When Christian Students Want a Special Day...

It’s one thing to have a “Day of Silence” that celebrates the difficulties and the angst of gay students.  But it is quite another when Christian students want to observe a “Day of Truth.”

Writes Michael Johnson:

The idea of the “Day of Silence” is that students and educators go all day without talking, while flashing a card at those around them explaining that the quiet is their way of showing solidarity with the culturally-oppressed kids who get bullied “just for being who they are.”

It’s a wonderful idea.  Everyone should have a day like that.  Because we are all misunderstood and we all live under frightful pressure to conform.

Imagine what it is like for a conservative like me to live in “Baghdad”Jim McDermott’s Seattle.  We could use a little surcease from liberal bullying around here, I can tell you.

But then Christian students requested a Day of Truth “with some thoughtful discussion of differing views — religious, scientific, social, personal — on homosexual behavior.”  And that was different.

Requests for “Day of Truth” events are perfunctorily denied, students who initiate discussions or even wear philosophically provocative T-shirts quickly find themselves on the short list for detention, even suspension.

It’s part of a pattern.  Liberal agenda events are fine.  But don’t bring your conservative bigotry or your religion in here, pal.

Even when student protests don’t call for open discussions, debates, and conversation — as in the pro-life Days of Silent Solidarity, which focus on calling attention to abortion — educators and government officials move fast to shut down what are usually quiet, respectful, non-aggressive demonstrations.

The delicious thing about this is that students are getting a clear message.  If you want to rebel, if you want to create a stink, if you want to really get the adults riled up, then there is one thing that really gets their goat.

Try to bring your religion into the government school.

Not your average, run-of-the-mill government-approved secular religion like civil rights, or feminism, or gay rights, or racial quotas.  No.  We are talking about the God thing.

They just cannot stand it.  And that is strange, because we live under a constitution that says that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech...

But hey, it’s one law for us and another law for the peons.

Let's Call It "Hewitting"

First it was Fisking.  That’s the process, according to Britain’s Observer, of:

savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet.

It is named after lefty Brit reporter Robert Fisk, who often deserves it.

But now it is time to talk about “Hewitting.”  That’s the interview technique in which radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt interviews an MSM journalist and exposes him (or her, but usually him) as a pompous weasel.

The latest victim of Hewitting is Los Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten. Hewitt had him agreeing that Rosie O’Donnell is a disgrace.  Then Hewitt steers the interview into more dangerous territory, the LA Times itself.  In the interview, he relates,

We also range over the sale of The Tribune Company to Sam Zell,  the Andres Martinez resignation, the deathly dull nature of the paper, and who’s to blame.

 And so off High Hewitt goes:

HH: Do you have any responsibility, Tim Rutten, for the poor performance of the newspaper over the last seven years?
TR: Do I personally have any?
HH: Yeah.
TR: No, I think I’ve done about as well as I could.
HH: Do any of your colleagues in the newsroom have any responsibility?
TR: Sure. Some of them do.
HH: Which ones?
TR: Oh, I don’t!I’m not going to go there, you know that.

Now we are getting the victim softened up.  So Hewitt goes in for the kill.

HH: But can you name for me the conservative columnist who is full-time at the Los Angeles Times?
TR: Who is full-time?
HH: Yeah.
TR: We don’t have a full-time political columnist at the newspaper.
HH: No, are any full-time columnists at the Los Angeles Times conservative?
TR: Not that I would characterize!I think not that you would recognize as conservative, no.
HH: Or that you would. I mean, they’re just not there.
TR: That I would? No.
HH: Okay, are there liberal columnists at the Los Angeles Times?
TR: Sure.
HH: How many of them?
TR: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think about my colleagues that [w]ay.

Really, liberal journalists ought to be issued a Miranda warning before being interrogated like this.

Surely they deserve the same rights as a common criminal suspect.

When Politics is Only About Spin

Ten, fifteen years ago in the heady days of the Third Way fashionable commentators were all agog about Spin.  Clinton did it.  Blair did it.  Everyone swooned.  It was so cool.

Later, when President Bush made his case for the invasion of Iraq, of course, the swooners were nowhere to be found.  It is one thing to do a bit of advocacy for the good guys, but another thing to shill for evil neo-cons.

But now, in a British row about taxing the income of pension funds according to  Robin Harris, people are even fed up with spin from Third Way progressives like Blair and his designated heir, Gordon Brown.

Now people can see the spin for what it was, trying to square circles.

New Labour’s strategy of gaining power was to be at once fresh and reassuring, to split every difference and to be all things to all men. Accordingly, generalised pledges, bland phrases and a selection of well-judged soundbites provided a substitute for philosophy.

The reason for this, of course, the substitution fo spin for political philosophy was the same for New Labour as it was in the case of Clinton spin. New Labour and Clinton Democrats were trying to do the impossible, keeping their lefty base happy by not really reforming the welfare state while assuring the rest of the country that they had left their old lefty ways behind and would be accountable and deliver government services just like market-driven retail giants.

