You've Got to be Kidding, Girls

A decade or so ago we all laughed about political correctness.  It was so stupid that nobody could have been taken in by it.

But here we have, in 2007, a program of deliberate indoctrination of college students, political correctness run wild at the University of Delaware, according to Mike S. Adams.

The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed - in the university’s own tax-payer funded materials - as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.

You know what those incorrect attitudes are.  And you know the penalty.

One student was identified in a write-up as the “worst” one-on-one session stating that she was tired of “having diversity shoved down her throat.”

Now we have Congress working on another major problem, writes Allison Kasic.  It’s the underrepresentation of women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—in the university. In the first day of hearings conducted by Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA),

[n]o Committee Member or panelist challenged the presumption behind the hearing—that discrimination is the primary cause of women’s underrepresentation among science and engineering academics[.]

I’m sorry, girls, but this doesn’t pass the smell test.  Do you really think that, in 2007, there is a male faculty member in the university who would dare to discriminate against a woman, for any reason whatsoever?

Oh sure, there may be some men around who might sneer behind a woman’s back.  But no academic today in America would dare to risk a career in such a way.

Anyone who has the kind of cojones you need to buck the system like that is in finance or a technology startup, not in the university.

But let us suppose that women do suffer discrimination in STEM.  Is it really a problem that rises to the level of legislation?  Is this egregious discrimination that amounts to a civil rights matter?  Or is it just an annoyance?  Should important solons be taking time out from other important educational matters, such as the abysmal state of K-12 education, for instance, to solve this problem?

Come on, girls, you’ve got to be kidding.

We conservatives could take a Leninist view of this: The Worse The Better.  Or we could take a Rhett Butler view of it: Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

After all, conservatives have been run out of the university and marginalized in academe to an extent that must certainly exceed any discrimination that women suffer in STEM.

But the fact is that we do care.  The universities do matter.  And it matters that liberals are running the universities into the ground as they slowly ratchet up the level of compulsion and as they force every student, every faculty member, every building, and every ivied wall to conform to their belief system. 

Just as they have ruined everything else in the government by an excessive faith in the power of rational compulsion.

But really, what can we do?

Stuck on Stupid? Dems Want Carter Era Tax Rates

The central idea of the Reagan revolution was that punitive tax rates, like the 70 percent top rate on “unearned” income, was a jobs killer.  Greedy entrepreneurs just won’t go out and risk capital when the government is going to claw back up to 70 percent of their earnings.

Liberals sneered at the Laffer Curve and called it “trickle-down” economics.  But they pocketed their TIAA-CREF pensions swollen with the gains from a stock market that went from 1,000 to 10,000 in 20 years with nary a squeak.

Now Democrats like the sepuagenarian Charles Rangel want to return to those days, last seen in the Carter administration, by raising tax rates for high-income Americans.   James Pethokoukis explains.

[Rangel’s 4.6 percentage-point surtax on high incomes] only looks like a restoration of [Clinton’s tax rates]. But if the Bush tax cuts expire, the four-and-a-half points stays on top of the 39.6 [top Clinton tax rate]. So they are taking the rate to 44 percent. Then you add on 1.3 points ... another 2.9 points on top of that for the Medicare tax. So we are back to the 50 percent marginal rate under that plan.

But that’s just the beginning.  In addition, the Democrats are talking about raising the cap on FICA taxes.  So that’s another 7 1/2 percent.  Now we are talking about 60 percent marginal taxes.  On wages.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that the top 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 37 percent of federal income taxes, and that the top 50 percent of taxpayers pay 97 percent of federal income taxes.  Check it out at RushLimbaugh.com (truth in taxes) or the IRS(xls).

It’s just like the 1930s when for ten years, the United States was Stuck on Stupid.

NYT Hoping Religious Right Will Go Away

It’s as regular as clockwork: the article in The New York Times reporting that the religious right is about to go away.  This time it’s David D. Kirkpatrick’s turn.

The old warhorses of the Religious Right are dying off, and many church communities are tired of hearing about politics from the preacher’s lectern.  They are also tired and conflicted about the Iraq War.  And what about Rudy Giuliani?

[He] could hardly be less like their kind of guy: twice divorced, thrice married, estranged from his children and church and a supporter of legalized abortion and gay rights.

That is, unless he turns out to be their kind of guy.  Then comes the inevitable paragraph:

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

The trouble with this sort of wishful thinking is that it rather ignores the elephant in the room.  It is one thing for Democratic presidential candidates to make nicey nicey with the voters about their religious beliefs.  But it doesn’t change the fact that the Democratic Party is a party of the secular, the single, and the childless.

Real Democrats expect their leaders to advance the banner of Peace and Justice, meaning more and bigger government programs for slacker liberals and more and more stringent hate-crime laws to protect the GLTB community from the tsunami of gay-bashing that we all know is poised to engulf America.

Evangelical Christians just aren’t into all that stuff.  Whatever The New York Times may say.

Evangelicals are mostly nice decent married people with children who believe in being decent and neighborly and in live-and-let-live.

Most us us could learn something from them.

"Limited Lives" of Media Professionals

How can we best understand the Scott Thomas mess?  Why did the editors at The New Republic not realize that the “Baghdad Diaries” of Scott Thomas Beauchamp didn’t pass the smell test?

It’s because they only “saw it in a movie,” writes Peggy Noonan.  You remember, the great anti-war movies of “Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone.” 

