The Real Meaning of Honor

Honor is a much abused word.

Mostly it is abused by people who say: How dare you question my honor?

Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, is bravery in men and chastity in women. If you think that’s all baloney, then try telling a man he’s a wimp and a woman she’s a whore and see where it gets you.

The point is this. Honor in men is the absolute commitment not to break and run when standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers in the face of certain death.

It was honor, writes W. Thomas Smith, that made John McCain refuse the Vietnamese offer of a ticket home.

Wracked with dysentery, having been tortured as a POW for nearly eight months (he would be imprisoned for another five years), at times suicidal... and beaten and bayoneted during his capture; McCain simply said “no.”

McCain’s honor saved him from the dishonor of providing the North Vietnamese with a stunning propaganda stunt, to

Show the world a “merciful” North Vietnamese government, while simultaneously creating a sense among other American prisoners that the “blue bloods” among the POW ranks would easily accept preferential treatment.

John McCain’s father was an admiral, at that time commander of naval forces in the Pacific. Imagine what the anti-war folks could have done with that.

However politics or business may work, an armed service needs people of honor. It is not a noble thing, but a practical thing.

Putting others ahead of oneself, being honest, and – to borrow an oft-uttered phrase – “being a Boy Scout” is a part of the mix which drill instructors have always tried to whip into raw recruits. Moral men simply make better, more-disciplined fighters who will put the unit above themselves. So as a consequence, former fighters are, more often than not, going to be good, moral people.

Of course, our liberal masters don’t really like this. They understand that the spirit of honor that permeates the armed forces is a culture that could one day be turned upon them.

That is why they work so hard to attack the US Armed Forces whenever they are accused of wrongdoing.

More People Entering Work Force

The unemployment rate was out today, up to 5.1 percent. As usual the headline “80,000 Jobs Slashed” was not the important story.

If you look at the Labor Department’s press release (archived) you will see that the interesting number is in the Household Data. It shows that the Civilian labor force increased by 410,000 last month and that the number of people “not in labor force” declined by 225,000.

What does that mean? Does it mean that people are flooding into the labor force looking for jobs so they can avoid foreclosure on their homes? Does it mean that people see job opportunities? Does it mean that laid-off people are starting new businesses?

At this time of the business cycle, the numbers in the Household Survey (from a BLS survey of households) are typically more optimistic than the numbers in the Establishment Survey (from a survey of employers). But what does that mean?

Anyway, the stock market is going sideways today. That’s because the unemployment rate is usually considered a lagging indicator. Financial markets are typically looking round the corner, six months to a year ahead.

The trouble is that you can’t really see what’s round the corner. That is why markets fluctuate.

Who's The Fighter?

Academics and government employees like Barack Obama for president, writes Michael Barone, because they are peacable souls who don’t like conflict.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war.

Of course there is more than sentiment here. War competes for public-sector dollars with education and domestic government programs.

But Clinton and McCain are fighters. They appeal to the Scotch Irish types in America, the kind of people who supported Andrew Jackson went he ran against John Quincy Adams for president in 1828.

Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, "If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you."

In other words, if Obama gets to be the Democratic nominee for president we really will have a choice not an echo.

In my view, the idea that academics prefer the arts of peace is a little overdrawn. Academics have been ruthless in their purging of conservative voices in the academy and in their general marginalization of conservative ideas. And when it comes to opposing reform of the welfare state they stop at nothing.

But academics like to have someone else do the dirty work for them: policemen, tax collectors, and human rights commissions.

But I get the point.

Dem Divide: It Really Isn't Funny

It’s easy for Republicans to snigger at the problems the Democrats are having in nominating a candidate for president.

After all, they deserve it. For forty years since the civil rights era they have sat at the political table and played race card after race card.

Har, har, they would say to the white-faced players at the table as they cleaned up, and not just money, but power and the love of beautiful women.

But now it is looking as if their race politics is forcing the Democrats to nominate a very not-ready-for-prime-time candidate for president.

And there’s nothing the Democrats can do about it. That’s because their candidate is black. If the Democratic superdelegates ditch Obama—for another flawed candidate—then they are risking the fundamental base of their party support, the almost unanimous support of the black electorate. James Edmund Pennington calls it the Democrats’ devil’s bargain,

[the] devil’s bargain with American blacks, a bargain that promises, in exchange for nearly all black votes all the time, fealty to certain imperatives, be it a continuation of social policies that are poisonous to blacks and the nation, silence and denial in the face of widespread destructive behavior patterns at the root of much of the black American dilemma, obsequious veneration of hate mongering, racial arsonist black "leaders", or, as in the case of Obama, the nomination of dangerously untested, thinly-resumed candidates who may be deeply flawed and unelectable. For forty years this has been the bargain and it must hold now.

Devil’s bargains end in an almighty smash-up. When it comes, it’s not going to be at all funny.

