak of secular piety. Disgusting.

Global Warming, A Friendly Riposte

My good friend, Mr. 42, left a comment on my last post that I think raises an interesting and a key point, to which I would like to reply. Here is the comment, in full:

First off, let me say that I completely agree with you that the science of global warming is at best debatable, and that we really don't know exactly what is going on. However, I feel we must be prepared for all circumstances.

I think the point you are missing is that in this case, the freedom exerted by these businesses could possibly be infringing on the lives and well-beings of countless other people. People, especially businesses, need to be responsible in controlling how much they contribute to the environment. Will it completely stop global warming? I don't know. Do we, as consumers, also need to be less wasteful? Probably.

If these businesses cannot see that the improvements can not only help them, maybe the government should be involved. The government's primary job is to protect it's citizens. If that means that they have to place laws to protect the environment, then it should.

I think 42's concern is one that is widely shared; it is a legitimate one that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The problem comes at several points, which I would like to outline.

The argument can be sketched out in this way: 1. There is a possibility that businesses' practices are contributing to the incidence of global temperature increase in such a way that other people may be hurt. 2. The government's primary job is to protect its citizens. 3. Therefore, government may have to step in to limit businesses' range of activity.

I realize that my argument will make a departure from current mainstream thought (though not from the classical liberal tradition on which our Constitution was based). However, the problems are with the second premise and with an unstated assumption built into the argument.

The premise that "the government's primary job is to protect its citizens is false. The government's primary job is actually to protect its citizens' freedoms. The point in my bringing up the statement "Give me liberty or give me death" is to say that freedom is more important than life, and that that is a defining and founding creed of our republic. The truth is that the Constitution does not authorize the government to take any action regarding environmental concerns--not even the actions the government has already undertaken. The reason is that the Founders were more concerned with liberty than with life; that's why so many of them risked so much to gain their freedom. In fact, I believe that morality requires us to choose freedom over life, if such a choice becomes necessary.

The unstated assumption is that government action could potentially protect citizens in this area. Increasingly, real world experience tells us that the answer is an emphatic "no." I'll link to a column from Britain's Guardian paper today that will elaborate, but the fact is that government action has contributed to economic stagnation and even deaths throughout Africa, and that government action has done little more than create an enormous new lobbying arena that inevitably leads to inefficient and outright destructive actions, such as ethanol subsidies, restrictions on oil drilling and refining, and promotion of wind power over nuclear.

Bush Prepares To Pass Around Global Warming Kool-Aid

Michelle Malkin directs readers to this post by Iain Murray on The Corner on National Review:

We're hearing some very bad things about the President's likely unconditional surrender on global warming today. One senior source suggested that the last line of sound defense had been breached and that "It will be very bad." I'd imagine he will request, against all evidence from Europe that this does anything but make consumers poorer and utilities richer, a cap and trade regime for energy utilities.

This is the last straw regarding President Bush's conservatism. No one can rightly be called a conservative who supports government intervention for global warming. Heck, even if the science is solid--a dubious assertion--and the anti-warming measures will actually curb warming--significantly more dubious--what ever happened to freedom? What does "Give me liberty or give me death" mean, anyway? USA, you've come a long way.

Christian morality has played a significant part in presidential politics of the past, but it will have been nothing compared to the coming Green morality.

McCain has bought in too, and you can bet that both Democrats are in. So we likely have another eight years of this madness to deal with. This only underscores the extreme importance of electing Republicans to Congress who can stop this religious movement from destroying our economy and more importantly, our freedoms.

Academic Tyranny (It's Not Just At Marquette)

Michelle Malkin tells the story of a student at Marquette University who stood up for police in class, saying that he saw police officers being called "racist" by a Hispanic driver they'd pulled over for a traffic offense. The professor then chastised him in class and pulled him aside after class to inform him that his comments could have been interpreted as offensive and made him apologize to the class.