Shall we say that those movies were a little too focused on sending a message?

What we are seeing here is the naivete of the modern media.  Says Noonan:

It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business.

Noonan was lucky, she realizes.  She came up through CBS News—she used to write Dan Rather’s radio commentaries—and in those days the network was still under “the influence of the Murrow boys.”  Those guys had lived a little, and they had a nose for “a bunch of hooey.”

But our modern media boys and girls do not.

What is the Difference Between Kerry and Beauchamp?

What’s the difference between John Kerry and his Winter Soldier accusations and Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his Baghdad Diarist (cached) accusations?

Both of them were shown to be false.

Yet John Kerry went on to become a United States Senator and a nominee for the office of President of the United States.  It looks like Pvt. Beauchamp will just serve out his term in the army and then disappear. 

I’ll tell you the difference.  John Kerry is an elite liberal.  Beauchamp is just a slacker liberal. 

John Kerry went to Yale, met with Hubert Humphrey and went from strength to strength.  He knew how to play politics and how to keep his nerve when peddling utterly false propaganda about US atrocities in Vietnam.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp was just a kid from St. Louis with a fantasy about being the next Hemingway.  He just didn’t know how to play the game of liberal politics.

Anyway, while the New Republic is obviously in full coverup mode, it looks like the Army is looking after its own.  Michael Yon happened to meet Beauchamp’s commanding officer, LTC George Glaze, in Iraq.

LTC Glaze seemed protective of Beauchamp, despite how the young soldier had maligned his fellow soldiers. In fact, the commander said Beauchamp, having learned his lesson, was given the chance to leave or stay.
...
But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

Almost brings a tear to your eye.  We can hope, after it’s all over, that Scott Thomas Beauchamp won’t be a liberal.  He deserves better.

Government Worsens Hard Times

Remember the story of the Great Depression.  Michael Medved does.  It goes something like this:

Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while the Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation.

But soon enough, Happy Days Were Here Again.

Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and a flurry of radical reform in his first hundred days in office. While conservatives squealed, this “new deal for the American people” improved the lives of everyone and got the economy humming again — just in time to face the challenges of World War II.

Only it wasn’t like that.  President Hoover was very busy expanding government to beat the Depression, and Roosevelt expanded his policies.  The unemployment rate hit 17 percent in 1931 and stayed high for the rest of the decade. “At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14%.”

So what went wrong.  Plenty.  And most of it was caused by government.  Medved tells the tale.

1. The New Deal prolonged the depression.
2. Recessions end quicker without government intervention.
3. In the old days, the advocates for the poor called for less government, not more.
4. There was more economic mobility when government was smaller.
5. The Great Society programs of the 1960s worsened the plight of the poor.
6. Government programs crowd out private charity.
7. “Nostalgia and political correctness cloud consciousness of the recent past.”

Go ahead.  Check out Medved’s article and read the whole thing.

The End of Socialized Medicine?

Just as Hillary Clinton is about to get her hands on the nation’s health-care system, Peter W. Huber reckons it’s too late.

Universal health care is a “superstructure,” to use the Marxian term, built upon germ theory medicine.  You can eradicate cholera and neo-natal deaths with a universal one-size-fits-all program.  The problem is fairly simple and the solution is within the capabilities of government bureaucracy.

But the new medicine is life-style related.  If you eat too many Cherry Garcias, Huber writes, and you have a propensity for high cholesterol levels, then you are headed for trouble.

You can cure your cholesterol risk with a drug like Lipitor or you can fix it with healthy eating.

The government can’t really solve the problem of elevated cholesterol levels with one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.

For the government is in a bind. It subsidizes the health care of the feckless.  It the old days, this made sense because a universal program to eradicate tuberculosis really did benefit everyone.

But health care to correct poor life-style choices is different.  The healthy pay for the fecklessness of the feckless, and it ain’t cheap.

The passive, clueless, and feckless must get ruinously expensive, last-ditch care because they don’t show up until it’s too late for anything else, and universal means what it says.

That means that, sooner or later, universal health care will start to lose political support.

The pocketbook-healthy eventually tired of paying for welfare that persistently failed to end poverty; the health-healthy will tire of paying for health care that persistently fails to improve health. However selfless and generous people may be, responsible types eventually despair of trying to cure self-destructive behavior from a distance.

It’s an interesting theory.  But I think it is way out on the bleeding edge.  I’d say it will be a generation before we get real reform of health care.

There are just too many slacker liberal votes out there in favor of it. 

Not By Age, But Life Expectancy

The government’s entitlements like Social Security are based on age entitlements.  At age 62 you can get early retirement on Social Security.  At age 65 you start Medicare.  But government researchers are looking at another approach, writes Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. 

The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth, both in common practice and in the law, rather than alternative measures reflecting a person’s stage in the lifecycle distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios.

Get the idea?  Change the entitlement for Social Security from age 62 to the age at which you have a 15 year life expectancy. 

The chaps at Marginal Revolution seem to think this is a great idea.  But I wonder.

As a 61 year-old, I really don’t want to be forced to work until 70 or something before I get my Social Security.  The fact is that most people, once they have raised their children, start to slow down.  And our brains, as well as our bodies, slow down too.  We get ready to get out of the rat race.  If only we could.

Of course, with a judicious combination of work and savings, I can adjust my work effort and income to suit myself.  But with a mechanical government program, that’s not possible.  Somebody else sets the rules.  And the rules are not necessarily in anyone’s best interest.

