I Just Got a Tingle!

For the last couple of years I've sneered at liberal Chris Matthews and his famous tingle. But now I take it all back.

Needless to say, my tingle--and yes, it was in my leg--had nothing to do with President Obama. It came at the end of an American Spectator blog by Ben Stein. It had to do with the comments of his Hispanic gas station attendant.

"We have to wake up," he said. "Those people want to hurt us. Then they want to build a mosque. Why? To hurt us more? And how come Obama always takes the side of the people who hate us? Isn't this his country, too? What's wrong with him? Doesn't he know he's an American? Or what is he? This country has to wake up and get rid of Obama."

I nodded. "I agree," I said.

The man shook his head. "This country has to wake up," he said again. "We elected Obama. We made a big mistake. Now we have to fix it. Stop him, then get someone else in there. Someone who is an American. Someone who works for us, not our enemies."

Tingly stuff, I'd say. Because it tells a very big truth about America and American history.

At some point every immigrant stops thinking of himself as a helpless victim oppressed by a big bad America. He stops hugging the side of the swimming pool in the shallow end with all the liberal swimming instructors and strikes out into the deep end. He finds out the amazing, almost unbelievable truth about America. He belongs. He finds himself thinking of himself as a non-hyphenated American. He starts talking about "we." He finds, out there in the deep end, that when he gets into trouble and asks for help, Americans will come and help.

Perhaps he plucks up his courage and goes to a Tea Party--where all those racist whites hang out. And he finds out that he's welcome, that the sharp-faced middle-aged white women are pathetically grateful to see him there.

He finds out that everything the liberals told him is a lie, that all those awful racists and bigots of which he's heard tell are just folks.

Maybe he even gets a tingle running up his leg.

Ben Quayle's Way With Words

Back in the day--oh what halcyon days they were--Vice President Dan Quayle (R) had a little problem with his spelling.

Yes, he spelled "potato" with an "e." Oh what a jolly time our media friends had with that. Because, you see, it confirmed their worst prejudice, that Republicans were uncultured and anti-intellectual.

What a shock it is, then, to discover that Dan Quayle's son Ben has a remarkable way with words. Even the liberal Politico has taken notice covering his victory speech when he won the Republican primary for the 3rd congressional district in Arizona on Tuesday.

His victory speech's first line mirrored a startling attack ad he released in the campaign's final weeks: "I mainly have eight words for you: Barack Obama is the worst president in history," he told supporters.

Well. On the other hand, maybe he's not so good with words. His line seems a bit wordy to me. For one thing, it adds up to 15 words, including the vocal pause "mainly".

Dan Quayle can't spell, and now we find out that Ben Quayle can't add.

The thing is that in these latter days, you've got to cut things down, dumb them down so the "like" and the "totally" and the "whatever" crowd can get it. How about this:

Worst. President. Ever.

Still too long? Hmm. Maybe we have to reduce it to texting-speak, where everything is reduced to an abbreviation, as in LOL. How about:

WPE

I wonder if WPE is already taken? Let's just Google it and see.

Ah, no problem. WPE is already recognized as "worst president ever."

So that's all right. Mind you, WPE also stands for "writing proficiency exam" and "winsock packet editor." But somehow I think that people will get the point.

When they go into the voting booth in November.

Palin the Kingmaker

Several of the GOP candidates that won yesterday are, as our MSM friends like to say in their objective reports, outside the mainstream. In the next paragraph, they typically quote some Democratic honcho; he'll say that Democrats look forward to running against him.

Sharron Angle in Nevada is one such candidate. And it looks like Rick Scott (R), the self-financed businessman running for governor in Florida is another. Maybe Joe Miller, who seems to have defeated Lisa Murokowski, is another.

The MSM is right, of course. In the past conservative candidates that didn't mouth the correct pieties to liberal Articles of Faith got clobbered.

One day, of course, that's going to change. Because that's the way the world works. One day some chap will come along and desecrate a holy shrine. People will hold up their hands in horror. They will look up to the heavens expecting the wrath of the gods--and nothing will happen.

Is 2010 that year? Nobody knows. Not yet.

But we do know that Sarah Palin is a political force. All the people that wrote her off as a light-weight and as a bumbling fool are wrong. Sarah Palin is a remarkable political talent, and she has been a professional politician since the mid-1990s. She seems to have a political "golden gut," an instinct for the right word, the right gesture, that President Obama would probably love to borrow, if only he could.

Sarah Palin is making herself into a political kingmaker. She travels around the country sprinkling selected candidates with her pixie dust--and they keep coming out of nowhere to win elections.

Are you chaps ready to take her seriously yet?

Government's Kiss of Death

I picked up Tom Wolfe's two latest novels, I am Charlotte Simmons and A Man in Full a while back, and now I have started Charlotte.

But I almost stopped right there. Because I thought to myself: I don't want to read about this squalor, this tale of youth utterly degraded and demoralized. It's too painful.

