Human Orgasm vs. Human Love

Once is happenstance. That's what Goldfinger told James Bond back in the day.

So it must just be happenstance that I encountered on the same day two articles that spoke about the intersection of love and sex.

First, let's talk about the Death of Rock around 1960 when, Brent L. Smith tells us, the powers that be decided to kill the racial mix and orgiastic combination that was the rapidly metastasizing rock-and-roll scene. They did it with the payola scandal, that ruined the career of disk-jockey Alan Freed. He quotes Bob Dylan:

I was still an aspiring rock n roller. The descendant, if you will, of the first generation of guys who played rock ’n’ roll — who were thrown down. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis. They played this type of music that was black and white. Extremely incendiary. Your clothes could catch fire. When I first heard Chuck Berry, I didn’t consider that he was black. I thought he was a hillbilly. Little did I know, he was a great poet, too. And there must have been some elitist power that had to get rid of all these guys, to strike down rock ’n’ roll for what it was and what it represented — not least of all being a black-and-white thing.

Then Smith goes on into Norman Mailer descanting about orgasms. So you can see the incendiary mix that rock represented circa 1960. Race and youth and sex. Any ruling class would probably want to put a damper on it. Because the whole point of human society is to control sex, Virginia, so that the men don't kill each other off in sexual competition.

Oh, and so that women can practice love. Because there is another side of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Women get treated like sex objects.

And that is rather thoughtfully communicated in a piece  by M.D. Aeschliman about Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein, born in 1797. Mary Shelley was the daughter of radical lefty William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft -- of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

[Mary's] mother was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, like Godwin an opponent of marriage as “the grave of love,” but who had nevertheless persuaded him to marry her for the sake of their child[.]

In 1816 when Mary wrote Frankenstein she was the mistress of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the radical circle that included Lord Byron, of whom it was said he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Shelley married Mary in December of 1816 and she had four children by him, of whom one survived. Life was not easy for a woman in those free love circles. One of Mary's children at least died of neglect on Shelley's part as his radical clique bucketed across Europe. Then we have the testimony of Claire Clairmont, only discovered in 1998.

Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, one of Byron’s many lovers and the mother of one of his illegitimate children, accompanied Mary and Shelley on their elopement to Switzerland and subsequently formed part of their household in England, Switzerland, and Italy. As Daisy Hay points out, Claire left an autobiographical manuscript about Byron and Shelley that was discovered only in 1998 in a collection of letters now owned by the New York Public Library. It vindicates Tom Stoppard’s clever but profound insight that “What free love / is free of / is love.” Claire, William Godwin’s stepdaughter, had been part of his London circle, and in her manuscript she looked back on her relations with Shelley, Byron, and their friends, wishing to demonstrate “from actual facts what evil passion free love” caused, “how it abused affections... into a destroying scourge,” and “what victims it immolated.” “The worshippers of free love,” she went on, “not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves” and turned “their existence into a perfect hell.”

Now, I like to say that men are fighters and women are lovers. And my further insight is that the big problem for society is to promote the safe practice of woman's love.

The sexual revolution, which occurred for rich bitches, male and female, at the turn of the 19th century, was experienced by your F. Scott Fitzgeralds in the 1920s and by the ordinary American middle class in about 1960. That is what Brent L. Smith is writing about. Bliss was it in that morn to be alive / To be young was very heaven.

Yeah. Actually, it was great for young men, but not so great for young women, as Claire Clairmont reminds us.

Nor, I think we can say, is it so great for the special snowflakes in college in 2016. Because the rules of the sexual revolution are that sex is free and without consequence. But the rules of the female heart are that love is forever, and that is what the snowflakes are complaining about. They give their bodies to the local yokel in college and then get angry weeks or months later when they come to resent that their love has been tossed aside like a used condom.

Of course young women get. Mary Shelley or Claire Clairmont could have told them that two hundred years ago. But I suspect that the solution is not anything on offer from the left. And that is the real tragedy of the sexual revolution. Because the sexual revolution, especially for women, turns "existence into a perfect hell."

Did Anyone Ask the Poor What Education They Wanted for their Kids?

