National Charter Schools Week

Education of our children ought to be simple. It ought to be captured in the simple right of a parent to send their child to the school of their choice.

But Americans have been denied this simple human right. And it doesn’t seem as if they will get that right any time soon.

In the twilight of educational freedom good people struggle with the limited forms of educational freedom that are allowed in the unfree world of education. And this week is National Charter Schools Week.

In NRO Chester E. Finn takes a look at charter schools, the limited approach to education freedom that allows individual publicly-financed schools the license to escape some of the stultifying bureaucratic rules of the full metal jacket public school system.

Not surprisingly, Finn finds that the authorization and oversight of charter schools is the biggest problem area. (Why wouldn’t it be, considering the anomalous position of charter schools, half free and half slave?)

One good area is that authorizers are quick to close down a school that is failing. Usually, the failure is not academic, but organizational or financial.

But general oversight is not too good. Partly this arises from the fact that many authorizers of charter schools are public schools districts, and you can imagine that school districts are not the best when it comes to effective oversight and supervision.

[A]lmost half of all authorizers practice limited oversight of their schools, demonstrating scant concern either for school quality (e.g., not screening applicants rigorously and not holding schools accountable for student achievement, etc.) or for compliance (by ensuring fiduciary responsibility, enforcing federal laws, etc.).

Finn recommends expanding the use of independent charter school authorizing boards and taking the responsibility away from school districts.

They engage in chartering by choice, not coercion, have ample resources to draw from (financial and human), and can skillfully navigate the treacherous politics of charter authorizing.

But of course all this is mere bagatelle, moving the deck chairs on the you-know-what. The basic question remains.
Why are American parents denied the basic human right of sending their children to the school of their choice?

The evidence, from the distant past before the birth of the government public school, is that ordinary people can be trusted to supervise the education of their children. You can read all about it here.

How long, O Lord, how long?

US Special Forces are Out Kicking Butt in Iraq

Is Al Qaeda in trouble? Is it retreating from Iraq? That is what the StrategyPage guys are saying. Writes Harold C. Hutchison:

Despite the many brickbats of the media, al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq, and is now retreating to lick its wounds where it can.

OK. That’s pretty direct. So how were they defeated?

In trying to defeat the United States, al Qaeda made three big mistakes: They fought the last information war, they underestimated the American leadership, and they also managed to anger the Iraqi people.

Another reason, according to this report on StrategyPage, is that the US special forces guys are kicking butt.

Under the Special Operations Command TF-145 is out every night following up on tips from informers.

The basic drill is for one of the four smaller Task Forces to grab a likely bit of info and quickly plan and execute a raid... The objective is to capture people alive, if possible, because interrogations and examination of documents starts immediately... Most of this takes place at night, and several raids may be carried out between dusk and dawn.

If old Osama bin Laden is still out there, I’d say this sort of thing doesn’t read too good. This isn’t a replay of Mogadishu. This is US soldiers out every night kicking butt.

There are still several well armed gangs and tribal militias in the "Sunni Triangle" of central Iraq, and some of these have been persuaded to make peace with the government in order to avoid a visit from TF 145. Iraqis are big fans of American action movies. And they note that a visit from TF 145 is just like the movies, except for the real bullets, blood and dead bodies.

We cannot know what the real situation is in Iraq. We must listen and learn and try to piece together what we read. At least we can be pretty sure about one thing. Our US Special Forces are out there making a difference. Thanks, fellas.

After 5/1, Let's Connect Some Dots

After 9/11 our Democratic friends were not too kind to the Bush administration. They said that Bush and his pals at Halliburton should have connected the dots and prevented the attack on the World Trade Center.

Never mind that Jamie Gorelick had forbidden the law enforcement and intelligence communities from talking to each other.

After 5/1 it is a matter of due diligence to try to connect some dots. If something nasty happens, we wouldn’t want the Democrats to blame conservative bloggers for betraying the nation by failing to connect the dots.

Is anyone connecting the dots between International A.N.S.W.E.R. organizing the demonstrations of the Day without Immigrants and International A.N.S.W.E.R. organizing the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, and reports of International A.N.S.W.E.R. officers taking trips to North Korea? Even the lefties at infoshop.org are concerned that their Peace efforts are being damaged by association with International A.N.S.W.E.R..