In my last post, I mentioned that the sort of thinking that Obama displayed, surprising to many, is simply not uncommon on college campuses. Similarly, this is totally unsurprising to me. I have heard innumerable instances of professors here at State abusing their power to promote a certain agenda; my philosophy class, for example, was once given a guest lecture by one of our resident feminist philosophers. One student spoke up to disagree with what she said, and she verbally abused him in a way I've rarely heard before in a classroom. Interesting coming from someone who decries power inequality based on social arrangements. It's the only time I remember considering speaking to the ombudsman.

But the Left has long considered it their job to use higher education to indoctrinate students. They pay lip service, sometimes, to honoring both sides of debates, but in the end what they teach as fact is often simply liberal dogma. I think a lot of people would be surprised at how many college professors simply take for granted that George W. Bush is a criminal, that opponents of affirmative action are racists, and that America is a basically evil country. The best way to draw looks of derision or of mystified curiosity is to say that you disbelieve in anthropogenic global warming, that you voted for George W. Bush, or that you approve of the Iraq War.

The best part is that they don't even think of themselves as radicals.

SNOB-ama? (Let Me Know What You Think On This!)

The more I think about Barack Obama's statements and the more I hear from other people what they think about it, the more it seems to me that Barack Obama has revealed something very deep, very important about himself. He has said and done things before that sounded questionable--we'll remember his "punished with a baby" gaffe, his politically radical mentor Jeremiah Wright, his "typical white person" misstep--but I think that that this comment is the most revealing of his real beliefs.

Anyone who has spent much time on a college campus will tell you that if you ask the average college liberal, student or professor, what's wrong with America, they'll gladly tell you: Religious people. People with guns. People who dislike illegal immigration--racists, as far as they're concerned. Obama's implication was that the real problem is economic--people don't have enough money, enough medical care, enough food, enough housing--and that people are seeking false comfort in God, guns, and people like themselves. The average college liberal, if you asked him, would probably agree that that is what's going on. It's never been a wonder to me that Barack Obama enjoys such immense popularity on college campuses.

But the problem is that this attitude, this belief, is revealing of certain seriously negative traits. It smacks of elitism; after all, elite values in the United States tend to center around the importance of money and comfort, whereas middle- and lower-class values tend to focus on religion, individual rights, and the rule of law. In Marxist terms, it would be an imposition of upper class ideology onto the lower classes. As such, it also reveals a deep arrogance--an arrogance widely shared by college students. Ultimately, what Barack Obama said was that he knows better than you what is wrong, and that he is the only one who can fix it. And that's precisely what typical college students of all political stripes believe; they ARE the college students, after all. Doesn't that make them more qualified to make political decisions? (Emphatically, no. Experience, personal experience, seems to me the most important thing in forming political beliefs. I don't think it's a mistake that people tend to become more conservative as they grow older, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the saying goes, "If you're a conservative when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're a liberal when you're 40, you have no brain.")

This arrogance leads them to a stunningly heavy-handed paternalism. Unsurprisingly, Obama's solution is a government that can espouse the values you aren't smart enough to embrace. It isn't too much of a stretch from there to see that Americans just aren't intelligent enough to govern themselves; instead, they need a body of wise, intelligent, educated people to take care of them, to make society go. To make the trains run on time, if you will. And that's the danger: it's philosophically near to Fascism--real Fascism, the kind Mussolini wrote about and Hitler spoke about, the government as a religion of state.

Don't get me wrong here; I don't think Obama is about to start putting people in concentration camps. (That's not what Fascism was centrally about; it was just a natural result of the Nazis' Darwinian beliefs.) I think he's a pleasant and honest person. Way too honest about what he really thinks of America, and what he really wants to do with it.

Wow, Finally Back

Well...okay, so I've been extremely lax about posting. But I'm back! Also, I'm suspending the "Cedar Fest" issue...it's been a week, so it's old news. Such is our modern world.