I was reading a piece from a pro-home-schooling site recently. This particular site is strong on self-directed learning, letting the kids figure out what they are interested in and letting them get on with it: "Having a set curriculum is so last-century."

Which is fine when you are a whip-smart Jewish mom and your kids are smarter than average smart Jewish kids. And it makes sense for the folks I call the People of the Creative Self. That's why education in general has been genuflecting towards the idea of an education in creativity. Our ruling class believes in creativity and so it believes that everyone else should too.

Back in the day the ruling class had different ideas. The French revolutionaries wanted government education that dished the Jesuits. The Prussians in the Napoleonic War wanted government education that raised up soldiers and an economy that could dish the French. The Brits started out opposing the education of the poor. In the US the Boston Brahmins in the 1830s wanted a state education that would cure the Irish of their Catholicism.

But by the end of the 19th century everyone agreed that education should prepare children to be obedient factory workers, and in this they had a point because research shows that it is extremely difficult to socialize post-pubertal men to factory discipline. It takes violence, just like it did in the good old days of the slave plantation. Or, to put it more gently, it takes basic training and drill instructors.

Of course since then the ruling class has decided that its scions that don't want to take their places in the establishment should all be creative artists, and so they have adapted the west's education systems to suit.

A creative education makes sense for the People of the Creative Self. But what about the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary job-holding middle class? I'd guess that they would be wanting more of the old-time system: start with the three Rs, and then add in other useful arts that will help in the entry to the job market and the graduation to becoming a responsible citizen.

But what about the poor, the folks I call the People of the Subordinate Self? What do they want for their children? Has anyone ever asked them?

The only thing I know about the poor and education is anecdotal. I know about oversubscribed lotteries for slots at places like the Harlem Success Academy. I know about DC Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee getting fired for trying to get the teachers to work harder. I know also that the government schools serving the poor are the worst around.

Seriously. What do the poor want for their children? Do they want a baby-sitting service? Do they want discipline and the basics? Do they want jobs for teachers? Do they want their children to climb up into the middle class? Do they want to keep their kids out of gangs?

When you ask these questions you come to realize that, in the public square, we don't have a clue what the poor want in the education of their children.

And I think that's a shame.

Can We Teach the Corporate Elite Before it is Too Late?

I had always assumed that the US corporate elite were apolitical, and the reason that they slewed liberal was just taking care of business. If you are Warren Buffett with your oil trains you chime in with a call for tax increases because that's how you buy protection from the liberal ruling class.

But now comes David French to tell us, in the wake of Paypal deciding not to invest in North Carolina because the state doesn't like men in women's bathrooms, that the corporate elite is not liberal out of prudence but liberal out of conviction. He writes:

The business world’s turn toward progressivism is the result of peer pressure, not market forces. It reflects the personal values and interests of the corporate world’s liberal elite, not the values and interests of the country as a whole. Apple, Disney, and PayPal fish from the same cultural and academic pond as the elite media and elite universities. When I was at Harvard Law School, my classmates were recruited not just by top law firms but also by top consulting firms and multinational corporations. Very few of them were conservative. Barely any of them were social conservatives.

So it's war.

But before we open hostilities, let me tell you corporate barons how insulated and narrow-minded and bigoted you are for falling in with the left's cultural and religious orthodoxies. Maybe some of you will see the light.

Oh, and if you don't understand that leftism, progressivism, whatever, is a religion, and just as bigoted as the bitter clingers of Obama's report, then I have a bridge to sell you, cheap, because you look like an easy mark.

The central idea I want to get across is that enthusiastic Christianity, fundamentalism, the sawdust trail, whatever you want to call it, is the royal road to the middle class from the victim culture of workers and peasants. Hey, I even wrote a book about it, The Road to the Middle Class. You could start at Chapter 1.

What is the point? The point is that, to succeed in the industrial, capitalist age, people need to lose their age-old submission to fate and the local warrior lord, and take responsibility for their lives. Here is what a commentator said during the Great Awakening in the 18th century when a ton of people in the Anglosphere were doing just that.

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

Do you see that progressivism is the opposite of this? It says, oh, you poor victimized dears. There is no hope for you in this cruel and unjust world. Just vote for us, the progressives that care for you, and we will right your wrongs and feed you entitlements forever.

