After VT: Gun Control Doesn't Bark

After the horror of the shootings at Virginia Tech and the innocent lives cut down, two thoughts.

First of all, has nobody thought about just what a cruel place the modern university is?  It is perhaps the epicenter of privilege and injustice in the modern world.  You cannot just walk into a university like a Wal-Mart and say, here’s my $50; I’d like to take a course.  Oh no.  First of all, you put on your knee pads.  And that’s just the beginning of humiliation.

OK, so we learn that dozens of people knew about the killer Seung Cho.  And they had told the administration and the campus police about him.  And the powers-that-be did nothing.

This is where conservatives have something to say.  About the mediating institutions between the megastructures—like government and big research universities—and the individual.  Healthy societes have a vibrant space for the mediating institutions.  Welfare states and the like are constantly attacking the mediating institutions because they believe in top-down control by the educated elite ensconced in government.

We conservatives mourn, deeply mourn, that we haven’t done enough to get this message through.  Why not?  It’s so obvious, so self-evident.  People are social beings, they need to be embedded in social networks.  And social networks mean mediating, voluntary institutions free of the dead hand of government.

Second, did you notice the dog that didn’t bark?  Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid are saying: Gun control?  What gun control?

What is going on here?

Democrats are soft-pedaling gun control because, as Roger Simon writes, Democrats believe they lost the 2000 election because of gun owners.

Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas or the Democratic state of West Virginia, he would not have needed to win Florida in order to gain the presidency. But he lost them all. And guns had a lot to do with it.

We conservatives believe that the gun control issue is an epiphenomenon.  It stands for something much bigger, that people should be responsible for their own lives.  That the government cannot promise to make everyone safe with its big programs and its reckless promises.  People must look to their own resources. They must build and maintain their own networks of mutual aid and security.

And not the least of the value of these networks is to fold adolescent loners into the social network of community.

So for conservatives the spectacle of an adolescent loner going berserk in a government megastructure like a government university makes complete sense.

For us the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?

It is our job and our sacred mission to tell the world how to walk back from the dreadful anti-social society that the educated middle class has built in the last century.  In this society everything has been stripped away except government power and individual helplessness.

We know better.  And we live with the awful truth that we have failed to make our voices heard.  We have failed to break through the wall of liberal power to demand an end to the monstrous society of alienation and privilege.

So today we start again.  Break down the megastructures!  Shatter the privileges!  Grow the human-scale mediating institutions like families, churches, associations, and clubs!

And above all connect the adolescent loners back into society.

Let's Don't Kill All the Lawyers

The Duke “rape” case was won by good defense lawyering, writes lawyer Randy E. Barnett, and don’t you forget it next time you tell a lawyer joke.

When innocent people go to jail is is usually because of an incompetent defense.

In every case I knew about where an innocent person had been convicted, there had been an incompetent defense lawyer at the pretrial and trial stages.

In a competent legal system, moreover, the defense has a difficult problem.  If the prosecutors are competent then people tend to assume that anyone accused of a crime is probably guilty.

While knowing that mistakes do happen, the accuracy of the system leads everyone, including defense lawyers, to assume that anyone who is charged is probably guilty. After all, they usually are. Notwithstanding the legal "presumption of innocence," in a system that generally gets it right, there is a pragmatic presumption of guilt.

So if you are accused of a crime and you really are innocent, you have to prove your innocence.  That means that you have to hire good defense lawyers.  And the Duke case defense lawyers were good.

Their skillful questioning at pre-trial hearings revealed the prosecutor’s misconduct that eventually forced him to give up control of the case and now threatens his law license. They uncovered compelling exculpatory evidence and made it available to the press; they let their clients and their families air their story in the national media.

All’s well that ends well.  Just don’t forget how much you depend on a good defense when the legal system says: “J’Accuse!” 

Kill the Tax Monster

It’s all very well for Paul Greeberg to call for the end of the current federal income tax system.  No doubt he’s right that

For the average American family, filling out a tax form has become like attacking a puzzle to which, often enough, there is no right answer. But we’re all supposed to swear, on penalty of perjury, that we’ve done our best to find it.

But are people really as upset as he thinks?  First of all, only about half the American people actually pay income tax.  Rush Limbaugh has a permanent feature, Truth About Taxes, on his web site that trumpets the fact that 50 percent of the taxpayers pay 96.7 percent of the federal income tax. 

Then people like “beating the system” with the home mortgage deduction and the various tax credits.  It’s like weekly supermarket specials.  Supermarkets could just keep their prices low.  But instead they advertise loss leaders every week—and that means that other prices must go up to balance the loss leaders.  Why do they do it?  Women like the fun and excitement of hunting for bargains and clipping coupons.

Still, the federal income tax is enormously wasteful and complicated.  For the sake of national hygiene we should replace it.

Greenberg wants to replace the current income tax with a flat tax.  He’s right.  The president’s budget for 2008 anticipates income tax collections of $1.246 trillion.  That’s about 9 percent of GDP.  For that we need a complicated schedile of tax rates going up to nearly 40 percent and a forest of deductions, credits and allowances?

Come on.  America can do better. 

Just Who Has the Conflict of Interest?

It was noble of Newsweek to allow a climate change denier, climate scientist Richard Lindzen, to write a column in their global-warming scare issue.  But they wanted you to know that Lindzen “receives no funding from any energy companies.”

Oh really.  So we are to believe, writes Jeff Jacoby, that

Apparently Lindzen’s scientific and professional credentials aren’t sufficient to lend authority to his views; readers must be explicitly reassured that "energy companies" haven’t paid him off.