Plus, there's something far more interesting happening. The Obamessiah lashed out recently at what Democrats really think is wrong with America: people who can't get it in their thick heads that government handouts are more valuable to them than family, church, guns, or national security:

...each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Predictably, McCain and Hillary blasted the comments--which simply provided more proof that Barack Obama is one of the most unfortunate off-the-cuff speakers in presidential election history--and the Obamessiah responded with this:








The best comment was Allahpundit's, calling Obama is a "crypto-Marxist." That's exactly what he is, but if you listen closely the "crypto" part seems to go away. His conception is an America in which a powerful elite exploit the disadvantaged many for their own gain. He promises to use government to fix this. But it isn't only religion that's the opiate of the masses--it's also guns, God, nationalism, family. You can see exactly the stereotype that Obama has in mind, and if you really press them it's one that most liberals have. Obama promises a newer, better opiate, much more powerful than any of the ones before: government, and lots of it. And its track record is a bit less than questionable.

Rush Limbaugh is correct in this: Mr. Obama is the most far-left candidate that the Democratic Party has ever--EVER--run. No one compares to this man.

Cedar Fest 2008: Mentor's Perspective

Wow, I've been terrible about posting lately! But, as promised, some stuff about Cedar Fest (hopefully not too late for anyone to be able to get excited about it anymore...)

I am a mentor in Snyder Hall, which is basically the east wing of Snyder-Phillips Hall. It lies across Bogue Street and somewhat northward from Cedar Village apartments, and one can see the apartments from the window in the outside door on the east side of my floor. Because of our proximity to the party, our senior staff thought it prudent to ask for two volunteers to augment the normal contingent of three mentors on duty for the night; I was one of them. At 7:00 PM, when we signed in for duty, the on-duty assistant hall director and the hall director met with us to discuss the night's order of affairs. They had decided to lock down the hall an hour early, at 11:00 PM, in order to block the free flow of party-goers into our hall.

We met at 8:30 to go on rounds, and again at 10:30. There was a bit more drinking activity than usual, but nothing at all spectacular. Nevertheless, there was an air of something important coming; the tone in the senior staff members' voices, the extra mentors on duty, and the shouting and chanting that could be distinguished even from a distance all contributed to the sense that something would happen at some point. Eventually, the senior staff ordered the mentors to watch the doors to make sure that no one was letting anyone in through doors that should be locked. This became an important enough task that three mentors were sent on duty while two others, myself included, watched the front side doors. The AHD and several night receptionists who had volunteered patrolled the outside of the building to make sure windows were not being used to enter illegally.

This arrangement gave me the ideal opportunity to figure out what the situation was with the party. I heard that police were intervening at times to arrest students who were becoming problematic or exposing themselves and that there were EMTs on site ready to cart away anyone who needed medical help. As the night passed, it began to look like there would be no rioting or large-scale police action of any kind. That was good news, of course, but--truth be told--a little anticlimactic.

That wouldn't last long. Mentors were told to split up and complete our last set of rounds at around 2 AM, but before that the complex manager from Shaw Hall, volunteering to help us, informed us that City of Lansing police in full riot gear were moving to seal Grand River from the party--a likely prelude to a dispersal action. As we moved through the upper-level floors of the building, we began to hear the loud thudding of tear gas canisters being fired across the street. We rushed down in time to see crowds streaming out of the various streets leading to the middle of the Cedar Village apartments and billowing white gas following them. Looking for any haven from the tear gas, many approached our building and were rebuffed, as per the regulations regarding housing complexes. Among them were an older man and woman wearing "ACLU Observer" T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen or thirty minutes later, police fired a second volley of tear gas and completely cleared out the apartment complex.

Once the crowds dissipated, mentors were given permission to go to sleep. That was at about 3 AM. Although we were tired, I for one felt like we had done something truly constructive in our role as mentors, a feeling that I have often lacked while on duty. Our reward was uninterrupted sleep, as the rest of the night passed without event.

Cedar Fest 2008

As you may or may not have heard, residents of the Cedar Village apartment complex decided to revive the Eighties' tradition of Cedar Fest, which is basically an all-day event at which people get really drunk and cause a disturbance. Back in 1985, a local judge banned the event, but apparently that's all over now.