How did that work out for the white working class that got good jobs at good wages thanks to progressive legislation that empowered unions? It ended up with the extinction of the unionized corporations and the good jobs at good wages. And the extinction of the white working class in drink and drugs.

I call this "little darlings" syndrome. If you ever sign up to become the little darling of the ruling class you end up like anyone that cuddles up to a sugar daddy. You end up thrown away for something younger and sexier. How do you think it is working out for African Americans, one of the latest little darlings of the liberals? Even Al Sharpton is discouraged after seven years of a black president.

Hey, CEOs, that you be you! If you get in bed with the government, taking its subsidies and it set-asides, it could all end in tears. Do you ever wonder what will happen when it is politically convenient for the government and the ruling class to dump you and loot you?

Yes, but what about gays and trans and women and minorities?

Well, I have developed a reductive theory to 'splain it all so that Lucille Ball's Lucy character could get it. I call it Three Peoples theory.  Here's how it goes.

Throughout most of history, humans have lived as People of the Subordinate Self. They knew that the world was stacked against them unless they became the client of a powerful patron, such as the village Big Man or the lord of the manor. Even the heroes of The Iliad knew that they were merely the playthings of the gods on Mt. Olympus. But then came the Axial Age religions which advanced the idea that gods were predictable lawgivers. Follow the divine law as a responsible individual and you could go to Heaven. Notice that this applies across Hinduism (get reborn as  Brahmin for good behavior) and Judaism and Christianity. As Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, it is a really powerful idea to say that, even if bad guys get away with it in this world, don't worry. Because there is no escaping divine justice after death in the next world.

So the people that bought into the new Axial Age religions became People of the Responsible Self, and they tended to live in cities and engage in trade. That makes sense, because when you are in business, you are in the responsibility business. But most people still lived out on the farm, subject to the vagaries of the weather and the local lord.

With the growth of capitalism in the last 500 years, almost everyone has had to come in off the farm and live in the city. This movement has been marked by notable religious revivals. The Reformation, that centered in the commercial Low Countries. The Puritans in 16/17th century England. The Great Awakening at the dawn of the industrial age. Did you know that the Second Great Awakening centered in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York where the cheap transportation of the Erie Canal had suddenly awakened the population from the sleep of ages?

Yes, but that was then, this is now. Well, now we have the People of the Creative Self. We creatives don't just want to be responsible, we want to make a mark with original and creative work. So we celebrate the courage of the rebel, in business, in culture, and in sex. We celebrate this, the People of the Creative Self. But not the rest of America.

And this is my point. If you are a truly advanced and evolved and compassionate person you will recognize that the creative life is not for everyone. Most people still want to live responsibly under rules, or subordinately under powerful patrons. And the laws should reflect this.

Back in the day advanced progressives said that it was cruel to chuck the working class into the capitalist crucible. They ought to be allowed to maintain their authentic working-class culture, and the state ought to honor this. In other words, if People of the Subordinate Self were not ready to enter the capitalist world of the People of the Responsible Self they had a right to stay where they were, and the laws should recognize this right.

But now the People of the Creative Self are saying that if you don't bend the knee to our creative culture that celebrates all kinds of genders and life styles then you are a bigot and we will name and shame you back to the stone age.

I don't think so. And you corporate chieftains had better get evolved and compassionate on this and step out of your Creative People bubble. Because the culture of progressives and their political correctness and their social media naming and shaming of anyone that dissents from the liberal line is narrow, and cruel, and unjust, and flat-out bigoted.

Progressivism celebrates the People of the Creative Self; it patronizes and manipulates the People of the Subordinate Self; and it anathematizes the People of the Responsible Self.

And two wrongs out of three don't make a right.

Silencing the Opposition Means Your Side is in Trouble

A defining characteristic of the Obama era is the widespread adoption of the president's advice to argue with your neighbors and "get in their face." And so on.

Actually, that's fine in an election; an election is a show of force, a contest to see who has the biggest army of voters behind him or Herself. The trouble is that the president continued his robust rhetoric into his presidency, and his supporters have followed his lead.

