Death of a Feminist

On July 15 the American feminist
Susan Lydon
died at age 61 of cancer. She is celebrated as the author of
“The Politics of Orgasm,” in which she argued in 1970 that “women do not need men to achieve sexual fulfilment.” The reason, you
see, is that the clitoris is the center of female sexual pleasure.

Perhaps Lyton’s jaundiced view of human sexual relations was affected by her participation in the
notorious San Francisco Summer of Love in which, it seems, the male approach to human sexuality
predominated over the female. At any rate, Lydon broke up with the father of her only child, mixed
it up with rock musicians for a while, went through a drug hell, and then finally found salvation in the
world of
knitting and The Knitting Sutra.

Whether or not Lydon was right, and that the vaginal orgasm is a myth (let’s say it depends), there
is the nagging verdict of the opinion polls. Apparently those most satisfied with their sex lives are
conservative married women. So you wouldn’t expect a liberal woman writing for Rolling Stone
about rock music to be much enamored of sex anyway.

Karl Rove, Supply Sider

The importance of Karl Rove isn’t just that he is a top-flight political strategist. As
Larry Kudlow
relates, he is also a committed supply sider. He has been a strong advocate for the president’s
tax rate cuts and
the cuts in the tax rates on capital.

At a recent speech at the Reagan Library, Rove quoted

the great classical free-market thinker Ludwig von Mises, who said that
`capitalism has raised the standard of living among the masses to a level which our ancestors
could not have imagined.’ Rove also said that because of Ronald Reagan, the
debate over the merits of capitalism versus a command-and-control economy has been settled,
that the free market has won in a rout,
and that economic growth and prosperity have followed in its path.

He also told the New York Conservative Party that
“Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe in higher taxes.
We want few regulations; they want more. We believe in curbing
the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government.”

It would be a shame if Rove got bounced from the White House by the Plamegate kerfuffle.

Eek! Hayek Alert NYT Readers!

For years The New York Times has carefully sheltered its readers from the corrosive ideas
of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (oh all right, there
have been four mentions so far this year, one by David Brooks and
the rest in Danger on the Right articles about conservatives). But in today’s Book Review
Richard A. Posner dares
to introduce the name that dare not speak its name. At least not to liberals who thought that Hayek
had been buried 50 years ago in Hermann Finer’s The Road to Reaction.

And the worst of it is that Posner hauls Hayek into an article about the current media wars in
an utterly unforgivable way. He uses Hayek to show that the bloggers are more accurate than the mainstream
media.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances
is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only
they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market
pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its
lack of a master coordinator or regulator,
and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

No! Shut him up immediately. This is wrong! It cannot be true that a million bloggers are more
accurate than a cadre of highly educated and highly trained journalistic professionals. It just cannot.

Seriously though. Posner’s article is a first-rate analysis of the market position of the MSM
in this time of turbulent media change. It is the kind of searching and challenging analysis that the readers of
The New York Times rarely experience. There’s a reason for that, Posner explains. People do
not read newspapers to encounter uncomfortable facts or to see “their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with
their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.” Instead

they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing
them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative
and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press.

And so The New York Times does not advertise the ideas of a thinker like Hayek who challenges
the ideas and the economic well-being of its readers. It takes a prestigious writer like Judge Posner to
do that. Sometimes, you see, even the enlightened need to be “challenged.”

Are You Now... a Member of The Federalist Society?

It would be comical if it weren’t so mean-spirited and sad. Liberals are all worked up about
whether Judge Roberts has been a member of the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and
libertarian lawyers that promotes the idea of a “dead” constitution. The society advocates for the idea
that the consitution means what it says it means and
what the founders said it meant, and can only be amended by the constitutional amendment process and
not by the judicial amendment process.

Liberals are scandalized by the Federalist Society because they understand that it stands for a
program that would unwind 70 years of liberal Supreme Court jurisprudence
that started with a radical expansion of the power of the federal government in the 1930s with a
radical interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.