In fact, the trouble with the government’s entitlement programs is that they respond only too readily to the universal human willingness to live at the expense of others.

Hey!  I’ve worked hard for ___ (fill in the blank) years.  I deserve it.  The folks in Europe certainly do.

And once you have the government program in place then you are reduced to arguing over whether to juggle the benefits this way or that way, or change the eligibility upwards or downwards.  Individuals and families are not longer in control.  But the monster stays.

The entitlement problem will not be solved by mechanical means, juggling this or that parameter.  It will be solved by raw political power.

That may not be a pretty sight.

Will The Atheists' Plan Work?

What with Governor-elect Bobby Jindal’s win in Louisiana (yes, they are celebrating back at his village in India) and Dinesh D’Souza’s new book out his month, race manipulators may start to wonder if South Asians are becoming overrepresented somehow or other. 

That’s what happened about a century ago when the immigrant Jews started becoming too eminent too quickly and turning up at the gates of Harvard.

But never mind about that. Let’s talk about D’Souza’s book instead.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book is called What’s So Great About Christianity.  In an excerpt he wonders about the atheists’ grand plan to convert the masses. 

The strategy can be described simply: let the religious people breed them, and we will educate them to despise their parents’ beliefs.

This is not new, of course.  Schools and universities have been indoctrinating children in the wonders of the nation state for at least a couple of centuries.  The Germans were a dab hand at that, creating a national school system in Prussia during the Napoleonic wars in order to rebuilt the German nation and beat back the French.

The question is: will it work?  It’s all very well for the atheists to write all their books and prove that transcendental religion is a crock.  What do they have to replace it, and can they learn from Chesterton’s warning that people who do not believe in God will believe in anything?

Elite atheism works rather well for people ensconced in prestigious university chairs.  Secure financially and spiritually in the comfortable groves of academe their belief system need not extend further than the glory of reason and the divine, er, universal truth of academic tenure and freedom.

But ordinary people in the real world face terrors that the university professor can only begin to imagine.  They need something a little more robust and a little more powerful than university secularism.

I went to Gluck’s opera Iphigenie in Tauris over the weekend.  It’s a story about the revenge of the gods and the awful fate of princes of the blood—in this case Iphigenie and Orestes, the surviving children of Agamemnon. 

The king of Tauris turns up at the temple of Diana (run by Iphigenie) in a terror lest the gods take revenge on him for his crimes—much like Al Gore runs around today warning of climate change if we don’t repent of our environmental crimes. 

The solution to the king’s problem, he reckons, is sacrifice, preferably the sacrifice of any strangers turning up in Tauris, and he gives the job to Iphigenie.  That should appease the gods—just like hybrid cars and low-energy light bulbs are recommended for saving the planet today.

Of course his grand plan gets ditched because the first stranger who turns up in Tauris is Orestes, Iphigenie’s brother.  Iphigenie finds that she just can’t quite bring herself to sacrifice her own brother, especially since she hasn’t seen him for fifteen years.

Christianity has a rather different strategy.  It turns the tables.  Instead of human sisters sacrificing their human brothers, God does all the sacrificing instead, once for all, by sacrificing his Son.

And in this blood sacrifice. the greatest blood sacrifice of all time, God says that he forgives us humans for all our wicked ways.

It’s a truly remarkable concept, you’ll have to admit.  God sacrifices his Son so we don’t have to sacrifice our own sons.

There’s an interesting corollary to God’s offer that will be obvious to all sensitive souls.  If God forgives us, shouldn’t we forgive, in return, the mother-in-law and the others in our life who torment us?

I don’t know if the atheists have thought of this, but I would recommend that they gin up something similar.  Otherwise their ingenious plan to indoctrinate our children might not work out.

People might start asking: What’s So Great About Atheism?

A Tale of the Times

As we battle on in the culture wars, trading barbs and op-eds back at headquarters, it is good to pause and find out what is going on at the front lines.  

I was struck recently by this report on a cohabiting couple by Sandra Parsons.  She writes about the experience of a thirtysomething woman of her acquaintance. 

I’ll call her Anna, who for the past ten years has lived with her partner, who I’ll call Harry. They have two young children. For years, Anna said to Harry she thought that they should get married, for the sake of the children if nothing else. Harry refused.

Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?  This is the twenty-first century, after all and women are free from the necessity of  depending on a man. 

Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.  Let’s go on.

Anna had a job when they first got together but gave up work when she had her first child. This suited her; she wanted to be at home.

And it suited Harry too.  He gave his er, partner, $160 per week to cover the groceries and every other expense she might incur.

You might ask why Anna accepted this situation. The answer is because she is a gentle, fragile soul with no stomach for a fight. She pretended to herself for a long time that everything was all right, and then she went to see her GP, who gave her antidepressants.

Shall I go on?  Fueled by something, maybe the antidepressants,

Anna has now decided she has had enough. She wants to leave Harry. When she told him, his response was that it was his house, his money and his children.

Oh, and by the way, Harry would fight for custody, “using her depression as his weapon.”  Nice chap that Harry.

One of the things we are learning, in this age of independent, liberated women, is what the point of that silly little piece of paper, the marriage certificate, is all about.

It is to protect women—many of whom are gentle souls without the killer instinct—from their own gentle, loving instincts.