First we had partisan stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank bills. Then we had the IRS harassing Tea Party groups. Now we have Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calling for prosecution of climate change critics using the RICO laws that were designed as a tool to break up organized crime syndicates. And we have state attorneys general going after ExxonMobil for misleading investors and the American people about the dangers of climate change 20 years ago. And they are also going on a fishing expedition after CEI, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And that's not to mention the harassment of social conservatives that don't want to get with the latest gender-bending fad.

See, whatever the actual issue, whether climate change is the defining issue of our time or just a liberal fantasy, or whether gay and transgender rights are a fundamental human right of just liberal folly, liberals are making a fundamental mistake here.

If you decide to resort to intimidation and punishment-by-process in your issue advocacy, then you are conceding that you are not winning in the court of public opinion. You realize at a gut level that you are losing the argument. You have concluded that only the clunking fist will get the job done. In fact, you are starting a war.

Now our liberal friends insist they are all in favor of peace and justice except for the occasional peaceful protest designed merely to raise public awareness about an issue. In this faith they are probably as delusional as the European colonialists that rationalized that their colonies were beneficial to the backward "natives." What a benefit western traditions of public administration and law were to the people of India!

I have argued this week in the American Thinker that liberals are delusional when they think that their activism is merely a helping hand for the traditionally marginalized. No it isn't. Liberal activism is the power play of the scions of the rich and powerful. Liberal activism is a problem. It tries to turn every issue in America into a political issue, and thus into the moral equivalent of war.

Let us ask our liberal friends what might be the problem of turning every problem in America into a moral equivalent of war. Why, our liberal friend's answer would be immediate if we were talking about the Cold War. The problem is Escalation. Yes. Once you set up conflict between two parties there is always the danger of escalation.

There is also the little problem, as Glen Harlan Reynolds points out, that conspiring to deny Americans their constitutional rights is a crime.

The great problem of the modern age, in my view, is that it has reduced the need for warrior monarchs, warrior marcher lords, and warrior dawn raiders. The logic of the post industrial revolution era is that nearly all things can be resolved by market relationships, based on the profoundly social impulse to make yourself useful to your fellow humans by offering products and services on the global market. The fate of the world need not be decided by feats of arms or even entitlement programs. It can be resolved by peaceful cooperation.

But this is too radical for our hunter-gatherer brains to grasp. And there are plenty of people who want the excitement and the danger of moral war that excitingly verges towards actual war. Thus the liberal activism culture.

If that were the end of the story, there would be no hope for us.

But the saving grace is that power makes you stupid. The whole point of power is to be able to ignore feedback, to silence the opposition and respond with a clunking fist. But clunking fists, like incoming mortar rounds, tend to concentrate the minds of the recipients wonderfully. And when you silence the opposition, and force them to keep their heads down with your mortar rounds, you do not know what they are thinking.

And sooner or later the grateful recipients decide to stop thinking about their problem and decide to do something about it.

Here's Why Politicians Always Call for Unity, Dennis Prager

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager is annoyed with politicians that continually call for unity. And then he quotes a bunch of politicians calling for unity, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That's baloney, he writes.

One would be hard-pressed to name a single free society that was ever united outside of wartime. The only truly united countries are totalitarian states.

But that is exactly the point, the point of government. Wartime.

That's why I hammer away at my catchphrases like Government is Force and Politics is Violence.

When politicians are calling for unity they are calling us to war. They are saying, as they sang in Les Mis,

Will you join in our crusade,
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Politicians are always calling us to war. Of course, in the old days governments actually admitted this. But now, in the age of the welfare state, government is said to be all about peace and justice, but this is a lie. It is a lie that today's ruling class tells itself. Nobody here but us bespectacled librarians.

Government is always saying: enough of the namby-pamby stuff, it is time for force. We must gather together, unite, bury our enmities, and go forth to smite the foe. In the case of health care, the foe is insurance companies and their profits. In the case of race, the foe is white privilege. In the case of the Great Recession, the foe is greedy bankers.

The excellent Reverend Al Sharpton understands all this perfectly with his slogan, No Justice, No Peace. He is brilliantly inverting the do-gooder dream of peace and justice and making it into a war cry.