But because conservatives are relentless rather than ruthless they have not reacted to the
McCarthyesque tone of liberal inquisition: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist
Society? When used in the 1940s to probe liberal membership in the Communist Party of the United States it was
a question that provoked liberals to decades of frothing outrage.
That was a time when there really were liberals in the federal government who were
spying for the Soviet Union. So
Bob Tyrrell
laughs at the liberal obsession with secret handshakes and secret societies, and
Roger Pilon
implores Republicans not to apologize for the Federalist Society but to stand
proudly for open advocacy of ideas like the rule of law and against the “living” constitutions that
allows liberal Supreme Court justices to bend the constitution like a pretzel.

Liberals are ruthless;
conservatives are relentless.
The way to understand the ruthlessness of liberal political tactics is to understand that they
are retreating. The savage attacks are the desperate actions of a rear guard, protecting the
main liberal army from disintegration. There is always a razor’s edge between orderly retreat and
the sauve qui peut (hmm, that’s French for “every man for himself”) of an utter rout. And you never know when we
might reach the tipping point.

Blog Bites MSM: Guardian Trainee Didn't Disclose Terror Links

Remember in the good old days when the MSM importantly told us how they were
the people’s tribune, the last line of defense against abuse of power by the
high and mighty? That
was before the blogs.

British blogger
Steve Burgess
(actually an American blogging in Britain) decided to look
up the connections of a Muslim trainee at The Guardian and found that
trainee Dilpazier Aslam was writing features about terrorism without disclosing
that he “was a member of the Islamo-fascist group Hiz ut-Tahir.”

No! Surely not! An august member of the MSM not disclosing that
its objective journalist was in fact not objective but a committed, card-carrying
Islamo-fascist? Well why not? After all, the MSM in the United States has
plenty of Democratic sympathisers without ever disclosing that they have all
sworn blood oaths to fight against Karl Rove and George W. Bush and everything
they stand for. No. Maybe that was Howard Dean talking about Republicans.

By the time it was all over, The Guardian had made huffy comments
about people that spend a lot of time indoors (this sort of anti-blogger
bigotry must be stopped!) the trainee has been fired and the
executive editor for news, Albert Scardino, had resigned from his post at
The Guardian.

And everyone had a grand old time chuckling at The Guardian’s pompous embarrassment.

Don't Tell the Democrats!

The risk in nominating a conservative to the Supreme Court with a short period of service on the
bench is that you can’t be too sure what you are getting. That
is what has conservatives worried about Judge Roberts. They remember the
conservative court picks that were captured by the liberal beltway culture:
O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter. Ann Coulter has put out a couple of articles
already that worry about this prospect.

But Carol Platt Liebau
thinks that we may be OK after all.
Judge Roberts is a lawyer who has lived most of his professional life in
Washington DC, like Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. And like them he has partisan experience
in the Justice Department and the White House. He already has a social
network in Washington and does not have to bend the knee to liberals to get into the social
swim.

But you never know...

Indonesians Think Christianity is More Modern

There is no doubt that the west needs to get a lot more serious about the Islamic
mass movement and its program to create a world-wide caliphate. But we need to keep a sense of proportion.

Here is a brief item from
Strategy Page
about Christianity in Indonesia. Moderate Muslim leaders want help from the Indonesian government
“to stem the growth of Christianity.”

While 85 percent of Indonesians are Moslem, most of
the remainder are Christian. On some islands, the population is half, or more,
Christian. On those islands, many Moslems see Christianity as a more “modern” religion.
Christian clergy and missionaries are generally better educated than their Moslem counterparts,
and the Christians tend to be more successful economically as well.

Meanwhile,
Mark Steyn is needling the British about their coddling of Islamic terrorists
with housing benefit and generous welfare. The British should get serious, he writes:
they are in a war. To encourage them, he reminds them
of the progress that Islam is making,

[T]here’s a lot more of the world that lives under Sharia than there was, say,
30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984.... Fifty years ago,
Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it’s in the grip of Islamic law.
So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway.

Of course, Steyn is right. The Islamicist mass movement is a real threat and we should treat it
as a war—how about calling it a global war on terror? We should rough up the Islamic welfare
queens in Britain and Old Europe and make them get a job.

But let us not lose sight of the enormous strength of global capitalism, global democracy and global
Christianity. The only way that Islam makes headway politically is by using brute force. It needs to,
if the islanders of Indonesia think of Christianity as more modern. They understand, as this
website does, that enthusiastic Christianity is the Road to the Middle Class. And they want
to get on it.