You can see that if society sets up a rule—say, no sex without marriage—then it protects a lot of gentle souls who just want to love and have a baby.

Because if a gentle soul cohabits with a man and has his children and settles down to raise them then she is not going to be in a very good situation when it’s time to trade her in for a newer model.  Especially if she is depressed because of his continual low-level cruelty.

The bottom line is that there is no such thing as an “independent woman,” any more than there is such a thing as an independent man.  When a woman gets in the family way, she needs help.  And not just help, but safety.  The safest thing for her and the kiddies, studies show, is to be married to the biological father of the children.

You could look it up.

Civil Society in Iraq?

When the United States first invaded Iraq you could tell that the Iraqis only knew to obey.  When will “security” be restored, they asked.

It’s possible, top-down peace and security, but it’s not the best kind.  It’s the difference between “society” and the “state.”  The state is the agency of force and compulsion.  Society is the medium of peace and reconciliation.

Now it looks like the Iraqis are finally fed up and they are taking responsibility for peace and security from the bottom up.  That’s what I get from Cliff May’s report on the situation in Iraq.  He talked to “Col. Wayne W. Grigsby, Jr., who commands a ‘surge’ brigade based in a mixed Sunni and Shia area near Baghdad.”

“The Iraqi people are fed up with the violence and with the extremists, both Sunni and Shia,” Grigsby said. Far from “resisting” the American troops in their communities, “they want to join the fight and protect their neighborhoods. They are coming to us and saying, ‘How can we help? We don’t want to live like this.’”

I’d say that you can’t read any better news than that.

Let’s hope it’s true. 

Understanding the Risks We Take

How do you know what risk you are taking?  That’s the subject of a book by Riccardo Rebonato, Plight of the Fortune Tellers.

The problem is that most people in business really don’t know what could happen if things go south.  So Rebonato’s book enables us to think again about notorious debacles like Enron, writes Arnold Kling.

[T]he main reason that Enron got into trouble, I believe, is that for years Enron’s executives and its Board did not understand how it was making its money and the risks involved.

Of course when things started to go badly wrong, Enron’s management started to cheat, and that’s what everyone remembers.  People do that when they get in a hole.  When Nick Leeson, a trader at Barings Bank, got in a hole trading in Nikkei 225 and Japanese bond derivatives  he made such a mess cheating his way out that he took the entire bank down with losses that exceeded one billion dollars.  And Barings didn’t have a clue what he was doing.  Not until it was too late.

How do you evaluate risks?   That is the problem in all kinds of business activity, including most recently sub-prime mortgage-backed securities business.

In the 1980s and 1990s Arnold Kling worked for Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giant.  The problem for Freddie Mac was to evaluate what would happen to their assets and liabilities in interest rates changed.

One of the reports that we developed was something that we called the NPV Curve. This report gave an estimate of the value of the company if all assets and liabilities were evaluated at current market prices, and then estimated how this value would change if interest rates were to rise or fall by one percentage point, two percentage points, and three percentage points.

In fact Freddie Mac set up their assets and liabilities so that they could just about survive a ten-year deflation in housing prices equivalent to the Great Depression.

In real life, of course, the future may be worse than the Great Depression.  But we can hardly conceive of such a dismal future.  But by combining the NPV Curve with a Great Depression scenario an institution can develop a set of rules to understand its risks and manage them.

That’s a tool we all could use.

Coercion in the Liberal University

We all shake our heads at the absurdities of the movement ironically called political correctness.  But, the problem is that it impacts real lives, as George Will reminds us.

Quoting from a report from the National Association of Scholars, “The Scandal of Social Work Education,” he writes:

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice "from local to global levels."

Nothing wrong with that, unless you actually start to coerce students into “advocacy.”

For more than a century the left has been teaching us about the hegemony of the west in imposing its views on the poor.

But there’s no problem when it comes to imposing their views on us.  That’s just “advocacy.”

In fact, it’s ok to force students to do political advocacy as a part of their university course work.

Writes Will: “In 2005, Emily Brooker” enrolled in a class where

a mandatory assignment for his class was to advocate homosexual foster homes and adoption, with all students required to sign an advocacy letter, on university stationery, to the state Legislature.

Brooker objected to the assignment on religious grounds.  She was charged with a violation of professional standards, and was ordered to write a report on how she could reduce the gap between her views and the ethics of the social work profession.

When she sued the university, it dropped the charges and made financial and other restitution.

Maybe there’s an opportunity here.  Liberals have made the class-action lawsuit into a fearsome weapon of progressive politics.  Maybe conservatives should start suing when their academic—not to mention religious—freedom is violated by the hegemonic professors in government universities.

But let us be of good cheer.  This sort of coercion is only needed because the social work establishment is getting panicky.  And it’s significant that the education schools are up to the same tricks.

When you can’t win by persuasion, that’s when you turn to coercion.

Who's Phoney Now?

Ever since the invention of the steam-driven printing press wise heads have advised hot-blooded youngsters not to tangle with the media: Never fight with a guy who owns his own printing press.  That’s what they said.

But recently prominent Democrats decided to mix it up with Rush Limbaugh on the question of who is the bigger patriot.

It’s beginning to look as if the old rule still applies:  Son, never mix it up with a guy who owns his own Golden EIB Microphone.

A couple of weeks ago Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and 40 other Democratic senators sent a public letter to the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, the parent of Rush’s radio show.  The letter excoriated Rush for impugning the honor of anti-war military veterans.

