Liberals and Diversity: A Cautionary Tale

Conservatives have always distrusted the liberal line on diversity and inclusion.
Because it has always seemed to be about empowering liberals and
silencing conservatives. But Gandhi and Martin Luther King taught us long
ago that we can use our distrust about our opponents to test their
sincerity. Invite them to honor their noble principles and see what they
do.
David Horowitz
has been inviting liberal professors to live up to their avowal of free speech
and academic freedom in a campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights that
attempts to extend the idea of academic freedom from professors and academic
leftists to student and conservatives. Would the
liberal professors honor their noble principles, or would they betray their
principles in accordance with the dictates of the postmodernists that
law and rights are meaningless: the only thing that matters is power?

Unlike the British in India, and the Americans in the 1960s, it
looks like the only thing that matters to the liberal professors is their
power. They are attacking, as McCarthyism, an Academic Bill of Rights that
merely repeats what liberal icons like John Dewey advocated at the
beginning of the twentieth century. They are advocating
against the principles they claim to believe in.

That, of course, is exactly where
controversialist David Horowitz wants them.

"Lifestage" Conservatism

We already knew that President Bush led by 20 points in the last election
among married parents with children. Now we have an explanation. It’s
the concept of “lifestage” conservatism, people that started out
liberal but grew up fast when they became parents and no longer wanted a
public square that pandered solely to the interests of twentysomething
singles.
Suzanne Fields
delivers the news.
Details at the Progressive Policy Institute

The Katie Crisis

Conservatives have waited a long time for the day that Katie Couric
would start to get into trouble. Now it has happened, and, in accordance
with the media Blood in the Water theory, the sharks are rushing in to take
a chunk out of pretty Katie’s shapely legs. It’s funny how power corrupts, isn’t
it? Give someone a chunk o’ cash and a modicum of power, and watch
the inner beast come out to play.
Myrna Blyth
dishes the details.

Steyn Week: Tories Too Strident and Too Timid

This week it’s all Steyn, all the time. And today Mark Steyn
takes
after Britain’s Tories for being too strident on immigration when anyone could have known that a
whisper on immigration would have been magnified by the lefty media into a trumpet blast. And
any Tory Party worth its salt would have come out with some
“Thatcher-sized themes,” you know, smaller government and lower taxes.

It's The Culture Stupid

Thomas Sowell trots out the basic finding of his Race and Culture trilogy for the benefit of
Opinion Journal readers. The reason that blacks (and also Southern red-neck whites) have
fared
poorly in the United States is their violent, illiterate culture.

“The culture of the people who were called `rednecks’ and `crackers’ before
they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was
a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement,
as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. ”

Sowell’s great finding is that if you want to predict the speed at which an immigrant to the United
States will assimilate, you should look at his/her education and tradition of living under law. Groups like
Jews and East Asians that have revered education and have an experience of living under law have
thrived immediately. Groups like the Irish, the Scots-Irish, and the blacks have struggled because they lived under the
boot of oppression or knew only a culture of force and feud before they came to the land of self-government.
Michael Barone’s The New Americans makes the same point.

Conclave or Congress: Which Gets the Job Done?

Mark Steyn
chooses
the College of Cardinals as the more serious institution. Why, it took them only
a couple of days to elect a new pope, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee takes all month just
to worry about John Bolton yelling at a bureaucrat in a hallway in central Asia ten years ago? You’d
think that they would applaud him for encouraging better performance. You’d think the Democratic Party
was more serious. You’d think the Republican Senators would have more cojones.

Not What They Had In Mind

A roundup of comment on the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI in the
Weekly Standard gives us a flavor of fashionable opinion on the new pontiff.
There’s no doubt about it. People don’t like their ox being gored, and a traditional Catholic Church
is a threat to their peacefully grazing cattle. But one man’s peacefully grazing ox is another man’s
rampaging bull. The Church and its traditionalist allies think that their traditional Christian ox is sorely
threatened by the rampaging progressivist bull.