But let’s face it, American blacks were going to have to come face to face with reality, the reality that life is not just race and slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.

Why not this year?

Education vs. Family

In the sleeper movie hit “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” the heroine Toula breaks away from her imprisonment in the family Greek restaurant by getting some computer classes at the local college.

That’s a common pattern, a liberal friend told me. Children who don’t get an education are stuck in the ghetto of their family and don’t “get on.”

But for me, a light went off. For if the mission of the university is to break children away from their traditional family community, then isn’t the mission of every liberal program the same? Whether it’s education, health care, or welfare, every government dollar loosens a woman’s tie (and it’s usually a woman) to her family.

Isn’t that just what liberals want?

The question is: how much of a good thing is this, really? We westerners may all agree that it’s important to free women from patriarchal domination. But when does a government program get to the point of breaking up family ties so much that children grow up stunted from lack of parental attention, as Minette Marrin argues.

Increasingly it seems parents can’t or won’t spend time and care on their children. Increasingly both parents are working; increasingly single parents are anxious, harried and time-poor; increasingly children are consigned to inadequate day care and nurseries; increasingly they are offered wraparound educare (promoted by Gordon Brown [and Hillary Clinton]). Increasingly we see the results.

Many of us take it for granted that it is a good idea for adults to have independent fulfilling careers and consign their children to the care of help professionals. But there seems to be a cost.

[H]alf of all toddlers arrive at primary school unable to speak properly for their age. Their numbers are growing. To say this suggests a widespread failure of socialisation is surely an understatement.

When you take people away from their families and put them into institutional settings, be it childcare, school, factory, or office park, you lose something.

And we did not just get here by accident. We got here because the progressive class wanted us here.

The job of conservatives in the next few years is to develop a compelling critique of the liberal world in which we live. Then we should offer the American people a way out of this death spiral. We should offer them family and hope.

How Could This Happen, Say Libs

You gotta love our liberal friends. Here we should be wiping the floor with the Republicans, say the folks at the New Republic in Bush’s Last Laugh. Instead the situation “verges on the apocalyptic” for the Democrats.

Where it once looked like Bill Clinton and Al Gore had helped purge the party of the lame identity politics that had ruined Democratic candidates for a generation, discussions of race and gender have returned with a vengeance. Supporters of Clinton and Obama compete to prove who is the bigger victim—opponents are casually tarred as sexist or racist.

Oh yeah? Since when did Clinton and Gore do anything but use identity politics in the 1990s, appointing tons of people to administration positions because of their race or gender?

What Bill Clinton did in the 1990s was keep a low profile on race and gender. Above the radar, he was the president of the soccer moms. But below the radar he was a full-on practitioner of identity politics, careful to keep feminists and blacks on side and eager, with the Motor Voter law, to make it easy for anyone with a driver’s license (i.e. Mexican nationals) to register to vote.

And when Al Gore ran for the presidency in 2000 he ran a class warfare campaign, “fighting for the people against the powerful.”

Last time I looked, race and identity politics was going as strong as ever in the nation’s schools and universities, as Mike S. Adams experiences on a daily basis. Recently he’s been trying to get the University of North Carolina to help publicize a talk given by a notorious Christian creationist, and the university keeps losing his emails. Wrong identity, you see.

Let’s face it, the Democrats have done a land office business with race, class, and gender identity politics. But, as the good book says, those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

Just One Day In The News

Over on the right at Road to the Middle Class we run a ticker of “Readings.” Today, Friday March 28, 2008, they look like this:

• The "100-Year " Lie, how Democrats are jumping all over John McCain for saying that we could be in Iraq for 100 years.
  
• Kangaroo court is now in session, Mark Steyn’s story about the Canadian Human Rights Commissions that have nothing to do except troll for trouble in neo_nazi websites.
  
• Obama’s Former Pastor’s $1.6M Home, about the rather upper-class home that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is building in suburban Chicago.
  
• Toyota Prius proves a gas guzzler, about a Beemer diesel getting better gas mileage than a Toyota Prius.
  
• The Polar Bear Ambush, about environmentalists trying to get the polar bear listed as an endangered species so that they can get the courts to impose their global warming agenda.
  

What is the common denominator in all these news items? Liberal hypocrisy. One rule for me and one for thee.

That’s why I’m looking for a Democratic sweep this November. The American people have kinda forgotten what Democratic governance looks like. I think they need a reminder, and I think that conservatives need a vacation, a pause to get their thinking caps on and start developing a real agenda for reform.

All you need to do is go over to usgovernmentspending.com if you want to get the message about what ails this country. In fact, you don’t have to do anything. We’ll bring the details to you.

There’s where we need to go to work. Almost a trillion dollars a year in government pensions. Almost a trillion dollars a year in government health care. Almost a trillion dollars a year in government education. And what do we get for it?