Now it’s Rush’s turn to respond. As reported on RushLimbaugh.com the letter from Senator Reid has been offered for sale on eBay.

Here is what we are going to do with Senator Reid’s letter.  Tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon on my award-winning program, I am going to announce that we are auctioning this letter on eBay.

Of course, Rush does not propose to take the proceeds and spend it on himself.  Rush is a board member on The Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation, a charity that provides scholarships to the children of fallen United States Marines, and he’ll send the eBay selling price to them.  And he’ll match it with an equal amount of his own money.

Will Harry Reid match Rush’s contribution?  He’s a wealthy real-estate investor and ought to be able to pony up some cash to help the children of America’s veterans.

Here’s another suggestion.  Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has received $15,000 in contributions from Guardian Marine, builder of a $4.5 million boat that the U.S. Navy didn’t want, according to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. 

Murray and two other Democrats from the Washington State congressional delegation

exercised their political muscle to slip language into a 2002 spending bill to force the Navy to buy the boat from Edmonds [WA] shipbuilder Guardian Marine International.

The Navy gave the boat to the University of Washington which doesn’t need it either.

So here’s an idea Sen. Murray.  Why don’t you contribute $15,000 to the Marine Corps - Law Enforcement Foundation and demonstrate your support for our fighting men and women?  Anyone can sign a letter bad-mouthing Rush Limbaugh.  But helping the children of fallen warriors with your own money is real, tangible support.

It might even clean your hands a little.

Here’s the mc-lef.org url to make on-line contributions, Senator.

"But Critics Say"

It was impressive to watch the network news on Friday as they marked the announcement of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize for climate change advocacy.  Among other things, they celebrated the number of hybrid cars bought and the number of fluorescent light bulbs installed.

While nobody would want to rain on Al Gore’s victory parade, one cannot imagine that if President Bush had won an award the reports would lack the all important “But Critics Say” paragraph.  Yet there was not a breath of a suggestion that Al Gore’s ideas were in the least controversial.

We conservatives first noticed the important cultural artifact “But Critics Say” during the Reagan years, and really got to miss it when it went into decline during the Clinton administration.

But climate critic Dr. William Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University said to an audience at the University of North Carolina,  as reported by Steve Lytte:

[A] period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.
"We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

Dr. Gray is an expert in the forecasting of hurricanes.  “We’re brainwashing our children,” he said.

The Nobel Peace Prize is certainly a remarkable institution.  Probably the best way to understand it is as an annual expression of the current enthusiasm of the bien-pensant global academic middle class.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But all the celebration of climate change advocacy makes it difficult to be a critic.  Dr. Gray:

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants."

And what is academic freedom worth without a grant for academic research?

Damning Hillary with Faint Praise

Many conservatives must be mulling over the same thoughts as ACharles Krauthammer.  If Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president what does it mean for me?  Writes Krauthammer:

I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her — precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband’s — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e. self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason.

You have to admire the Clintons.  They certainly make the most out of their situation: leading a liberal party in a conservative country.

Maybe a Clinton presidency is the best prospect for conservatives in this period of conservative exhaustion.  If they really are as “flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated” as Krauthammer wants them to be then they are the right people to lead the nation while conservatives rest and recuperate—and do the serious thinking needed before floating in on the next conservative flood tide.

Their Jihad and Ours

Ever since the seven century, we are all constantly reminded, jihad has been a one-way ticket to Islam.  The jihad warriors conquered the ground, sweeping out of Arabia, westwards along the south shore of the Mediterranean and north through Spain, eastwards across the ancient lands of Persia and the great civilization of India.

But they were not just nomad bands, strewing destruction in their wake.  They offered a remarkable proposition to the peoples that they conquered, as Lee Harris makes clear in his review of The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.

The Muslim victors could have condemned their victims to everlasting servitude, but they didn’t.  They gave them a choice.  They could stay as they were, a conquered and humiliated people, or they could join the victors and surrender to Islam.

Quite a concept, writes Harris.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any method by which a quicker pacification of a conquered people could be achieved than by allowing them to make a swift and easy transition from being outsiders to being insiders

If you were a Christian or a Jew, you were permitted a middle way, of dhimmitude.  You could keep to your religion of the book, but you had to acknowledge the supremacy of Islam.

It has been a remarkably successful proposition down the centuries.  Very seldom has Islam retreated from the lands it had conquered not just by the sword but with the word of Mohammed. 

So the question is: How can we, in the enlightened tolerant west, contest on equal terms with such a powerful ideological force

The answer is that we have a pretty powerful jihad concept of our own.  Just like the Muslim jihad it is a program of world conquest.  And it offers a remarkable menu of benefits to those that surrender to its will.

You already know its name.  It is the movement of democratic capitalism informed by the spirit of Christianity.

It began in the despair of Jewish defeat in the Roman Empire and grew with the conversion of rich women in the cities around the Mediterranean.  From monasteries in northern Europe in the dark ages it took over the minds of the feudal nobility.

And then about half a millennium ago in the aftermath of the religious upheaval we call the Reformation it started to go global.  It was a force of remarkable power and it spread across the world, for its strength was not just spiritual, but economic, political, cultural, and military.

In place of tribal gods it offered the God that saved all of mankind.  In political terms it offered the community of language to transcend the community of the kindred.  In economic terms it offered a community of trust that was proven by acts of trustworthiness.  In cultural terms it offered a separation between cultural power and religious power, and in military terms it offered the strength of the western team and delegation combined with the economic power of the community of trust.