Afternoon turned to evening, and evening turned to night. East Lansing and Michigan State police were on the scene, periodically hauling away people committing indecent exposure and becoming violent. EMTs were on hand, treating people who needed medical attention. (Sounds like fun, Cedar Fest, doesn't it?) Full cans and bottles of beer were being thrown up in the air, sometimes landing on the streets and sometimes on people. Police used the tactic of trying to target trouble spots in the crowd, launching harmless flash bombs to scare people away and arresting only a few people who were causing trouble. Late into the night, it became apparent that the crowd was becoming a mob. That mob began hurling bricks as well as full bottles and cans. East Lansing police ordered the crowd to disperse through a loudspeaker and then gave several warnings, telling partiers that they had the authority to use chemical agents if they disobeyed the dispersal order. This move only produced cheers of "Tear gas! Tear gas!" Then they tried to fire a shot across the bow, using more flash bombs and fireworks. City of Lansing police were brought in to seal off Grand River Avenue, and the order was given. I have no particular loyalty to Michigan State as an institution, but it must have been inspiring to hear students chanting, "Go Green! Go White!" to the beat of launched tear gas canisters. Revelers poured out of the various exits from a Cedar Village now obscured through a toxic haze.

This time around, I was able to see much of what was going on. You see, as an on-duty mentor in Snyder-Phillips Hall, literally just across the street from Cedar Village, I and four other mentors, as well as other staff members from the hall and from around campus, had the task of securing the building and helping anyone who needed medical attention.

The events, and various students' responses to them, tell an interesting story about the attitude of my generation toward politics, morality, and life in general. That is a story I intend to tell, in the next few posts, from various perspectives.

I'd Rather Be Blogging...

...but it's the end of the school year, and you know how it is. And it's not just the end of the year, but also of my time on campus at Michigan State, so I have lots of people to catch up with, stuff to do, and a thesis to write. *sigh*

Anyway, I thought I'd at least offer up one post for the weekend. (There may be more, but I can't make guarantees.) And anyway, this is just a little too juicy.

Neil Stevens at Redstate.com reports that Ron Paul has proclaimed public support for...the John Birch Society. Yes, the Birchers, whose anti-Semitic and conspiracy-theorist ilk William F. Buckley unapologetically ejected from the conservative movement. Is this a big surprise? Not to those of us who understand where people like Dr. Paul come from. I can't say that his domestic policy of decreased spending and low taxes is unattractive, but it's the isolationism, the veiled anti-Semitism and white supremacism, the paranoia that should always tip you off. Endorsements from neo-Nazis and the KKK...the discovery of a long string of newsletters filled with racist rants...now, this endorsement of the JBS should be the final indication of who we're dealing with here. It's the same ugly paleo movement that produced Pat Buchanan's later presidential runs, David Duke and his trip to the Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran, and LewRockwell.com.

This says it best: A "Ron Paul for President" sticker on one of the bridges across the Red Cedar River, which bissects MSU's campus, was written on by a jokester: "LOL No."

But For School, I Would Write A Post To Thee

Instead, I'll leave you with this tribute to Bo Schembechler I found on YouTube. It brought the same tears to my eyes that Bo's death did about a year and a half ago. Here at Michigan State, people don't understand what he meant to us. His death was like the end of an era; it was like the last hero of a forgotten age had passed. Everything about him was larger than life. After losing twenty or thirty players because of his hard workouts, he posted a sign that said, "Those Who Stay Will Be Champions," and he delivered in Year One. He beat the 1969 Buckeyes, probably one of the best college football teams of all time, 24-12, in a game that many, including my own father, have said made them shed tears of joy. He was a superhero with an archnemesis, his friend and mentor Woody Hayes, a legend in his own right. He made the Wolverines chant, "The Team! The Team! The Team!" before taking the field. And he wasn't just a coach; he was also like a father to so many on his team, even after they'd graduated. When they heard of his death, several players bought tickets back to Ann Arbor immediately, without pause. Former players from a period of more than twenty years came back to share their experiences with Bo, and grown men who had made our most violent sport their life came back to weep and laugh and remember one of their dearest friends. And in fitting legendary style, he died the day before one of the biggest Michigan -- Ohio State games in memory.

