John Edwards' Two Americas

Conservatives and Republicans like to go to bed at night secure in the knowledge that liberals are not the sensitive compassionate people of a thousand puff pieces but snobs and rich bitches.  And not just that but mean and stingy, as Arthur C. Brooks suggests in his Who Really Cares.

But our objective media seldom satisfy our deepest yearning.

Which is odd, when you think about it.  Imagine the circulation potential in “liberal hypocrite” stories!

But at last we have hit pay dirt. We have Elizabeth Edwards and the “rabid, rabid Republican” story.  And it couldn’t be better.

Now Leah Friedman of the Chapel Hill News & Observer has been to see Monty Johnson, the rabid, gun-toting neighbor of the high-flying, presidential campaigning Edwards family.

"I’d just like to know why she has such hard feelings to me," he said. "They say they’re for poor people."

Monty, according to the story, is a 55-year-old retired landscape gardener, and when reporter Friedman caught up with him he was on his way home with a cooler full of catfish. 

What got his goat, he says, was Edwards’ calling his 42-acre property "slummy."

Actually, you could make a reasonable argument that when the ambulance-chasing lawyers move in it is they who are lowering the tone of the neighborhood.

Anyway, the Edwards won’t have Monty Johnson around much longer.  Edwards has his “slummy” property up for sale.  And he’s open to offers from the Edwards.  No hard feelings in that department.

But Johnson would like an apology.

Liberal Censorship! Oh No!

In the age of talk radio it has become much more difficult to bury egregious examples of liberal censorship.

It’s always been a major national problem.  But hitherto the power of the mainstream media meant that liberals could always squash anything that made them looke like the bad guys. 

Liberals are all in favor of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable as long as no liberal oxen are gored.  But you’d better not try afflicting comfortable liberals!

So now PBS has “censored” a documentary piece about moderate Muslims versus the extremists because, as Jennifer Harper reports:

the film would "demonize Islam" and promote public fear of Islamic organizations.

Of course, conservative super-hawk Frank Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy is associated with the film “Islam vs. Islamists,” and that is bound to promote public fear—among liberals, anyway. 

But think of all the liberal documentaries down the ages that have demonized people.  Think of the granddaddy of them all, CBS’s “Harvest of Shame” back in the 1960s.  Think of how that landmark documentary demonized farmers and promoted public fear of farming organizations.

And what about all those helpless Southern racists demonized by documentaries about civil rights?

Of course, it’s perfectly OK to run features demonizing Wal-Mart, or the notorious right-wing militia movement.  That’s different.  Why, Wal-Mart is in danger of promoting public fear of high prices.  And that would never do.

But the biggest problem in the United States was unearthed by Bolce and De Maio in The Public Interest years ago.  Liberals hate Christian fundamentalists.  They hate them with a passion that Bolce and De Maio measured using generally accepted social science interview techniques. 

So PBS should really be worrying about documentary films that demonize Christians and that encourage secular liberals in their dangerous anti-religious bigotry.  Because much of what passes for liberal journalism promotes public fear of the ordinary evangelical Christians next door.

A Liberal Mourns His Favorite Republican

Just what was it about John McCain that liberals loved so much?  Was it because he ran against the Republican Party base in 2000?  The way columnist E.J. Dionne remembers it:

He spoke out too forcefully in 2000 for campaign finance reform and against "the demands of big-money special interests." He condemned the "self-appointed" leaders of conservative groups — a rather influential constituency — and singled out Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "the agents of intolerance."

Really?  McCain is against big-money special interests?  No kidding! First I’ve heard of it.  I imagine that he’d also be against incumbent protection acts.

Yet everything that “right-wingers” loathed about McCain is “what his party most needs now.”

His reform enthusiasms stand as the perfect antidote to the corruption of the past Republican Congress.

It’s telling, isn’t it.  Dionne’s idea of a good Republican is one that would make the party take its medicine.

But Dionne has got it wrong.  We folk in the Republican base don’t like McCain because we don’t like his truckling to the liberal media.  We don’t like his attack on the First Amendment.  We don’t like his corporative approach to commerce.  We don’t like his government-comes-first approach to tax cuts.

And we don’t like him joining the liberal linebackers piling onto Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. 

The liberal half of this nation has a serious problem with anti-religious bigotry.  The last thing the nation needs is presidential candidates taking pot-shots at religious leaders—even if many of them are just as flawed as our political leaders.

The Social Work Bullies at Missouri State

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The president of Missouri State University, Michael T. Nietzel, recently publicized a report on the university’s School of Social Work, saying that the report was “as negative a review of an academic program as I have ever seen.”

In the report, according to Anne D. Neal,

the external auditors describe a “toxic environment” in which students are bullied, discriminated against because of their faith, and coerced “into certain belief systems regarding social work practice and the social work profession.”

 Don’t be too quick to blame the school, writes Neal.  What about the accrediting agency, the Council on Social Work Education?

Policy Section 4.2 requires that CSWE-accredited programs “integrate social and economic justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.” 

Yes, a highly academic approach to the concept and practice of social work.

But let us read between the lines.  Who are the students likely to be studying at the MSU School of Social Work?  Not white males, obviously.  And probably not to many white females, either.  Social Work lacks the prestige it enjoyed a couple of generations ago. 

No.  What you can expect is that most of the students in a modern School of Social Work will be minority females.

And that is who the thugs of the bullying class are coercing.

There’s a temptation for conservatives to take the Leninist line about all this.  What do we care about nasty goings on in the nether regions of the liberal bureaucracy?  The worse the better.

But it won’t do.  Because the thugs of the bullying class are beating up on our fellow Americans.  And conservatives just don’t like that.

We want all Americans to be free and independent, even the dupes and the victims of the bullying class, even people who will never vote for a conservative or a Republican in their lives.

A liberal, they say, is someone who wants to be paid to help people.  A social worker, apparently, is someone who demands to be paid to bully people. 

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.