And anyone could join.  All they had to do was to liberate themselves from the limited trust boundaries of the blood kindred—the tribe or clan—and learn to expand the boundaries of trust as far as they could tolerate, beyond the boundary of blood kin, even beyond the boundary of language and religion to the horizon of humanity itself.

The chief block against the expansion of this European idea was Islam.  On the west was the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean; on the east was the implacable foe of Islam.  But the development of ocean transportation in the fifteenth century allowed the jihad warriors of capitalism under Christianity to outflank Islam in the east by establishing trade routes to India around the continent of Africa and migrate westward across the Americas and thence to China.

Growing slowly at first and then with gathering speed, the capitalist Christian jihad has finally achieved the capitulation of the two great ancient cultures of the world: India and China.  Now we are left with a single holdout, Islam, inoculated against the western virus by its own jihad faith, is facing what may be a final challenge.

In the tumultuous confrontation between two jihad armies, can the jihad of Islam survive?  Will the next century see the final annihilation of Islamic jihad in a double envelopment, the traditional German Kesselschlacht?  Or will the jihad warriors achieve a breakout from the Middle East into the population collapse of western Europe?

That, of course, is the Question.  President Bush has made the first steps to oppose the breakout and to divide up the homelands of jihad.  It will be up to his successors and up to us what happens next.

For it is true that, just as we understood in the Cold War that communism and capitalism were in a contest for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world, the outcome of the present war depends upon a similar understanding, a multigenerational covenant to contain and neutralize the virus spreading out of Araby.

Now We Are Six

Used to be there was childhood and adulthood.  Then there was old age.  Then, about a hundred years ago they invented adolescence.

Now they’d added a new one.

So now David Brooks, emerging from behind the Times Select wall of silence, can write:

There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age.

“Odyssey” is the new stage. 

During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.

Well, yes.  It’s true.  But only to a limited extent.  Liberal 20-somethings do all that.

And you can go back a couple of hundred years and see the odyssey years emerging in the children of the educated middle class in the early nineteenth century.  Take Marx and Engels.  They were traveling around Europe in their twenties having a grand old revolutionary time.  Then they settled down to write a manifesto.

But there’s a problem.  Adolescence and odyssey only make sense for the children of the educated middle class, the kind of people who do sixteen years of education straight off the bat and then look around for a creative quest to engage their adult years.  For everyone else adolescence and odyssey are a waste of time,

Often the adolescence and odyssey years are worse than a waste of time, they are actually profoundly harmful.

Take the young man who hates high school.  He’s really learning stuff, isn’t he, as he sits in high school wanting desperately to get out into the world.

Take the twenty-something slacker.  He’s really having an odyssey hanging out in Austin, TX, or Seattle, WA, doing nothing much.

Take the thirty-ish career women.  She’s got about eighteen months to get married and start a baby before fertility problems start to set in.

The worst thing is that this adolescence/odyssey culture has been forced on our youth more or less at the point of a gun.  Unless you organize your life in the approved liberal fashion, this society really isn’t set up to help you. 

In fact it actually hinders you.  Suppose you are the son of a building contractor.  Best thing for you would be to get out on the building site at about age 12 and drive equipment around. Maybe you would take time out for a few courses in drafting and business finance.

But you can’t do that.  The operators’ union will be after you for underage equipment operation, and the school district will be after you for truancy.

So you are left just hanging out until you are allowed to start your life by the liberal gatekeepers.

Brooks is right.  Our society does have an “odyssey” decade.  But now we need to relax the liberal cultural hegemony so that other life paths are allowed.

Or even encouraged.

Check the "Back Story" of every Dem Sob Story

The right-wing blogosphere has been having a grand old time with the Democrats’ latest poster child.  A 12-year-old boy gave the Democrats’ weekly radio address a couple of weeks ago and used the opportunity to advocate for the S-CHIP program, a government health program for not-so-poor children. 

Democrats have recently passed an expansion of S-CHIP and President Bush has vetoed it. So Democrats have been hauling out the sob stories to develop the political momentum to override the president’s veto.

The centerpiece of their campaign, reported by Samantha Sault on the Weekly Standard blog, is

Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old boy from Baltimore, MD, whose parents relied on Maryland’s S-chip program to pay for his health care following a severe car accident.

The MSM dutifully copied the Democrats’ talking points without using its army of editors and fact-checkers, but the blogger icwhatudo did check up on the Frost family.  Among other things he found out that

Graeme and his sister Gemma attend the Park School, a private school that costs $20,000 per child.

Their parents live in a recently remodeled 3,000 sq ft home and father Halsey Frost owns his own business.

We’ll see a lot more of this sort of shell game from the Democrats and I have a theory about it.

Liberals really don’t know any poor people, so a lot of the juicy government programs don’t really go to benefit poor people: they go to benefit well-connected Democrats like the Frosts.  And why not?  If you can save on health insurance for the kids and get the taxpayers to foot the bill why then you can spend money on private education and home-remodeling.

(But I suspect that the Frosts also have some private money.  Check with grandma, fellas.)

The thing about government programs is that there’s only about enough media bandwidth for the average person to know about, say, five programs.  After Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and the public schools the whole thing starts to become a blur.  Who has the time to do the research to find out what program you are eligible for?

