Rush Babies: They're Out There!

The Drive-Bys aren’t reporting this, of course, but there’s a whole new generation out there brought to adult consciousness by uber-talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.  And this morning a young Rush baby checked in:

When I first started listening to you, I was just kinda coming out of high school.  I can’t say I was the brightest person in the world, 2.3 GPA.  A lot of what you’ve said as far as going above and beyond and being more than you could be, so to speak, it has kind of helped me drive myself through college.  I’m 24 working on my second masters now.  You’ve really helped me[.]

“Joseph from Akron” had been raised in a union household, he told Rush. And Joseph’s father:

He’s a hundred percent, hard-core union guy. I grew up a liberal, and pretty much that was the only side of the coin I saw[.]

His mother would cry when a conservative got elected president.

You can see why some of our liberal friends are anxious to return to the good old days of the FCC Fairness Doctrine.  We’ve got to put a stop to this sort of thing.

You know, I just want to thank you for paving the road to enlightenment, so to speak, and like I said it’s hard to find resources out there to really combat the — I won’t really call it ignorance, but — misinformation that’s out there.

Yep.  This sort of thing could get really out of hand.  The critical moment comes when people break out of the helplessness syndrome after excessive studying at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

They oughta make a law to stop it before it’s too late.  Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

After Pelosi, time for some thinking

The trouble with Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Damascus was the thinking behind it, writes Michael Barone,

the thinking that gave Pelosi confidence she could produce progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
At the heart of that thinking is this proposition: We’re the problem.

Crudely put, it’s the Blame America First way of thinking.

(Actually, in the larger view, we are the problem, but not in the way the Blame America Firsters think.  It is our global commonwealth of trust and trade that is pitching the backward, parallel-cousin-marrying Middle East into chaos.)

 The problem, writes Barone, is the woman at a Democratic fundraiser who said:

“we were very safe under the Clinton administration.” No, we weren’t “very safe” — we just thought we were.

The depth of misunderstanding in a remark like that is telling.  The woman did not, after all, come up with that notion out of thin air.  She was just repeating what the Democratic zeitgeist was telling her.

Talk about “Bush Lied!”  To push a meme like that out among the Democratic faithful is setting up trouble for the future. 

And maybe the only way America can deal with it is to put a Democrat in the White House and force him—or her—to deal with reality. 

Don’t believe us evil warmongering Republicans. Get out there and experience reality for yourself, pal.

Then you’ll find out whether American is really the problem.  And you’ll find out whether we were really “very safe” in the Clinton years.

And then it will be time for some thinking.

Thinking Beyond the Welfare State

As Tony Blair heads for the exits conservative Brits are thinking about what the Conservative Party should offer against the high-tax high regulation, badly-run public services of New Labour Britain.

Iain Martin has a go.  From Tony Blair’s expected successor, Gordon Brown, we can expect “a bit less of the same,” the refrain of Clinton and Blair.  He’ll continue with the welfare state only it will be better managed.

High taxation will continue, our Armed Forces will be overstretched and real reform of public services postponed.

Conservatives need to offer the genuine alternative to this slow death by unreformed government bureaucracy.  They need to offer

a revival of social responsibility, relying on free institutions rather than Labour’s big state... and dramatic improvement in the lives of the poorest, who are currently held back by welfarism, violent crime and woeful education.

This points out the real issue with regard to the welfare state.  Suppose the Brits achieved “real reform of public services” tomorrow.  It’s unrealistic, of course, because of the power of public service providers to resist any reform, real or otherwise.

That would mean that the public services are organized to deliver public services in the context of 2007.  They will still be organized to deliver those services 2007-style in 2017, 2027, 2037, and so on.  When, do you think, would they get to be reformed again?  Not for a generation, at least.  Probably not for 50 years.

But that is the optimistic scenario, assuming that the public services got a full reform today.  In reality schools, health care, and welfare will continue unreformed, based on the ideas of fifty or a hundred years ago.

That is why they must be refomed and replaced by free and flexible institutions.  Until then the inflexible, unreformable big state will go on being inflexible and unreformable.

Lefties Want to Get Paid To Blog

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt chuckles at the frustration of lefty bloggers that their top dogs don’t link to and promote the the little puppy blogs.

Why, complains Kathy at Shakesville, the right-wing blogs do it all the time.  There’s no way, she complains, that “Jihad Watch and LaShawn Barber’s Corner and BLACKFIVE and Mudville Gazette and Wizbang” could have got to the top 25 of Truth Laid Bear’s blog ecosystem rankings on talent alone.

It does not make me happy to know that people whose worldview is so narrow, intolerant, exclusive, and hateful are so much better at supporting their ideological soulmates than we on the left, whose values run to diversity, inclusiveness, a place at the table for everyone, human needs before defense contractors’ wish lists.

You have to read stuff like that to believe it!  By the way, if you want to know how governments in the United States do in fact put human needs before defense contractors’ wish lists, or at least pay liberals to supervise other peoples’ human needs, just pop over to usgovernmentspending.com.

Of course, maybe the answer can be found in Arthur C. Brooks’ Who Really Cares? Religious conservatives are just more generous and more charitable than secular liberals.

The trouble is that people are just not being generous enough with the lefty bloggers. Kathy quotes from The Nation.

As bloggers become some of the progressive movement’s most effective voices, the left still has not figured out how to provide them with the resources they need to keep going.

Solution? The George Soros types should be paying lefty bloggers to blog.

Those lefties.  They really are something. 

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.