Eventually all this was going to come crashing down, despite the best efforts of the MSM deniers.  The science is in on this.  You can’t deliver good public services with big government.  You can’t deliver flexibility; you can’t deliver efficiency.

The science is in.  Government is good for force and compulsion, and it’s none to good at that.  But we have to put government in charge of force and compulsion because the alternative to government is to have private armies floating around rather like China in the 1920s to 1940s and Iraq and Lebanon right now.  Not a nice place for peaceful people who just want to get on with their lives.

But for anything else, government is a loser.

The problem is that there are many people—bright, educated people—who don’t want to see this.

One day they will wake up from their dogmatic slumber.  They will join with us in building a better society that empowers people in the mediating structures between government and the individual. 

But that day is not yet.

Partisans Applaud as Bush Bashes Democrats

President Bush has finally started to lob a few shells at the Democrats who passed a supplemental funding bill for the Iraq war with a timetable for withdrawal.

Gateway Pundit is encouraged:

This speech today could have been made months ago.

Maybe so.  But presidents, at least the ones that are not terminally shameless, have this quaint notion that they are president of all the people. 

And a Republican president labors under a particular handicap.  The mainstream media is very quick to jump to the support of their Democratic friends when they feel that they are being unfairly attacked.

So the president has to choose his moments carefully.

And an unconstitutional bill to micromanage the war in Iraq certainly fits the bill.

It also makes a difference that the Democrats have control of Congress.  That allows the Democrats to actually do things for the president to criticize.

But let us echo the president:

Democrat leaders in Congress seem more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need to fight the battles in Iraq.

As for me, I think it is time for the Democrats to run the war against terror.  What is their policy?  What is their Plan?  They do have a plan, don’t they? 

America would like to know.

Are the Mullahs Desperate?

With the mullahs in Iran staging another hostage incident, you have to wonder if it is deja vue all over again. 

Embarrassing as it is for the Brits, maybe that’s all the Iranian mullahs know how to do: Stage another hostage crisis.

That’s what Austin Bay thinks. 

But this latest hostage-taking incident smacks of desperation, not revolutionary fervor.
Late spring 2007 finds the Iranian "revolutionary government" facing an extraordinary range of internal and external problems.

 There are several, shall we say, insurgencies going on inside Iran.  (Could the bumbling Bush have anything to do with that?)

But the mullahs have an even bigger problem.

The mullah’s core problem is the Iranian people. Under-30 Iranians have had it with the mullahs’ failed revolution.

According to RMC Chappie Eric Voegelin that is important.  A legitimate government is not a government that wins elections.  It is a government that is accepted by its people as legitimate.

Then there is the humiliation of the Arabs next door in Iraq making halting progress towards democracy.  If there is one thing your average Iranian knows, it is that he is superior to the Arabs.

The problem with all these thug regimes built upon natural resource sales is that they aren’t learning how to make it in the real world of products and services, exchange and trust.

Sooner or later it catches up with you.  Ask the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

What About Those Free Trade Deniers?

How come that fashionable New York Times columnists are so quick to make moral monsters out of people that question the authority of global-warming enthusiasts?

Nobody seems to give a damn about another kind of denier, the free-trade denier, as >Donald Luskin complains.

Such people are in fact standing athwart 250 years of economics, and an overwhelming consensus of living economists. These protectionists are denying the enormous gains in standards of living and human freedom that are the direct result of free global trade.

 When Maureen Dowd made a nasty little remark about people who didn’t agree with her about global warming she implied that the climate-change deniers were putting us all at risk.

But you can make a good argument that the free-trade deniers are far more dangerous.

There is a good argument that free trade is the one big thing that has powered the extraordinary rise in human well-being in the last 200 years, and we are talking about life expectancy as well as crude material wealth.

But free-trade deniers are allowed to write in major national publications and are accorded respect in national councils.  Where’s the shame?  Where’s the blame?

Of course there’s a common thread here. 

The free-trade deniers and the global-warming people are all folks with a taste for compulsion.  They want to take our money and spend it for us.  One day they want to spend it on helpless workers.  Another day they want to spend it on saving the planet.

But it is always Other Peoples’ Money.  And it is always about compulsion.

Bigger, Bolder, Brighter for 2007

Don’t tell me.  April 1 is a foolish day to launch a site redesign.  But what’s a father to do?  It’s spring and every young man’s fancy turns to spring cleaning the old site to make it brighter, bolder, and more compelling.

So now we have a new logo and a new top menu with two level menuing.

And we have a blog column, an oped column, and over on the right a list of the latest links that I’ve tagged on del.icio.us.

The new color is firebrick, #B22222.

I’ve no idea what it looks like.  I’m colorblind.