I’ll tell you who: well-connected Democrats.  Imagining, advocating, managing, and just knowing about government programs is what they do in life.  So you are always likely to find a well-connected Democrat at the head of the line for the next government handout.

Bottom line: checking on the back story of Democrat sob stories is going to be a rich vein for conservative bloggers to mine.  Because the chance is always going to be high that any poster boy or girl that the Dems present for a media opportunity is going to be only a couple of degrees of connection from a powerful Democratic politician.

Democrats' Pretzel Patriotism

The fuss over Rush Limbaugh and the “phoney soldiers” (is it phoney or phony?) flap is all about patriotism and the questioning thereof.  Jonah Goldberg gets deep into the subject.

[L]iberals routinely and righteously condemn the “questioning” of anyone’s patriotism — until they have a chance to do it themselves. For example, in the debates over the formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of Patriot Act, Democrats accused George Bush and the GOP leadership of questioning Democrats’ patriotism.

Or John Kerry before the Council on Foreign Relations:

“I know what the Bush apologists will say to this — that it is unpatriotic to question, to criticize and to call for change.”  

You are not allowed to call Democrats unpatriotic, and generally speaking, Republicans don’t.  They merely hint at it.  But the rules don’t apply to Democrats.  Writes Goldberg:

Sen. Bob Graham called Bush’s war policy “anti-patriotic at the core.” Kerry dubbed Bush’s “creed of greed” — you guessed it — “unpatriotic.”

John Kerry?  Calling someone else unpatriotic?  Sure, and he’s not the only one.

And now with Rush Limbaugh, Democrats, starting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are lining up to call the radio host “unpatriotic” and do whatever they can to discredit him.

The truth is, of course, that Democrats are caught in a bind here.  For decades they have been mocking the idea of patriotism and nationalism.  They have been urging us to move on beyond the primitive nation state to a global world order.  They are all in favor of things like the United Nations and the European Union.

Their adepts, the left-wing netroots, are fully invested in the idea. They went to college and listened to their liberal college professors and they agree with their teachers.  Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. They don’t understand why the Democrats don’t stand up for their principles.

The reason, dear netroots, is that they can’t.  The overwhelming majority of Americans are patriotic and they believe in the nation state.  Democrats can tell each other in the faculty lounge that patriotism is a form of bigotry.  They can even say it in liberal precincts like San Francisco and Seattle.  But they can’t say that on the campaign trail if they want to be elected to state-wide or national office.  You just can’t get elected to national political office in America by trashing America. 

In fact, the Democrats tried it once, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  It didn’t work too well.  President Ronald Reagan was the result.

Since then Democrats have twisted themselves in knots with Pretzel Patriotism.  They demand that nobody questions their patriotism.  That’s because they can’t afford to let that happen.  They have to come up with weasel notions like Howard Zinn’s: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” 

But when it comes to patriotic Americans like Rush Limbaugh, hey, it’s Katie bar the door. Take anything he says out of context and blast him for assaulting the patriotism of the anti-war crowd.

But wait a minute.  I thought the Peace people had got beyond primitive notions like the nation state.

Understanding the Left

It’s a week in which leading Democrats have determined to demonstrate that in spite of the pressing nature of the Social Security crisis and the Medicare crisis the most important use of their time is to send letters to the head of Clear Communications to complain about Rush Limbaugh.  And for a United States Senator to threaten to censure someone who isn’t a member of the Senate.

Did he or didn’t he? Call honest Democrats “phoney soldiers?”  Did he or didn’t he call Brian McGough, the poster boy of VoteVets.org anti-Rush TV commercial, a “suicide bomber?”

You have to wonder, what does it take for Democrats and Media Matters to so wilfully take peoples’ comments out of context and use them as political bludgeons?

The answer comes from the review of a book by a British lefty who made the journey from the left to the right.  Matthew Parris writes about Andrew Anthony’s The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence.

In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest

But Parris notes that even though Anthony has traveled to the right he still belongs in the culture of the left.

I followed his progress across the ideological spectrum and saw him start doing, from the anti-Left, exactly what he used to do from the Left — labelling people, labelling groups, labelling ideas, ferreting out absolutist and blood-curdling claims made by individuals on the other side and brandishing quotes (the way the Israelis and the Palestinians do) with a triumphant ‘you-see-what-kind-of-bastards-we’re-dealing-with[.]’

I guess he is talking about the politics of personal destruction.

There is another way, Parris points out.  It is not a satisfying black-and-white Manichean certainty, but something more tangled and shaded.

And the lefties at Media Matters could learn a thing or two as well—even from Rush Limbaugh, who conducts his show with a jaunty optimism even on conservatism’s darkest days.

The power of Limbaugh’s voice is that he does not play the blood-curdling game of brandishing quotes.  He does not use the angry sneer.  He just brings out the quotes and laughs at the opposition.

Paying for Health Care -- and Education?

For a century we have lived with the idea that things like education and health care were too important—and too complicated and expensive—for ordinary people to do on their own.

That’s why we have the government spending about 0.85 trillion dollars a year on health care and 0.75 trillion dollars a year on education.  You could look it up.

Here’s a fearless prediction.  We are going to have to give up the whole idea of government-run education and health care and go back to paying for it ourselves.

Because the only thing that a government can do—or should do—is run a war.  Oh, and catch criminals.