The Workers World Party [parent of International A.N.S.W.E.R.] is widely known to support regimes such as Kim Il Jong in North Korea. WWP leaders make yearly trips to North Korea.

International A.N.S.W.E.R. wouldn’t be trying to gin up street disturbances to prevent the US from dealing with the Iran Crisis would they?

Obviously, we average bears can’t really see all the dots, let alone connect them. But think about this. If you wanted to weaken the US military effort, what would be the best strategy? Foment unrest among the illegal aliens? Who knows?

White Guilt Goes Global

In his two thoughtful books, The Content of Our Character and A Dream Deferred, academic Shelby Steele has explained great disappointment of the post civil rights era. How was it possible that after the landmark Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the politics of race would turn sour? Steele explains that the politics of the United States must be understood in terms of white guilt.

It was not enough to just sign the Civil Rights Acts and go home. Left over from the euphoria was the shame of white oppression, the stain of centuries. That accumulation of white guilt had to be expiated.

And so we were led by guilty white liberals into the wilderness of racial preferences, affirmative action, and “diversity.”

As is so often the case, it turned out that the moral crusade of white expiation was not just good politics, but good business, and liberals found that they could build careers, not to mention power and the love of beautiful women, out of race politics. Indeed they have transformed the culture of the university completely in their great work of expiation.

Today in the United States the only thing that matters in an educational institution is race, class, gender, oppression, and victimization. In an era when barriers of race, class, and gender have been lowered to an extent never seen before in human history, the diversity activists declare that oppression and marginalization are the only reality.

In an article in OpinionJournal.com, Shelby Steele now takes his theory of white guilt global.

In the aftermath of global white colonialism and white imperialism, he explains, the powerful United States must expiate for the sins of the white race.

Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence.

...

So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism.

That is why the weak and disorganized insurgency in Iraq can enjoy a certain success: the United States cannot bring the full force of its power to bear. It must fight two wars, one against the insurgency and one to prove itself free from the stain of white imperialism.

It is the same white guilt that makes the elite white Europeans flummoxed over the radicalized Moslems in their midst.

You can see where all this is going. It is going to get worse. It is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. It has to get worse before the white West finally flips and says: Enough already.

From a grand strategic point of view, it will probably help if India and China get singed by the Islamic conflagration so that when the tipping point comes they will tip onside.

Things will need to get worse before they get better because of the cultural power of the left in the West, the people who believe in white guilt instead of believing in God. It will not take argument and the give and take of debate to discredit the left and its discourse of power and oppression. It will take a disaster.

Although the West, the democratic capitalist West, is experienced world-wide as a white phenomenon, it is not. It is a middle-class phenomenon, the new world-historical culture that transcends race, tribe, religion, and political power. It champions the idea of free peoples serving each other in voluntary cooperation and trust under the rule of law. It champions the separation of powers in government, and the greater separation of powers in society between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

It is still new, still confusing, still little understood. It is the first world culture that already in its structure and its ordering permits the flowering of a true cooperative world community.

And it will prevail.

Rush Pleads Not Guilty

On Friday Rush Limbaugh announced an agreement with the state attorney in Palm Beach County that ends the two-and-a-half year investigation into “doctor shopping.” Rush gets to plead not guilty to a single charge, and the state attorney, liberal Democrat Barry Kirschner, gets to pin a trophy up on the wall.

The lefty media seems to think that Rush has got special treatment. Here’s David Sweet in the Huffington Post.

All right, the world's most famous doctor shopper is free already on a $3K bond, having the good fortune to have ready access to the that kind of scratch... Lots of folks in that situation would have trouble meeting the bond... But not Rusty L., probably the wealthiest broadcaster in the hate-for-Jesus kingdom.

The good thing about lefties is that they haven’t a clue about Rush Limbaugh. Don’t know what he believes, and don’t know what he does for a living.

But in NRO they have a different take. Write Andrew C. McCarthy and Mark R. Levin:

A long, transparently politicized nightmare of an investigation is over for Rush Limbaugh today.