Rich Rodriguez is being compared to him because of the intensity of the workouts and Michigan football's recent struggles, but no one could ever be who Bo Schembechler was, and no one ever will be. I'm just glad that we had him while we did--that we, no one else, had been lucky enough to have him with us.

Chinese Spy Caught, Too Late

Washington Post reports: (If this doesn't disturb you, there's a problem.)

Prosecutors called Chi Mak the "perfect sleeper agent," though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.

Eventually, Mak's job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China -- fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.

And it seems that there have been a whole slew of recent arrests of Chinese agents, posing as students, scientists, and more. Some of them have been here for years, seemingly totally assimilated to American culture.

The president, both the current one and the next, must deal with this situation. There needs to be a lot more caution about Chinese nationals in the United States and a lot more caution regarding classified technological information. Mostly, we need to use, publicly, language of moral reproach toward the People's Republic. Call them by name; tell the world what they are. Perhaps there is also an opportunity here to kill two birds with one stone: for example, cancel $500 million in federal debt to China for every spy that is discovered. We need some concrete way of phasing out economic ties with them, or more moderately to use economic pressure to achieve the goals of releasing political prisoners, ending the persecution of Christians and Falun Gong, backing away from Taiwan, and giving incrementally more autonomy to Tibet.

Now that I think about it a bit more, I think the Beijing Olympics are going to be a good thing. We need to use them to continue to step up reporting on China's crimes against humanity, their imperialism, their aggression. Drew Sharp mentioned that we failed to recognize the British monarchy a hundred years ago in the Olympic Games in London; let's go, show them up, and have our athletic contingent publicly disrespect China's overlords for their heinous crimes.

Patriotism

RedState has this offering:

In fine Obama is a Creedalist in his patriotism; and he may have (we cannot yet know) evaded a crippling political blow by means of the vulnerabilities of this theory. Put another way, Obama managed to escape the fact that he and his family have sat under the teaching authority of an openly anti-American preacher, by means of an appeal to the ideals of America.

Read the whole thing.

The difference between creedal and non-creedal patriotism is one I have never encountered before, but I have to say that my gut reaction is to be a non-creedal patriot. My strongest earthly loyalties, such as those to the Wolverines or the state of Michigan in general, are not due to their inherent material superiority, but simply because they are, in a sense, "mine." Ancestrally, in a way. And I think there is a certain virtue in showing loyalty to something simply for loyalty's sake--in fact, it seems as though there is something self-seeking in a loyalty rooted in the superiority of the thing to which one is loyal.

Fish Bowl Effect

There is some news today regarding family issues of a certain Michigan politician whose beliefs I disagree with profoundly. Every family has issues, has secrets they'd like kept, things they wouldn't want anyone to know about and that are no one else's business anyway. One of the unfortunate things about being a politician is that the truth will always out, even truths that are irrelevant to public service.

If you happen to notice who this politician is or what happened, consider keeping that person in your prayers. But it is important anyway not to attribute morality or immorality to someone based on their political beliefs, whether you're a liberal who thinks Bush is "evil" or a conservative who thinks Hillary is the Antichrist.

Sissy Handwringing Over Serious Problems

My first instinct when I saw this was: It sure is nice for SOMEone on the Left (or, really, even on the Right) to notice China's human rights abuses--although merely persecuting Christians hadn't been enough:

Sen. Barack Obama said he is conflicted about whether the U.S. should be a full participant in this summer’s Olympics in Beijing because of China’s human rights record.

“I am of two minds about this,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said in an interview aired Wednesday on CBS’s “The Early Show.” “On the one hand, I think that what has happened in Tibet, China’s support for the Sudanese government in Darfur, is a real problem.”

