Speaking Truth To Liberal Power

Talking-head Juan Williams is a reliable liberal voice on Fox News. David Fraser is a Briton who worked for decades as a probation officer. What do these two have in common?

The liberal intelligentsia doesn’t want to hear about their books.

Juan Williams has written Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, in which he takes up where Bill Cosby left off. He asks the question:

"Why are so many black Americans, people born inside the gates of American opportunity, still living as if they were locked out from all America has to offer?" His answers include the debacle of big-city politics under self-serving black politicians; reparations as "a divisive dead-end idea"; the parlous state of city schools "under the alliance between the civil rights leaders and the teachers' unions"; and the transformation of rap from "its willingness to confront establishment and stereotypes" to "America's late-night masturbatory fantasy."

But according to conservative radio talk-show host Michael Reagan the MSM is ignoring his book.

On my radio show the other night Juan told me how he has been silenced by the very liberals who have always clasped him to their bosoms.

When you write a book criticizing the liberal pieties, you get the silent treatment. Still, Williams’ book is at #156 today on the Amazon bestseller list.

Then there is British writer David Fraser. This probation officer’s book is called A Land Fit for Criminals: An Insider's View of Crime, Punishment and Justice in the UK. You would think that British publishers would be falling all over themselves to publish a book like that, considering that British crime is up over 2,000 percent in the last century. But no.

Sixty publishers rejected Fraser’s book. Then, according to Theodore Dalrymple, he got lucky.

The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant[.]

In his book, Fraser shows with facts and figures how the British government is utterly failing to control crime and criminals, and openly lying and covering up about it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters.

You wonder. Maybe the welfare state is further along to its collapse that we think, just because the depth of corruption and laxity gets slowly worse and worse with no attempt to correct its follies and its crimes. Governments generally do go this way, of course, until they are turned upside down by genuine reform or by something more radical.

Finally, A Brit Takes on the Israel Haters

Everyone has declared that actor Mel Gibson is a drunken anti-Semitic lout, after his little problem with the law last week.

But there are plenty of people who have been nipping at the same bottle, writes British politician and opinion writer Boris Johnson.

Come on, Blair! they write from their wisteria-clad redoubts... When are you all going to stop poodling and call a halt to Israeli murder?

Easy for you to say, he continues. They aren’t raining rockets on your leafy avenue.

This is a country responding, however incompetently, to direct aggression against its own people from a neighbouring failed state.

...
Whatever the hideous shambles of the past few days, it is still true, in principle, that when Israeli rockets kill civilians, they have missed their targets, and that when Hizbollah rockets kill civilians, they have scored a deliberate hit.

And that matters when you want to make an honest balance in the equation of moral equivalency.

Limbaugh Listeners No. 2 in News Knowledge

When the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its latest Survey Report on news consumption, entitled Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership, you couldn’t blame Rush Limbaugh for boosting it.

The Pew chappies rate Rush Limbaugh listeners most knowledgeable about news, right after readers of the Weekly Standard and The New Republic.

If you believe in Trust but Verify, here is the image direct from the Pew website.

So Rush Limbaugh listeners are not quite the yahoos that liberals imagine. As the Pew reports says:

Judged by their answers to three news knowledge questions, the most informed audiences belong to the political magazines, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, the O'Reilly Factor, news magazines, and online news sources.

But here is a worrying fact. Women are underrepresented as consumers of hard news. This is clearly a consequence of our patriarchal society, all fair-minded people will agree. All over America. little girls are taught not to worry their little heads about hard news. As a result, women clearly gravitate to soft news and feature magazines for their news, as the Pew table shows.

Men dominate the audience not only for sports news but also for news about science and technology, business and finance, and international affairs.



But women greatly outnumber men among those who closely follow news about religion, health, and entertainment.

This is a national problem that has been too long ignored.

What's Next for Conservatives?

In the autumn of the Bush years, conservatives are asking what worked and what comes next. It is clear that compassionate conservatism was a mixed blessing. It obtained tactical successes in winning the support of women and Hispanics, but it released the brakes on federal spending.

And, Andrew E. Busch writes, in issues like education and prescription drugs it conceded massive increases in spending without a corresponding advance in choice and ownership. When Republicans relax their devotion to limited government, they lose. Busch proposes a reinvigorated platform that includes:
— holding the fiscal line on both taxes and spending;


— re-energizing a public philosophy of constitutionalism and limited government;


— supporting a measured cultural traditionalism;


— incrementally introducing mechanisms for greater choice and accountability into existing public programs;


— concerted campaigning in the black and Hispanic communities on the basis of moral and religious standards, as well as entrepreneurship;


— continuing to promote the vitality of civil society

Perhaps the most important area where conservatives can win the support of women, blacks, and Hispanics is in the reform of education. Education is very important to women, especially, and yet they typically do not look at education beyond the immediate necessity of finding the best available option or program for their children within the existing structure.

Recent research on child-raising has strongly suggested that parenting doesn’t make much difference. The two big factors affecting child outcomes are genes and peers. In other words, after selecting their mate, the next biggest decision a parent makes is to select their children’s peer group.

A child’s peer group is the neighborhood children and the children at school.

