No Affirming for Christians in Holy Week

A permanent fixture of our calendar is Black History Month in which our media run dozens of affirming little features about the nobility and suffering of African Americans down the ages.

But the climax of the Christian calendar in Lent and Holy Week seems to be an opportunity to run attacks on Christianity, as reported by Brian Fitzpatrick:

Beginning on February 26, the news and entertainment media have fired a stunning barrage of criticism at religious beliefs, religious practice, and religious symbols. Nothing is too sacred to attack this year, not even the most crucial teachings of Judaism and Christianity.

And this even includes “guy” channels like the History and Discovery Channels.  You’d think that they at least would keep themselves apart from media fashion.

But I’ll bet that the media execs and producers serving up this stuff have no idea that they are dissing organized religion.  It just wouldn’t occur to them.  Imagine a TV mazazine show producing a feature during Black History Month that, say, investigated the financial affairs of race hustler Jesse Jackson.  Exactly.  It could not happen.  The thought wouldn’t even come into a network producer’s mind.

It’s not deliberate, it’s just the media template.  If it’s Lent then it must be time to run stories about Does God Exist.  If it’s Black History Month then it must be time to run stories about an obscure woman of color who suffered under the patriarchy.

Meanwhile, there is the “inconvenient truth,” told by Arthur C. Brooks in Who Really Cares, that conservative religious believers are more generous, more charitable, and happier than secular liberals. 

Yet religious believers are all ignorant bigots, we are told.  What is going on here?

Let's Talk. About Taxes

Let’s talk, said Hillary Clinton.  Of course she wanted to just talk pretty in pink, not actually talk about real things like the real money that the government is taking out of our pockets.

In this blog Michael Barone discusses the coming impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax as a political issue.  AMT was a soak-the-rich wheeze back in the late 1960s when Democrats suddenly decided that they were shocked that some millionaires weren’t paying income tax.  But now the AMT is hitting a core Democratic constituency, rich liberals in blue states.

In the American, American Enterprise Institute’s new magazine, former House Ways and Means staffer Alex Brill takes up my point that the upper middle-income people being swept into the AMT are concentrated in heavily Democratic constituencies.

It turns out that the AMT hits particularly hard in states with high state income taxes, so you can see why the blue states would be hardest hit.

Barone speculates that the public employee unions will soon weigh in on this as they are likely to be hardest hit if the AMT starts to bite blue-state finances.

But here is the kicker on taxes.

The Democrats would like to see most of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 or sooner; their House and Senate budget resolutions envision obtaining more revenue from unnamed sources and don’t envision extension of most of the Bush tax cuts.

Over my dead body, pal.

That sets up a clear issue difference between the parties, reflecting their genuine convictions on tax levels. But the AMT complicates things for the Democrats.

Good.  They deserve it.

I hope that all Republican operatives are working hard on the tactics that they are going to use against Democrats in 2008 when Democrats, ably assisted by their bribed apologists in the mainstream media, are going to be running away from the very idea that they intend to raise taxes.

Oh no, Democrats will say.  You have got it all wrong.  We wouldn’t think of raising taxes on the American people!  Just a few rich Republican fat cats and evil oil companies!

The question is whether we concentrate on growing the economy so that it can afford the massive bill for the baby-boom retirement or whether we just tax the economy to fund the baby-boom retirement.

There is a difference between the parties on this.

No Pelo-phany on Road to Damascus

Both left and right agree that Nancy Pelosi’s bumbling journey to Damascus was an embarrassment.

Writes the Washington Post editorial writer:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad.

 And from the right John Podhoretz:

On the road to Damascus, St. Paul became one of the revolutionary figures of world civilization.
Nancy Pelosi - not so much.

OK, so everyone makes mistakes, and suggesting that Israel was ready to negotiate peace with Syria was not Nancy Pelosi’s finest hour.

But there’s a bigger question here.  Obviously this trip to Damascus was not just a sudden brainstorm in the head of the speaker.  It was probably set up months ago as an interlocking piece in the puzzle of Victory 2008.

Are we to understand that the Democrats are starting to believe their own demagoguery, that the only problem in the Middle East is the blundering incompetence of President Bush?

The subtext on Speaker Pelosi’s trip is that all that is needed to solve the problem between Israel and Syria is the will to find peace.

I guess that is unremarkable coming from a Democrat, since that is what Democrats keep telling us they believe.  The only thing preventing peace is the “cycle of violence” that makes macho men keep on warring when they could be jawing.

But there’s a problem with such a Pollyanna view of international relations.  Says the Washington Post:

As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug[.]

This cycle of violence notion is all very well in polite liberal circles, but we are dealing with thug dictators here.  Power and thuggery, bloodshed and violence is the very life of thug dictatorship. Not peace.

Any of these thug dictators could, whenever they want, throw the whole thing up and go live in Paris—you know, right next to the widow of Yasser Arafat.

But they don’t.  They prefer power.  And making fools of foolish American politicians.

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.