Still, Obama said, “I am hesitant to make the Olympics a site of political protest because I think it’s partly about bringing the world together.”

Awww. That reminds me of an old Coke commercial. Anyway, then I thought, who the heck cares? Ominously, Drew Sharp:

It's time for people to see the separation of sports and politics as it really is -- an Olympic myth.

And it's time the U.S. tells the Chinese government that it will not tolerate the heightened subjugation of government dissidents in the months leading up to biggest moment in recent Chinese history -- the Beijing Olympics.

And if it continues, the Americans must boycott the Games.

Our state's worst sports writer goes on, naturally, to moralize about the evils of corporations, Big Macs, and Coca-Cola. Maybe he and Obama should chat.

In any case, it's maybe not such a good idea for Obama's foreign policy to hearken back to Carter's. Jimmy Carter, of course, is our best ex-president (in the sense of having been the person most qualified to be made an ex-president) and the last president to boycott the Olympic Games. They were held in the Soviet Union; the USSR had just invaded Afghanistan. Carter figured, hey, the Soviets will probably feel really bad if we deprive our hard-working athletes, who have been waiting for this moment their whole lives, of the chance to earn an Olympic medal. So bad that they'll probably give up that whole war thing! It worked so well that Americans decided to give Carter a nice, long vacation and turned to Ronald Reagan to maybe finish the job. He, famously, armed the native Afghanis, leading to the USSR's demoralizing defeat there.

No one loves a good symbolic act more than liberals, but it's hard to say what exactly the effect is on Communist regimes, who have always tended to be ends-justify-the-means types. On the other hand, it's fairly easy to tell what the effect will be on American morale. Oh, good, no Olympic games for us this year. Guess we'll wait for our star tracksters to age another four years. Too bad there's only a short window for a lot of these players, who have remained amateurs solely to earn the Olympic gold, to compete at the highest level.

Of course, we notably slapped an infamous tyrant in the face during the Olympic Games in 1936, when black athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals on Aryan-supremacist Adolph Hitler's home court. But you're right; boycotting is much better.

Onion News Network: Al Qaeda Disputes 9/11 Truther

(Via Allahpundit at HotAir.com)

"It's like talking to a goat!"




9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

The Party Of Fiscal Responsibility

In today's Washington Post, Paul Weinstein and Marc Dunkelman pick and choose evidence to try to paint Republicans as the party of big spending and Democrats as more responsible. Nice try. Here's a bit:

To Washington insiders, Republican commitment to fiscal discipline has been broken a thousand times. They laugh when they hear Republicans go to the House floor to excoriate Democrats as old tax-and-spend liberals. And they roll their eyes as so-called Republican budget hawks simultaneously call for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, a major factor contributing to endless budget deficits.

The entire column is an illustration of unusually partisan framing and selection of facts. The current situation has an extremely important context going back thirty year to Ronald Reagan. Reagan faced an America that believed itself to be in decline, that had lost its confidence and its nerve in the face of unchecked Soviet aggression and the constant drumbeat of domestic partisans--many of them later revealed as agents of the Soviet Union, and many not--claiming that the era of America was over and the era of socialism had begun. Reagan's plan was most likely the best available: militarily outspend a Soviet Union that he knew could never keep up. The military had languished during the Carter years, a victim of liberal neglect and post-Vietnam malaise. This military build-up required the assistance of a Congress controlled by a Democratic party turned away from its old hawkish ways and focused on increasing social spending; the resulting compromise, in which both sides would simply spend a lot more on what they wanted, made sense at the time and was certainly a bipartisan effort. That doesn't mean that Reagan was simply a big spender; some of his attempts to limit government spending on social programs are reviled by liberals to this day.