The cluelessness of Newsweek’s clarification is this.  Don’t they realize, and don’t Newsweek’s readers realize, that the “conflicts of interest” are all on the scare side of the global warming debate?

To begin with, staggering sums of money are channeled to researchers who emphasize the human role in global warming.

You know: grants.  Research money.  Not to mention promotion and advancement.

And then there are the prizes.  Big ones.

ASA’s James Hansen, a prominent global-warming Cassandra, won a $250,000 Heinz Award in 2001. Last month he was a co-winner of the Dan David Prize and its $1 million purse. Other awards and other purses have frequently gone to other prophets of doom. And the potential rewards don’t stop there. For those who toe the politically correct line on global warming, there have been big book contracts, hefty speaking fees, worshipful magazine profiles, softball TV interviews — even an Academy award.

Yeah.  Let’s talk about conflicts of interest.

The Passing of Unsung Conservatives

Liberals we know all about.  They are celebrated from a thousand MSM mouthpieces.  But when conservatives pass on we find, from the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances, that we hardly knew ’em.

Here is Milton Friedman remembered by Charles H. Brunie.

Once when Milton was in New York visiting some of Oppenheimer’s clients, we had a cocktail party after a long day. A young man asked him a question in an exceedingly rude manner—again and again. Milton’s response was very gracious. The next morning Milton was debating James Tobin, another Nobel laureate, at the Institutional Investor conference, with perhaps 1,000 attendees. Tobin asked almost the exact same question as had the young man the prior evening, but he did it very politely. Milton went at him hammer and tongs. Later, I asked Milton why he was so polite to the young man and so aggressive with Tobin. He replied, “The young chap didn’t know what he was talking about. Conversely, James did—it was an ambush question, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.”

Now we have the reminiscences of Pat Buckley, Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr. from NRO.  Writes William Rusher: 

The news of Pat Buckley’s death prompted two quite diverse reflections. The first was the memory of her many quiet kindnesses. Indeed, “quiet” is hardly an adequate word; “secret” might be better. In any case, they were wonderful. By pure chance, I learned that she had visited one friend every day for the last two weeks of his life, as it ebbed away owing to a mortal illness. To be there when you really needed her: That was Pat.

Well, who knew?  A rude young man graciously tolerated?  A New York socialite making the time for daily visits to a friend in the last two weeks of life?

Maybe that’s how it should be.  For if our good works are “known only to God,” what’s the problem?  You need to have your charity and your generosity celebrated in the newspaper Life section?

Virtue, it is said, is doing good when nobody can see you.

Hypocrisy Week

If shock jock Don Imus went to his reward, what about Malik Shabazz?  If it’s an outrage to make a racial joke about some basketball players then what about calling an Asian American woman a prostitute to her face on cable TV?  That’s what happened to Michelle Malkin.

Next, one Malik Shabazz, leader of the "New Black Panther Party," refuses to apologize for lynching the innocent Duke lacrosse players—and then proceeds to call me a "political prostitute" and mouthpiece for whites. Like I haven’t heard that a half-million times before.

Yeah.  Malkin’s heard it all before.

Comes with the territory when you’re an uppity brown woman who strays from the liberal plantation, you know.

And I gotta say, if they are insulting Michelle Malkin, then for me it’s personal.

James Bowman explains all this in Honor, A History.  Honor for men is standing in the line of battle and not running away and leaving your brothers in the lurch.  Honor for women is chastity.  You think that stuff is all old hat?  Then, writes Bowman, call a man a wimp and a woman a whore.

Our liberal friends, of course, have tried to upset this instinctive business of honor, with the anti-hero who makes a point of not standing with his brothers and the modern concept of women and “a sexual life.”

But of course, when it’s about race it’s different. In the liberal playbook race beats the all-important sexual revolution.

But watch for honor to make a comeback.  It’s probably more important than we think.

How Liberal Censorship Works

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a documentary focusing on the struggle of moderate Muslims to battle the forces of Islamofascist extremists would be a natural for PBS’s “America at a Crossroads” series.

But you would be wrong.

PBS has decided that the documentary “Islam vs. Islamists” produced by a group including conservative defense advocate Frank Gaffney, Jr. was too extreme and too one-sided to be shown on PBS.    

In other words, a documentary that compellingly portrays what happens to moderate Muslims when they dare to speak up for and participate in democracy, thus defying the Islamists and their champions, is not fit for public airwaves — even in a series specifically created to bring alternative perspectives to their audience.

Not that that ever worried PBS when they had a lefty documentary to show.

And that was the least of it.  PBS also:

• Tried to get Gaffney removed as an executive producer for the show
• Allowed “a series producer with family ties to a British Islamist to insist on sweeping changes to its "structure and context" that would have assured more favorable treatment of those portrayed vilifying and, in some cases, threatening our anti-Islamist protagonists.” 
• Hired, as an advisor to select the documentary films, an admirer of the Nation of Islam—which gets money from the Saudis to set up black Wahhabi mosques.  But this Saudi assistance is a feature of Gaffney’s documentary.  Talk about a conflict of interest.

More interesting than the he-said-she-said accusations is the bigger issue.  What exactly do these liberals think they are doing by covering for radical Islam?

Maybe it’s because that’s what liberals do for a living.  You identify a victim class worthy of support by compassionate and enlightened people.  Then you defend it from mainstream America—which all enlightened people know is racist and bigoted.

Up to now this approach to politics has worked a treat for liberals.  Over the last century they have successively identified workers, blacks, women, gays, illegal aliens as helpless victims.  Then they translated support for these victim groups into political power.  Hey, if it works...

But you wonder if that liberals haven’t gone a bridge to far by cozying up to radical Islam.