The Left Hates Exercise and Grooming

Want to know what President Bush has done now? According to liberal writer Jonathan Chait
he is exercising too much. Apparently it is scandalous that the president takes an hour or two
out of every day to get exercise. “What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession
with exercise that borders on the creepy,” he writes.

“Really?” asks
Tammy Bruce.

Not according to the medical establishment and the Surgeon General’s office,
which notes the benefits of exercise. Such as? Better sleep; reduced tension and stress;
reduction of high blood pressure; reduction of anxiety and depression; reduced risk of colon
and breast cancer; healthy bones, muscles,
and joints; improved self image; and generally improved physical health.

Bruce goes on to recall her days at the National Organization of Women, and how the members
seemed to have an aversion to taking showers and running a comb through the hair.

Then she adds her voice in defense of the Roberts family, who came in for some criticism
from the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan for
being too perfectly turned out at the announcement of Daddy’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
But she understands
why Chait and Givhan don’t like the personal habits and grooming of Bush and his nominees. President
Bush and the Roberts family

insult the Left by reminding intellectually lazy Slaves to Decay
like Chait and Givhan that class, decorum, and respect still exist. Tradition,
caring for one’s family,
and caring for oneself are still values that prevail.

When Chait writes: “It’s nice for Bush that he can take an hour or
two out of every day to run, bike, or pump iron.
Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does,” you have to ask
what planet he is living on. How could he not notice how Bush has aged in office, from the almost
adolescent look of 1999 to the careworn father of the nation that appears before us today. Does
Chait have so little experience of responsibility, of being the guy that makes the tough decisions,
that he does not have an inkling of what it means to be president?

Ten Core Values of Britishness

In the aftermath of the London bombings, Londoners are doing a bit of thinking about
what Britishness means. They are, as radio host Dennis Prager would say, trying to get
a little clarity about what they are and what they believe in.
In The Daily Telegraph
they have taken the time to formulate and publish a list of ten core values that tell
what it means to be British. Here they are.

• The rule of law
  
• The sovereignty of Crown in Parliament, that is, monarch, Lords, and Commons.
  
• The pluralist state, equality before the law and tolerance for others.
  
• Personal freedom
  
• Private property
  
• Institutions, primarily non-coercive civil society
  
• The family
  
• History, teaching children about the glorious past
  
• The English-speaking world
  
• The British character
  

You can see that some people are getting serious about what to do about the terror war. What
they are turning to—and it is important to fully realize this—is the nation state.

There is a reason for this. After the family, the clan or tribe, the nation state is where we
belong. It cares about each of us, and stands as guarantor of peace and justice in a way that
a European Union or a United Nations does not.

Read the whole thing.

Will Conservative Movement Split over Mark Steyn?

As conservatives and Republicans try to come together to get Judge Roberts
onto the Supreme Court, squabbling in the ranks is threatening to reverse
the painfully won victories that conservatives have gained over the years and perhaps
even put the nomination in jeopardy.

At the center of the storm is the self-styled “global content
provider” Mark Steyn. This brilliant writer and controversialist
is proving to be a divisive influence on conservatives in the United States.

Writes Jonah Goldberg: “I hate him.”
And he’s not the only one. Here’s
John Derbyshire, inspiration for
Andrew Sullivan’s Derbyshire Award, on Steyn: “I H-A-T-E him.” Things are
getting so bad that if you Google up "mark steyn" and "i hate him" you’ll get 181 hits.

With this kind of dissension in the ranks it’s no wonder that the president’s legislative
program is languishing in Congress. Worse than that, lefty fashion editors are
smelling blood in the water and think they can get away with criticising
the seersucker suit worn by young Master Roberts at the announcement of
his father’s nomination. This outrage went almost unchallenged except by
Wes Pruden.
(Yah boo to grungy fashion editors, he wrote. Seersucker suits are back, and white suits
can’t be far behind.)

Something must be done. It’s time for Karl Rove’s White House operation to put a stop to the
backbiting and petty sniping.

What, you might ask, are all these conservatives riled up about? Jonah
Goldberg was upset that Mark Steyn turned out to be the best dancer on the recent
National Review British Isles cruise, and John Derbyshire was upset that
not only was Mark Steyn a “genius of opinion journalism” but also
seemed to know everything about 20th century Broadway and the details of
everything written by Frank Baum and every stage adaptation of Baum’s Oz books.

For years, conservatives have accused liberals of practicing the politics
of envy. Seems like liberals are not the only ones into envy.

Come on chaps. We can do better. Let’s moe on and put Roberts over the top.

Let's Talk Economic Horse Sense

You economic Neanderthals that still think, like the Spanish of 1600 and the French of 1700 and the Germans of 1870 and the Smoots and Hawleys of 1930, that trade surpluses are good and trade deficits are bad shouldn’t read this analysis of the revaluation of the Chinese Yuan by John Tamny.

You won’t want to read that the trade figures are meaningless since, as the great Bob Bartley once said, the trade figures always balance. Ludwig von Mises said it better by writing that the balance of payments is always in balance. You won’t want to think that trade warriors like Senator Smoot Schumer and Senator Hawley Graham are always (and always have been) the tool of special interests that want the government to protect their rents.

Because here’s the bottom line on revaluation of the Yuan:

Assuming revaluation succeeds in making Chinese exports more expensive, the broad American population will lose twice: first in seeing their buying power reduced, and second in the necessary loss of productivity that always results when nations don’t take advantage of the economy-boosting division of labor. Those who doubt the latter point need only study the relative employment rates of countries with open versus closed markets.