After the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Republicans began to concentrate on decreasing spending again. No compromises needed this time; there was no need for a large military build-up anymore, with our major enemy out of the way. The 1994 Contract With America ushered in the first Republican house majority in decades, and a Senate majority as well. Its leader, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich--a former college professor--outlined plans, bitterly opposed by liberals, for term limits, tax reductions, and cuts in spending. A battle erupted; Democrats pulled out every demagogic attack in the book. Those who paid attention to politics in the Nineties might remember how Republicans were attacked for depriving poor children of hot school lunches. Gingrich did not back down, and decided to bring government to a standstill in an attempt to force Clinton to reduce spending. Clinton refused, and the public disapproved of the government shutdown enough for Clinton to prevail. The GOP then passed a line-item veto for spending bills, which was promptly struck down by the Supreme Court. Only welfare reform, a major platform of the 1994 Republican invasion, was successful--and Bill Clinton, after several vetoes, signed and took credit for it.

The general defeat of the Republicans in the spending battles of the Nineties--also hurried along by a booming economy that increased tax revenues without really increasing taxes--led many congressional Republicans to abandon the spending restraints that had originally been so popular. A battle simmered among Republicans, won largely by the bigger spenders with George W. Bush's ascendancy to the White House, with his "compassionate conservatism." Now, the nation had three fiscal camps: a Democratic Party that continued to advocate high taxation and high spending, a GOP wing dominated by social conservatives that wanted moderate spending and low taxation, and a GOP wing dominated by fiscal conservatives and often social moderates who wanted both low spending and low taxation. The battle between the two GOP wings continues to this day, as witnessed in the recent GOP congressional summits and their battles for relevant chairmanships between big earmarkers and fiscal hawks like Jeff Flake and John Campbell.

The truth is that the column above does not ever say how the Democratic Party is more fiscally responsible; the truth is that, although they may have reined in earmarks, they have repeatedly resisted efforts at illuminating the process and have refused to institute a GOP-proposed moratorium on earmarking. But the real issues, the real reasons why the federal budget will continue to balloon--Social Security and Medicare--will never be addressed and will likely only be expanded by Democrats, especially those who are currently running for president. Although an unfortunate number of GOP members have proved themselves totally irresponsible in those areas as well, there are simply no Democrats at all who have proposed meaningful reform in those two all-important areas. The Republican Party is still the nation's only hope for fiscal reform.

Is It A Phobia If It's A Reasonable Fear?

From UPI:

Arab leaders ended a summit in Syria Sunday by issuing a statement lamenting what they see as growing anti-Islamic sentiment around the world.

"The growth of ferocious attacks against Islam and the rise of Islamophobia are a deep source of concern, particularly given that the offenses to Muslims are increasing in countries known for their pluralism and acceptance of difference," said the final statement reported by Gulf Daily News.

These guys sure know how to work a Western crowd. Plead the words "ignorance" and "racism" while being something other than a white male, and you automatically win, facts be hanged. On the whole, it isn't remarkable that "Islamophobia" would be on the rise in the world's most pluralistic countries; those are the very countries most likely to be attacked, because jihadists cannot abide pluralism--and those Arab leaders who are crying out for pluralism aren't exactly paragons of that particular virtue themselves. Neither is it remarkable that anti-Islamic sentiment should be increasing, since the global jihadist network continues to plot, too often successfully, to kill as many infidels as possible in as many nations as possible.

What is remarkable, historically, is that Muslims have not faced exile and death in the Western nations that many (though not all) of their co-religionists attack. There is hardly even any move by them to declare unity with their fellow citizens. The first fact speaks to the commitment to tolerance that our nation has, honestly, taken the lead in championing, and that's a fantastic thing. The second fact speaks to the lack of cultural confidence that plagues America, especially in relation to Islamism.

Now, the title of this post may seem a bit inflammatory; I certainly don't mean that it's reasonable to think that all Muslims are terrorists or want Americans dead. But it is certainly not unreasonable to think of Islam as a whole as a violent religion, spread originally by the sword and with a long history of imperialism, especially considering the rise of jihadism across the world. The global terrorist network is a distinctly Islamic phenomenon, despite Hollywood's best attempts at portraying terrorists as either Communists or, even better, neo-Nazis. The Pope references Islam's history of conversion at swordpoint, and a Turkish priest is shot dead. A few cartoonists poke fun at Mohammed, and there are worldwide riots resulting in fatalities.