Then just yesterday I had been reading Hugh Hewitt's interview with Peter Hitchens on his new book The Rage Against God. There's this nugget of life in Britland.

We are a country in very severe decline of all kinds, and there is, at the moment, no sign whatever of any serious attempt to recover from that decline... [T]he tourist visitor inevitably sees the nicer parts, and isn’t going to go to the sort of place where you discover that the feral youths loping through the streets, where they will kick your head in at the drop of a hat. But we see them, and we see the un-policed cities, and we see vast areas from which the economy has withdrawn, and where people live entirely on welfare... And we see the effects of an education system in which people can spend eleven years in full-time education and come out unable to read, write or count... And unless something is done about it very soon, then as a society, we will cease to function. We are becoming an uncivilized anarchy, and a very, very uneducated and immoral one as well.

He goes on to say that marriage as an institution has just about ceased to exist in Britland.

Then, of course, we come back to the Obama administration and its $4.4 trillion increase in government spending and its utter failure to spark the economy from the banking crisis of 2008.

If you want to come up with the common denominator in all this, it is government and the government's kiss of death.

This is not all that hard. Government is the social agent of force. Politics is about power. The people that succeed in politics are people that are good at power.

When you put government in charge of anything then the culture of force takes over. Compulsion becomes the order of the day. And then the social arts, the kindly virtues, start to wither. Since everything becomes a matter of political power, then everything in society becomes reduced to power.

When everything is reduced to power, you no longer have a society.

We've put government in charge of education. So now everything to do with education is a matter of power. All the mediating institutions that make the world safe get tossed away, and solitary individuals like Charlotte Simmons get chewed up in the government meat grinder. The government kiss of death to young people.

We've put government in charge of welfare. So now everything in welfare is a matter of political influence. Welfare recipients understand how this works. They vote for the chaps that promise more money. If you want money, you must act pathological. Now we find that a century of government money for the poor has destroyed the low-income family. The government kiss of death to the poor.

We've put the government in charge of the economy. So now we have the massive swings and tidal bores of the current economy. Government spends a ton of money on housing subsidies, and creates a housing bubble and the inevitable housing bust. Now government is trying to fix the broken credit system while it plans vast new interventions in the economy. And, of course, in the century of the Federal Reserve, the value of the dollar has gone from $20.75 per ounce of gold to $1,200 per ounce of gold. The government kiss of death to the economy.

I wonder what will happen if we put the government in charge of health care? Oh dear. We already did.

Obama's Religion Problem

Our liberal friends have their knickers in a twist right now about the shocking finding that about 20 percent of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. Just to be on the safe side, they are blaming Rush Limbaugh for this.

The awful Rush, you see, started calling the president "Imam Obama" last week.

Earth to liberals: One of Rush Limbaugh's big secrets is hidden in the phrase "fun, frolic, and a serious discussion of the issues." The Rush Limbaugh Program features humor and wit--even extending to irony and sarcasm--as much as it features political analysis.

And I would suggest that calling the president "Imam Obama" is an instance of irony. Very advanced and sophisticated, irony. At least that's what liberals used to say. That was before their ox got gored.

It's not that surprising that 20 percent of Americans think Obama is Muslim. His father is Muslim. He spent a good part of his youth in Indonesia, a Muslim country. His middle name is Hussein. So what! Liberals put out confusing and unhelpful memes about conservatives all the time.

But Obama's problem is not really about Islam. Obama's problem is his political approach to religion in general. And that is what came through so loud and clear on the president's iftar speech.

When it comes to religion, Obama is a liberal. He is liberal in the way that he pronounces on the 9/11 mosque. He is liberal on the way that he condones the ugly black racism of Reverend Wright. He is liberal in the way that he talked about "my faith tradition" during the campaign. And of course he is liberal in the way that he has no regard for the religious beliefs of health care workers that may not want to be involved in abortion procedures or "death panel" decisions.

I don't know whether Obama is a Christian. I doubt if he is a Muslim. I do know that he is a liberal. If you are looking for his "belief system" then the answer is "liberal."

Liberalism is what we now call a "secular religion." It has all the hallmarks of a religion except a belief in God. It's a faith community. It has its articles of belief. It divides the world into us and them. It is militant, actively seeking converts, particularly in the government education system. It is intolerant towards non-believers.

This wouldn't be exceptionable, except for one thing. Liberalism wants to combine its secular faith, its church of liberalism, with the government. It wants its belief system to become a kind of state religion, but without God. This puts liberals into an interesting position. They are always quoting Thomas Jefferson and his call for a wall between church and state.

But they refuse to admit that their beliefs constitute a religion and that there amounts, in the United States, an establishment of liberal religion, officially supported and imposed by the government in a host of ways. Here's one. In the welfare state the government does a lot of things, like education, health care, and welfare, that used to be done by churches.

Obama's problem with religion is that, in a nation that's 40 percent conservatives, 35 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal, he's forcing a minority world view on the majority.

That is not a situation that is likely to end happily.

What Conservatives are For

The last two weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don't understand what went wrong.

Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.

Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this earth for one great thing. They were put on this earth to midwife the civil-rights revolution. In their finest hour in the early 1960s they insisted on realizing the promise of the American revolution that all men are created equal. They insisted that the original sin of the American founding should be redeemed. They risked a lot in pushing through the civil-rights acts, and lost the South for a generation, just as Lyndon Johnson feared. Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley didn't get it; they got all caught up in legalisms.

The trouble is that liberals, put onto this earth for that one thing, want to fit every issue into the civil rights mold. They are like the hammer: everything looks like a nail. They've made women's rights into a civil-rights issue, gay rights into a civil-rights issue. And now they want Muslims to be an historically marginalized group and apply the civil-rights solution to them too.

The conservative retort to liberals on the 9/11 mosque issue is simple, and it illustrates what conservatives were put on this earth to do.

Conservatives say to liberals: Yes, of course Muslims have a right to put up a mosque anywhere they want. The question is: should they exercise that right. Or should they think about the insult that such a mosque, so close to a site where 3,000 people, mostly Americans, were killed by Muslim terrorists, represents to New Yorkers and most Americans. Should Muslims, in a spirit of friendship and kindness, forbear to exercise their undoubted rights.

We conservatives are saying is that politics in particular and social relations in general are not just about rights and the rule of law. Life is not merely a mechanical thing about following the rules. Nor is it just an adversarial proceeding as in a court of law. Nor it is a blind application of bureaucratic rules. Life is give-and-take. Life is friendship. Life is restraint, holding back when you know you are about to hurt an acquaintance.

Indeed, if you try to reduce everything to a pound of flesh you will find that you inevitably end up committing one cruel injustice after another. The quality of mercy is not strained / It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.

This need to blend rules with the sentiment of mercy and friendship has been at the heart of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke railed against "sophisters, economists, and calculators" 220 years ago. Here is the full quote from his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The age of chivalry has gone and that of economists and calculators has set in, and the glory of Europe has departed.

Perhaps Burke was a little overwrought that day.

In the next few years we will see conservatism applied to the moral and material mess created by the bureaucratic leviathan we call the welfare state. Conservatives will be doing what they were made to do: pointing out that you cannot reduce the social relation--the caring things like care of the aged, care of the sick, the education of children--to rules and bureaucracy.

That's what conservatives are on this earth to do. To show liberals where they went wrong.

They Just Don't Get It, cont.

What must they be thinking at the White House? Here's faithful liberal reporter Matt Bai talking it other with some Democratic bigwigs.

Democrats in Washington are divided and somewhat puzzled over President Obama’s fading popularity.

Somehow, they figure, the president failed to communicate his successes! It's all a problem of messaging.

Well, not exactly, says bigwig John Podesta. It's really all because the president has been focusing on big legislative accomplishments, assuming that he would get an "updraft" from an improving economy.

Notice what this delicately tip-toes around. The Obama administration made a choice to push its expensive big-government agenda in 2009 instead of pushing economic recovery. It "assumed" that the economy would revive.

So John Podesta is just beginning to admit, in a veiled manner to soften the blow for New York Times readers, that the Obama administration made the biggest political error of all time, assuming that it was business as usual in the aftermath of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The administration assumed that it could pile huge new costs upon the private sector without stalling the recovery. We now know that it was wrong. Dead wrong.

Here's another veiled admission from Podesta--on postpartisanship:

[P]art of the president’s significant appeal to voters — “a big part of the secret sauce of getting him elected” — was his promise to transcend perennial partisanship.

A more national, outward-looking strategy for creating a “postpartisan” dynamic might have included White House partnerships with Republican governors or even with conservative foundations or industry groups. Because the president effectively boxed himself in to a Capitol-Hill-only strategy, though, he handed the Republican minorities in Congress the power to sabotage his goal.

“Once you became a legislative president, which is arguably what you needed to do, you couldn’t deliver on the nonpartisanship promise,” Mr. Podesta said. “And it’s something people wanted.”

You see the misdirection here? What do you mean, John Podesta, "partnerships with Republican governors or even with conservative foundations?" You are trying to suggest that there was no chance that the president could have done a deal with the Republicans in Congress. But this is rubbish. In 2009 the Republicans were ripe for the taking if the president had made a even modest move in their direction. They were extremely reluctant to criticize the president--right until the grass-roots entry into the health care debate during the August town-halls. At any time until August 2009 the president could have picked off a few moderate Republicans with some token compromises to get a bipartisan health bill.

It's interesting to see John Podesta starting to wake up to reality. But he has a problem. He must be careful not to frighten the horses in the street otherwise the base Democrats will get so demoralized that the GOP will pick up 100 seats in the House in November instead of 80.

So he speaks in veiled terms, in nods and winks. If he were a Straussian, we could talk about esoteric talk versus exoteric talk, saying in the same words one thing to the initiated and another to the uninitiated.

But of course, John Podesta is a Democrat, so he can't possibly be a follower of conservative Leo Strauss.