...

We are former federal government attorneys. We’ve collectively spent decades in law enforcement and believe passionately in its professional, non-political, non-partisan mission. Thus, it’s with outrage that we note that, rather than quietly dropping this embarrassment of an investigation, the state attorney, Barry Krischer — a politically active liberal Democrat — has insisted on filing a charge which he well knows will never be tried. Insisting, that is, on further media churning of an allegation of doctor-shopping that he’ll never prove.

As Dan Rather used to say in happier days: It goes with the territory. But as Hugh Hewitt writes:

Rush Limbaugh [is] the most innovative and successful radio talk show host in history, the most powerful brand on air from 1990 forward, and, as the story proves again, the new media voice most hated by the old media monopoly he -- almost single-handedly -- broke.

And that is why he is such an irresistible target for the left.

Galbraith: Conventional Wisdom for Liberals

In his Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith, who died Saturday aged 97, coined the phrase conventional wisdom. He meant by it the general widespread public assumptions, the unchallenged faith in things as they are. He meant the ideas that intelligent people like himself scorned as shallow and self-serving.

Naturally, he became the No. 1 purveyor of liberal conventional wisdom in the last half of the twentieth century.

Liberals have needed to feel themselves separate from the general run of Americans. They think of themselves as evolved, superior by virtue of education and by virtue of their values and their compassion. They are dissenters; they challenge conventional assumptions about life and mores. This special difference is what gives them the right to judge and the right to rule.

But of course liberals hold their own rigid views about the way things are, and they way things ought to be. It was the genius of Galbraith to understand that and to churn out, in book after book, the latest version of liberal conventional wisdom, the way that liberals looked at the world and interpreted it.

He also gave liberals a special place in that world.

In American Capitalism he presented the US economy as big corporations against big labor. And of course liberals were needed to balance the countervailing interests of powerful business and powerful labor.

In The Affluent Society he presented the liberals with a vision of private wealth and public squalor, licensing them to expand government in the 1960s to erase the moral stain of public squalor.

In The New Industrial State according to the New York Times obituary “he tried to trace the shift of power from the landed aristocracy through the great industrialists to the technical and managerial experts of modern corporations. He called for a new class of intellectuals and professionals to determine policy.” Oh good! More jobs for liberals—as if there weren’t already a huge new class of intellectuals and liberals busily doing just that!

It is likely that the comfortable liberal conventional wisdom that he publicised in his many books helped liberals to ignore the economic challenges of the 1970s and turn their eyes away from the success of Reaganomics in the 1980s. It didn’t square with what they had read in Galbraith, so it couldn’t be true.

But that is all over and now it is time for liberals to wake up and confront the new economy of the twenty-first century. How does an educated elite deal with “today's harsh, interconnected world where corporations devour one another for breakfast,” a world which has little time for American liberals and their conventional wisdom?

Orientalist Bernard Lewis at 90

It was Bernard Lewis, a scholar of the Middle East, who wrote the seminal article in 1990 that warned of the gathering storm in the Middle East. “The Roots of Muslim Rage” warned “that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force.”

His life is celebrated by Fouad Ajami today in OpinionJournal.com.

It was Lewis that noticed in the London paper
“Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998... a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden.” Three years later the rules changed on 9/11.

For centuries,

Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand.

But then the tide turned, and Islam found that it started losing every war. It was humiliating.

And the special humiliation of Islam issues from its early success. Moses and the people of Israel wandered for years in the wilderness. Christ was crucified. But Mohammed the prophet was an immediate success in hearts, minds, and on the battlefield. Islam showed how politics and religion could be unified into a single successful empire of faith and of worldly success. Now all that was over. And it was intolerable.

Bernard Lewis worries about the West.

It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered.

The question is whether the rage of Islam is just another rebellion against the power and authority of the global middle class and its paradigm of enterprise, law, tolerance, markets, and prosperity, or whether the angry Islamists will sweep over the world like the recurring eruptions of nomads out of the Asian steppe.

The answer is up to us. The West certainly has the power to stop the rage from the Middle East. The question is: Does it have the will?