Maybe this is the reason why anti-Islamism is on the rise? (Nah...) LiveLeak has, by the way, restored the video to their website after beefing up security; Indonesians have called for the video's creator, Dutch MP Geert Wilders, to be killed. (h/t Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com)

All About 42

Announcing a new blog by a good friend of mine: All About 42, where Mr. 42 himself talks about the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It'll basically be stuff that Danny thinks is cool, so, needless to say, it will be a must-read blog. That's why I'm adding it to my new friends blogroll, which feature will be...featured...on my left side-bar. Check it OOUUTT!

Obama: New Politician Or Old Partisan?

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey reports on some interesting news:

Politico has caught Barack Obama in another misstatement about his past, and this one goes right to the heart of his posing as a New Politics candidate. Working on a tip from opposition sources, Kenneth Vogel found a survey with Obama’s handwriting that he had previously denied handling. It shows that Obama himself established much more liberal positions on gun control, abortion, and other issues than he has admitted in his campaign.

The answers--apparently written by a staffer and then supplemented with handwritten notes by Obama himself--supported a total ban on firearm possession and manufacture, non-requirement of parental notification for abortion for anyone over the age of 14, and the abolition of the death penalty. These things might sound moderate to the average churchgoer at Trinity United Church of Christ, but...

John McCain's presidential bid has been characterized by resolution in the face of adversity and, with a few exceptions, holding to principles shared by a majority of Americans and, incidentally, a majority of conservatives. Hillary Clinton's campaign has been characterized by a by-any-means-necessary attitude that has hurt her popularity but hurt Obama's, as well. What has characterized Barack Obama's campaign? Repeated deceit and pure emotional exploitation. Many of us suspected all along that Barack Obama's middle-way speechifying was pure politics; from his NAFTA dance, to the lie about his connection to the civil rights movement, and to his backtracking about his mentor/mere pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and now this...well, Barack Obama is shaping up to be about as shamelessly deceitful as, well, someone else we know.

There Are No Cinderellas

Guess their advertising was true; no Cinderellas this year--at least, not in the Final Four--as Kansas just eked out a win against Davidson 59-57. For the first time, the Final Four is entirely made up of top-seeded teams.

Not so in the Frozen Four, however; although top-overall-seeded Michigan advanced past Clarkson with a magnificent 2-0 shutout by Billy Sauer and two more points for c'mon-obvious Hobey Baker favorite Kevin Porter, lowest-ranked at-large team Notre Dame sent Spartina packing with a 3-1 victory in the West regional finals to advance to the first Frozen Four in Fighting Irish history. Michigan's trip to Denver is an NCAA record twenty-third Frozen Four appearance. (!)

Michigan Advances To East Semifinals; Wisconsin Killed And Eaten By Davidson

Michigan won 5-1 on the back of a Kevin Porter hat trick + empty net goal. Pacioretty scored first followed by Porter in the second period after a scoreless first; then Porter scored another THREE goals in the third. Niagara scored one after Michigan had already taken a 4-0 lead and secured the outcome of the game. Now Michigan must defeat the 3-seed from the ECAC, Clarkson.

Notre Dame scored seven (7) goals today against New Hampshire to advance to the West semifinals in Colorado Springs. Just to put this in perspective, Notre Dame's scoring is very poor this year and their best player was out. Yikes. UND will go on to play the winner of Colorado College vs. Spartina for the chance to play in the Frozen Four in Denver; it was 0-0 about halfway through the first period last I heard.

But the big basketball news: Stephen Curry and his teammates today beat Wisconsin today by a lot. No specific numbers, just a lot, like when people forget to keep score in a pickup game because the teams are so uneven. So Davidson will proceed to (almost assuredly) play Kansas in the Elite Eight; Kansas's potential road to the Final Four will now include no one higher than an 8-seed, as tenth-seeded Davidson awaits them after twelfth-seeded Villanova.