The challenge of a surging China is not that it takes American jobs. Of course it takes American jobs. “They” are always taking American jobs. That’s how a growing economy works. Millions of jobs get lost and millions of jobs get created. A hundred years ago, “they” took away all the American jobs on the farm. Forty years ago “they” started taking away the jobs of good unionized factory workers. The result? Today
America has more jobs than ever.

The challenge for the United States is that if we want to remain the top dog in the world economically we have to make higher value products and do higher valueservices than the the rest of the world, from China to India to Old Europe. That, of course, is hard work, and not just hard work but smart work, which
is even harder.

Let us not forget, already, the last time that we jawboned a foreign country into revaluing its currency upwards. It was at the Plaza Accords in 1985. The Japanese were bullied into revaluing their currency upwards and ended up screwing up their economy for twenty years. They are only just beginning to emerge from the mess. And remember the great stock market crash of 1987 when the Dow lost 25 percent of its value in a single day? That happened the “Monday after Treasury Secretary James Baker talked down the dollar on the Sunday morning talk shows.”

All we Americans need to think about is how to create and grow businesses that meet and beat the competition. Everything else will take care of itself.

Organized Labor Split

Today the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union announced their
decision to leave the parent AFL-CIO, reports
The New York Times.

Their action symbolizes the split in approach to the deployment of union power. The
AFL-CIO wants to spend money on politics. The breakaway unions want to focus on
organizing.

The breakup also illustrates the split personality of labor unions ever since their
modern emergence in the nineteenth century. Were they to be activist organizations
agitating for social gains in the political realm or were they self-help organizations
dedicated to helping people on the ground.

The truth is that unions are mostly about politics. The Anglosphere entered the
industrial era with a common law tradition that disapproved of “combinations”
in restraint of trade. It took sympathetic public opinion and positive law to
change this and to award organizations of working men the legal privilege
to do what employers were forbidden to do: conspire in a cartel against the
consumer.

Still, the American labor movement remained mostly a working-class movement
right through most of the twentieth century under the leadership of men like cigar maker
Samuel Gompers and plumber George Meany. Unlike the union movement in Europe,
American union leaders kept the middle-class socialists out of their movement
and thus kept a certain distance from politics.

Today, of course, as private sector union membership has declined to 8 percent
of the labor force, the character of unions has changed. They are mainly
associations of government workers that work with Democratic politicians to
increase government spending in return for votes, wages, tenure, and pensions. The breakaway
unions are private sector unions; they have a different agenda.

From the conservative perspective it is probably a good idea for the public
sector and private sector unions to separate. It makes it easier to attack the
AFL-CIO unions as greedy tax-eaters.

Spengler Breaks Harry Potter Spell

We’ve all learned to love Harry Potter, the teenaged wizard who has taught a generation of children
to read.
Spengler
begs to differ. He does not see a harmless lovable fuzzball; he sees decline and decadence. He sees readers
submitting to a philosophy that says you can be special by remaining just who you are.
“Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his ‘inner feelings.’”

But this gets it all wrong, complains Spengler.

The spiritual tradition of the West, which begins with classic tragedy and
continues through St Augustine’s Confessions, tells us just the contrary, namely, that one’s
inner feelings are the problem, not the solution. The West is a construct, the result of a
millennium of war against the inner feelings of
the barbarian invaders whom Christianity turned into Europeans.

The great heros of western literature learned that they needed to change. Elizabeth Bennet needed
to overcome her pride, “Dickens’ Pip must look past the will-o’-the-wisp of his expectations; Mann’s Hans
Castorp must confront mortality; Tolstoy’s Pierre must learn to love.”
And Goethe’s Faust must also transform his character. “Failure to correct defining flaws, of course,
leads to a tragic outcome, as in Dostoyevsky or Flaubert.”

This being Spengler, you expect the appeal to Pope Benedict XVI, late Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and you
are not disappointed.

Of course, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker are merely going with the Zeitgeist, and its peculiar
corruption of the German cult of creativity that leaves out the theme of preparation and merely focuses
on the Aha! moment of impulse.

That is the problem.
All real creators know that creativity is a matter of work, graced perhaps
with a single gift of epiphany, and often paid for by years of unrequited labor. Potter and
Skywalker are telling us a lie.

Hospice Movement Founder Dies

Sometimes the important news is not too important. Sometimes it ought to
take a back seat to the really important stuff, the stuff of life and death
that we ignore in favor of the ephemeral and the titillating.

On July 14,
Dame Cicely Saunders
died aged 87. She was the “Visionary founder of the modern hospice movement who set the highest standards in care for the dying.”

She found her metier when caring for

a dying patient, David Tasma, a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, whom
she met on her first rounds as an almoner at St Thomas’s. He was a friendless waiter
with no family, and there was no consolation for him except in the love which she discovered
to be within her reach. It was then that she saw how the pain of cancer could be tamed by modern
drugs and that unavoidable distress could be made tolerable by a form of care that
ranked the physical and spiritual needs of the patient together.

Dame Cicely was a Briton of the old school, “a charismatic grande dame
with strong values and a great talent for leadership” who became an Evangelical Christian in
her young adulthood
in the years immediately after World War II.

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. It is the story of a remarkable life.