When you look at all this squarely in the face you realize that we humans have a problem. The people that govern us always get into power with a war cry. And yet we humans are supposed to be social animals who get on by peaceful cooperation. How do we get back to peaceful cooperation when our leaders are always rallying us to unify so we can go off to war?

I don't know the answer to this. The partial answer is that instead of unifying to smash an internal enemy -- which must deal with the contradiction that we are unifying in order to divide -- we unify to smash an external enemy.

Notice that this is what Donald Trump is proposing. He wants us to unify against the Mexicans and against the Chinese and teach them a lesson. He is calling for economic war on the foreigners. Of course he is; he has to be calling for war on something. On the other hand Ted Cruz is calling us to arms to battle the Washington cabal. Hillary Clinton is Fighting For Us, and Bernie is fighting for free stuff for college students.

The next thing for which our politicians will unify us will be the War on Islam.

The problem is that there is no mechanism for undoing the precipitate of force in our own society, the programs to force us to pay for retirement, health care, education, and welfare. All these things could be done without force, but who will dare to start the unwinding of our heritage of force?

In today's America there is nothing that will unify the people like a proposal to reduce the amount of government force in America.

The Problem is not "A Drought of Ideas"

Over at the American Interest Walter Russell Mead looks at a failing black college in South Chicago. He blames Democrats for presiding over a corrupt and dysfunctional system, and Republicans for not coming up with alternatives. And then he blames the cognitive elite for "A Drought of Ideas."

Vain and self-aggrandizing politicians deserve a lot of the blame for not trying to tackle the problems sooner, but they are far from being the sole guilty parties. After all, politicians can’t fight for solutions that don’t yet exist. And that there is so little creative thinking about these issues is the fault of think tanks, public intellectuals and academics. It is the cognitive elite that has let the country down.

Well, yes, I suppose. But that ignores the fundamental error of our times that "think tanks, public intellectuals and academics" should be in pole position on the NASCAR Politics 500.

Would we ever worry about the cognitive elite and food, and say that the cognitive elite has let us down on food? Fortunately, think tanks, public intellectuals and academics don't have a lot to say about food production, distribution, and retailing. Otherwise I am sure it would be just as screwed up as health care.

I'd say that the fundamental problem of our times is not the failure of the cognitive elite. The fundamental problem is that something like 35-50 percent of our GDP (used here as a stand-in for the day-to-day activities of Americans) is controlled by government. And government is force. And government cannot learn. And anyone that is getting a government check, from grandma to crony capitalist, will kill rather than give it up.

OK, suppose we throw away all the government programs because government cannot learn, i.e., learn from its mistakes. What then? I think there is still a problem, as was identified by Milton Friedman. He argued that governments always tax up to the limit and spend up to the limit that the society of the time allows. Our 21st century governments have spent the last century and more ramping up spending, on the idea that government can help people. And it has steadily ramped up taxes, on the idea that the rich should pay their fair share.

Now here we are, a century later, and the programs don't really help people. Social Security discourages people from saving; Medicare encourages grandma to make an avocation out of going to the doctor; welfare encourages people to molder away in useless lives instead of getting a job; education is just a jobs program for teachers and administrators that does an OK job educating middle-class students and a dreadful job of educating lower-class students. And as for taxes! Taxeas are a monstrous tangle of subsidies, credits, set-asides and pay-offs. And the taxes on labor make the simple notion of getting a job and getting paid a nightmare for employer and employee.

So I don't think that we can say that the problem is just a drought of ideas. The problem is that the game of taxing and spending has reached its limit. There is no longer any real slack that politicians can use to say: hey kids, how about this free stuff. And the same thing applies to taxes. The obvious new source of taxes is a VAT, but that would go hardest on the middle class and we can't have that.

So nothing will change until things get so bad that people no longer think that they can hold on to their particular government check, and no longer think they can get what they want from government.

It is pretty obvious that things would have to get really bad, as in riots in the streets, before people would agree to giving up their entitlements. The Charlton Heston rule applies. I'll give you my government check when you take it from my cold, dead hands.

But I am still thinking about the bigger question. Is it possible that there could ever be a government that deliberately did not spend everything it could and taxed everything it could? And that means: could there ever be a people that said, I don't want your stinkin' entitlements and I don't want you taxing the stinkin' rich?