Here’s libertarian John Stossel talking about Whole Foods and how they switched from a low-deductible health plan to a high-deductible health plan for their employees.  They put the difference, about $1,500 a year, into Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for their employees.  HSAs are tax-sheltered accounts like IRAs.  Writes Stossel:

CEO John Mackey told me that when he went to the new system, "Our costs went way down."

Most important, since employees control the money, their behavior changed. Whole Foods workers started asking "how much things cost," Mackey said.

Yes, but when people have to think about how much it costs before they go to the doctor won’t they skimp on health care?

Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger says studies show that "people who have these high-deductible health-insurance policies take a lot better care of themselves. They have more yearly physicals. Because they’re saying, ’If I keep myself healthy, in the long run, I’m going to be spending less money.’"

Republican politicians dare not tell us this, and Democratic politicians will fight it to the last taxpayer, but you are going to be paying for your own health care in the future.

And my guess is that we’ll be paying for education as well.

And that’s a good thing.  Because the most soul-destroying thing in America today is the K-16 compulsory bums-on-seats government education system.  If we had to pay for education, we’d be out of there in a flash.

Why spend money on stuff you don’t need and don’t like?

Is Rush Limbaugh That Important?

What’s the point?  That’s the question I have.  Why would Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) come back to Washington DC on Monday and get right onto the floor of the United States Senate to blast—not Al Qaeda, not the revolutionary government of Iran, but—talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, the jaunty conservative optimist of the air-waves?

Now we know that the “phony soldier” issue, the idea that last week Rush Limbaugh criticized all members of the armed forces opposed to the war, was raised by Media Matters, which is, as Noel Sheppard writes,

an organization is linked directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as billionaire leftist George Soros.

OK, that’s their job, to conduct a Clintonian politics of personal destruction.  That’s what they were hired to do.

But what is so outrageous?  Suppose it were true?  Doesn’t Rush Limbaugh have a right to criticize people he disagrees with and call them phonies?  Without the Senate Majority Leader rushing out onto the floor of the Senate to criticize him?

So you have to wonder.  What is really going on here?  What has changed in the last month?

Well, we know.  In the last month the Democratic presidential candidates have switched sides on the war in Iraq.  They no longer advocate getting out immediately.  They propose to keep US troops there.  Because the Bush strategy seems to be working.  And because they don’t want to get on the wrong side of the American people for the 2008 election.

But what do you do about all the netroots and the liberal partisans that you’ve riled up about the war for the last six years?

You execute a misdirection play.  You sicc them on Rush Limbaugh.

You have to wonder.  Rush Limbaugh is an amazing talent.  His “jaunty optimism” does more to keep the conservative base cheered up than anything else going.

But is Rush Limbaugh so important that the Senate Majority Leader must pause in the execution of the nation’s vital legislative business to criticize an off-hand remark by a media celebrity?

What is going on here?

The other interesting thing about the “phony soldiers” issue is that it mostly concerns veterans who have been trying to obtain VA benefits for which they are not entitled.  Here’s a report from the US Attorney’s Office of Western Washington on Operation Stolen Valor.

U.S. Attorney Jeffrey C. Sullivan today announced some of the results of “Operation Stolen Valor,” a year long effort to investigate and prosecute those who lie about their military service for financial gain or other reasons.

Here are the names of the targets of Stolen Valor as given in the US Attorney’s statement:

• Jesse Macbeth, 23, Tacoma, Washington
• Reggie Buddle, 60, Puyallup, Washington
• Larry Lewis Porter, 52, Seattle, Washington
• Roy J. Scott, 71, of Port Angeles, Washington
• Merrick K. Hersey, 64, of Vancouver, Washington
• Michael D. Heit, 58, of Harrington, Washington
• Elvin J. Swisher, 70, of Idaho
• Carlos Riosvalle, 83, of Portland, Oregon

Notice the ages of these folks!  They were indicted or sentenced for crimes including: “Altered Military Discharge Certificate,” “fraudulent claims of military service,” “Unlawful Wearing of United States Military Medals and Decorations,” and “Theft of Government Funds.”

So they were accused of doing things like altering their discharge certificates to obtain government benefits for which they were not entitled. 

Phony soldiers indeed.

UPDATE 10:19am: Rush agrees! The attack on him is a ploy to distract the liberal and anti-war base from the fact that the Democrats in Washington have utterly betrayed them.

Obama revises plan on tax cuts

All the Democratic presidential candidates started out firm in their determination to repeal the evil Bush tax-cuts-for-the-rich.  You know the kind they mean.  The kind of tax cuts that Paris Hilton gets (whatever that is).

Apart from the fairness issue, for of course it is only fair for rich people to pay a higher tax rate than the middle class like you and me, the candidates needed the money to pay for universal health care.

But now Sen. Barack Obama isn’t so sure, according to Brian DeBose. Of course he is determined to make rich people pay their fair share of the estate tax.

Senator Obama has been a consistent opponent of repealing the estate tax because he believes it is both fiscally responsible and morally right when ultimately the vast majority of people who benefit from these tax breaks are millionaires who do not need the money as much as middle class families struggling to make ends meet," said the campaign.

Yeah!  Squeeze them until the pips squeak! But now the campaign is not so sure.

But the campaign is not sure whether the estate tax would return to the pre-2001 rates, with the government taking 55 percent of inheritances of $650,000 and higher or conform to other recent proposals.

Well, nobody said that dealing with reality was painless.