This means that school choice is a huge issue for parents. If they have no choice in selecting a school for their children then they have no power to select their child’s peer group, and no way to influence this important influence on their child’s life.

This is a way to get the support of women.

Conservatives must advance the idea that, given the vital importance of controling a child’s peer group, it is wrong for the government to take this freedom away from parents. It doesn’t matter whether the school is public, private, religious, or home-school. Parents must have the right to send their child to the school of their choice.

A Dictator Hands Over Power, For Now

So finally General Pinochet, after 47 years as dictator of Chile, yielded power to his ageing brother in the wake of emergency intestinal surgery. It’s true that he ruled with an iron fist, allowed conservative spokesmen, but at least he made Chile the economic powerhouse of South America, made individual Chileans prosperous with his radical pension reform, and exported its wine to all the world.

Oh dear. Wrong dictator! And of course, Gen. Pinochet didn’t rule for half a century. After the coup in which he ended the chaotic rule of Salvador Allende, he put Chile on the road to prosperity and returned it to democracy.

Unlike Fidel Castro. On Monday night, he handed over power, temporarily, to his brother Raúl, as he underwent intestinal surgery. And he put off his 80th birthday celebration till December.

But today, everyone will be delighted to hear, he is feeling better.

Oh yes, he did wonders with education and health care (but how good is that education and health care really? Has anyone ever checked it out?).
But overall, economic growth in Cuba is estimated at minus 0.5 percent per year since 1959. Not that anyone is allowed to do an independent audit of Cuba’s economy.

But the way to think of Cuba’s half-century under dictatorship is to imagine how it would have been reported by our objective MSM if, instead of the lefty hero Castro, it had been ruled by a right-wing thug.

Forget about the extenuating circumstances, the education, the health care, the charm of Old Havana. Dictatorship would have been dictatorship, fascism, red with the blood of its victims: journalists and political human rights activists.

Reader Mail on Seattle's Cult of Victimhood

Things really are as bad as you think in Seattle. My article on the Seattle cult of victimhood inspired several alert readers to send me their thoughts, including these two horror stories.

One reader reports training employees at Seattle City Light in the use of some new equipment. It sounds like a comedy skit, only you are not allowed to laugh at such things.

Of the five City Light employees training on the new equipment, one was African American, one Native American, one Asian American, one woman, and one white male. The Native American wouldn’t use head sets, and needed special accommodation. The woman militantly said that several things in the equipment would have to be changed to accommodate her. The Asian American asked a few questions and quickly learned how to used the new equipment. The African American was “an old hand” who already knew the basics pretty well. The white male was the supervisor who said that he was fed up, but couldn’t walk away from the money.

Another exasperated reader sent me the definitions of Racism, Cultural Racism, and Institutional Racism that the staff of the Seattle School District’s equity and race relations staff had posted on the district’s website. It was the extreme left-wing victim-enabling stuff you would expect.

Since Cultural Racism on the part of whites includes an assumption of “future time orientation,” we can now understand why the Seattle School District lost about $34 million a year or so ago. Hey, obsessive planning and budgeting is so future-oriented and so racist!

Eventually all this stuff is going to fall down, but before it does a lot more people are going to have their lives ruined by Seattle’s victim-enabling culture.

It is going to get worse before it gets better.

A Pause for Optimism

What with TV screens filled with mayhem and panicked pundits screaming that all is lost, it is easy to throw up your hands and lose all hope.

But Michael Barone suggests that all is not lost yet. He uses the model of Thomas Barnett, “who divides the world into a functioning "Core" (North America, Europe, East Asia, rising China and India) and a nonfunctional "Gap" (the Middle East, most of Africa, part of the Andean chain in South America).”

Barnett’s Big Idea is that we should we working to expand the Core and shrink the Gap, expanding the realm of interconnected wealth creation and shrinking the world of thugs and terror.

From Barnett’s point of view things are not going too badly. Says he:

"Plenty of people look at the world today and see only decline and violence and chaos since September 11 [2001]. I am amazed at how little the Functioning Core of globalization has suffered since that date: no real violence or threats of same amidst our ranks, slow but steady political integration that's still not keeping up with the economic bonds that are booming, spotty but emerging sense of shared security values, and the usual pinpricks of harm inflicted by terror and God, but all in all, nothing really bad despite all this 'tumult' centered in the Middle East and the rising price of oil."

The point is that what Marx would call the “productive forces” all weigh in the advantage of the Functioning Core. And if you look at GDPs you will see that the troublemakers of the Gap are all puny players that for now are hitting way above their weight. And if, say, the price of oil fell by 50 percent they would really be in a world of hurt.

(A way to help that along would be to drill for oil in the Arctic and offshore. Just a thought.)

The difference between the Core nations and the Gap nations is the difference between the rule of law and the swing of power. In the Core nations an ordinary person can get ahead by following the rules. In the Gap nations you need a powerful patron.

As the Mexican immigrant said: In Mexico you need to know a politician if you want to get a job. In the US, in most areas of the economy, all you need is right between your ears.

The United States is the richest country in the world because it has the least amount of privilege weighing on its economy.