Sadly, I don't think that humans are capable of that.

Nevertheless, I do have an idea. My idea is this. Instead of getting entitlements from the government, people would sign up with entitlement patrons. They would pledge themselves to that patron, and the patron would promise to take care of them. But the patron would not have any coercive powers obtained from the government to force the rest of the nation to contribute to the patron and his clients. In other words, people that want it could live under a kind of neo-feudalism, where they shelter under a powerful lord and get his protection. But nobody outside the powerful lord and his patronage network would owe him and his clients a thing.

We already have this, in the the form of big corporations that offer pretty good feudal benefits and protection, and big unions that offer the same. I just want to make sure that these patronage networks cannot plunder the rest of the nation to feed their clients, and right now crony capitalism and labor law allows corporations and unions to plunder the rest of society. But not as much as government.

Obviously, employees of big government could not have any such client rights, because their rights would be supported by state coercion, government force, and that would be wrong.

Could it work? We'll see. All it would take is for government to start failing at delivering its much-loved checks. Then people would have to start finding a new way to shelter under a powerful patron.

Can Ted Cruz Bring US Together?

On the day that my "I Want a President to Teach Liberals a Lesson" got an Instalanche from Ed Driscoll, let's imagine that the opposite is true.

Never mind about teaching lessons: Can Ted Cruz be the candidate to bring us all together?

I think that liberals are going to get a monster lesson in the next decade, like the one they got from Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. It will be for a host of reasons, from the bankruptcy of the blue state to the rage of the excluded -- not the traditionally marginalized of liberal imagination but the real excluded that liberals have ejected from the public square and we know who we are. The point is that the divisive politics that liberals have pursued for the last 50 years is about to bite back.

All that aside, what we really need in a president is someone to bring us all together again after the astonishingly divisive presidency of Barack Obama. I give President Obama the benefit of the doubt. I believe that he really believes he is making the world a better place with his mean divisiveness. That's what a lifelong marination in liberalism will do to you.

Of course, bringing us together is what George W. Bush was trying to do 16 years ago with his kinder, gentler America, but liberals wouldn't let him. They needed him as Bushitler, and Bushitler he was. Liberals needed to rally their troops for the 2006 midterms and the 2008 election and by golly they did it. Because politics is violence, starting with verbal violence, and politics is division, starting with scapegoats. And the liberal religion is politics.

But is Ted Cruz, the scourge of the Washington cabal, the man to bring us all together?

OK, so Ted Cruz is not exactly the life of the party, but he has shown in his campaign thus far an astonishing capacity for sweating the details. So here goes on a three point plan to bring us all together.

• There must be a way to reach out to African American church ladies. Ted Cruz is openly Christian, and the church ladies of Charleston, SC, showed their Christian forgiveness after the monstrous act of Dylan Roof shooting up their church and killing their church members.
  
• There must be a way to reach out to the striver Hispanics. Never mind about building a wall, all I see is Hispanics working as hard as they can to build a life for themselves and their families here in the good old USA. Yes, the liberal policy of non-enforcement of immigration law is a scandal, but legal Hispanics are our people and we must be sure that they know it.
  
• It is time to start making fun of SJWs. Kyle Smith has a piece on retweeting social-media trolls, and he is right. It is time we laughed the SJWs into irrelevancy. The idea is to create the meme that we are all tolerant Americans and that these deadly serious SJW crybullies are nothing but a joke.

But not all of the bring-us-together plan would be sweetness and light.

I think it is time for Americans of good will to wage a war on the left-wing activism culture, because the left-wing activists divide us. Many of our liberal friends think that activism, and its fantasy of speaking truth to power, is the highest that anyone can aspire to. It is, obviously, the liberal equivalent of the Catholic family encouraging a child to find a "vocation" to be a priest or a nun. In other words, liberals see activists as the conscience of the nation. It is time for a president to remind our liberal friends that just as there is a very small divide between madness and genius, so there is very little distance between the conscience of the nation and the scourge of the nation.

Can Ted Cruz do this for America? Nobody knows. But I'll bet a primary victory that he has a team working on something like this. Because if an ordinary mortal like me can think about it, you can be sure that super-genius Ted has been thinking about it for years.