Sounds like the kind of place where the Most Equal Comrade would go to "church"

During the Easter Sermon at St. Paul Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., the pastor launches into an attack on those who cherish freedom.

The Easter post

When major holidays arrive each year, my reflections on them take on tones peculiar to the way my life and the world have been proceeding lately.

This year, Holy Week has had me thinking about the phenomenon of mockery.  We often talk about the physical suffering Christ endured on Good Friday - and for good reason; what he was subjected to you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy - but it's important to remember the mockery aspect of his ordeal as well.  The "King of the Jews" inscription on his crown of thorns, the taunts of "save yourself!", the sponge full of vinegar on the hyssop branch - all designed to eat at a person's sense that his very existence has any purpose.

I've sometimes envisioned Jesus flinging the cross off his back on his way up the hill, standing tall and telling the crowd and the Roman soldiers, "All you people f--- off!  I haven't done anything wrong and I'm not going to take this!"  That certainly would have been in keeping with - what's the term? human nature - but that would have indeed confirmed the mockers' real message - that his existence was worthless.

America is pretty much characterized by mockery now.  Conventions, institutions, norms of personal interaction, and values that were commonly held until quite recently are now the object of scorn.  For insisting that up is up and not down, that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and not 5, a modern American gets ridiculed and ostracized.  Those who have usurped the cultural narrative have convinced a critical mass of the populace that the age-old definition of the most basic human relationship can and must be jettisoned.  They have convinced far too many of us that there is some compelling reason not to avail ourselves of the vast reserves of fossil fuel present all over our continent.  They have decreed that an attitude of nonchalance about overwhelming debt is the only acceptable reaction to it.

Most pertinent to the point of this day, they have declared that the overarching theme of the Holy Bible, from a certain tribal people in the Middle East being selected by the Creator of the universe to receive His commandments about how to live in a way that pleases Him, through the travails that people suffers for straying from that, to the wave of prophets he imbues with the gift of uttering his pronouncements, to begetting a son among them who, after a prophetic ministry, must die a ghastly death - replete with the most degrading mockery - in order to rise again three days later and prove that he had overcome the world, has been fabricated by mere mortals, either out of fearful superstition, or as a means of wielding power.

We are told to react to the story that, above all others in human history should make us weep and purge our hearts of hardness, with cynicism.

Easter is your chance - my chance - to reject that cynicism, to invite real faith back into your - my - heart, faith that the only human being who ever lived who did not have an earthly father walked out of that tomb that Sunday morning in perfect health and vitality and went into town to have some breakfast with his friends, and then command them to bear witness to who He was - is - and then to reassure them - us - that he is with us as long as there is space and time, at which point a Counselor will look into each of our hearts to see what kind of eternity we have prepared ourselves for.

The next bubble?

Lately, several of my writing assignments have been in the realm of agricultural journalism.  In fact, right now, I'm working on a piece on how injecting soil productivity factors as a multiplier for base land values is causing a rise in property taxes in Indiana.

So it was with interest that I read this piece by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst in the American Enterprise Institute's online magazine asserting that farmland may be our next economic bubble to burst.  For all their moment-to-moment concern about weather or crop price fluctuations - or soil productivity factors - farmers have had a good run of it for some time now.  They've been investing their spare cash in additional acreage, and its value has been spiking as a result.  Hurst is not confident that that can continue in perpetuity.

Hey, I was re-elected fair and square; it doens't matter how obscenely Antoinette-esque me and my family are now

You knew about the first daughters going to the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas for spring break.  Were you aware that from there they jetted off to Sun Valley, Idaho?

If you're going to claim to be a world-class observer of culture, you'd best not be sloppy on a regular basis

Bill O'Reilly has long stuck in my craw.  There's no doubt that he's smart and accomplished.  He certainly knows how to blow the ratings doors off his counterparts at other cable networks.  But he's astonishingly clumsy at walking his self-imposed fine line between objectively assessing the fault lines in our culture and offering his own opinion.

He really got it wrong last night in a segment with Megyn Kelly, when he said that the pro-keep-the-definition-of-marriage side in the current debate had nothing to offer but "Bible-thumping."

Several pundits have gone after him on it today, but none with the sharpness of Mark Levin.  The Great One even manages to get in little digs at some choice examples of O'Reilly-speak, such as "the folks" and "secular progressives."

Bill needs a good smackin' from time to time, and he got one today.

Upside ya head

I don't think the odds that this will just peter out quietly are very good.

Why the EPA should be dismantled yet this morning - today's edition

The destroy-normal-people-forms-of-energy arm of the MEC regime rolls out its most draconian requirements for gasoline purity to date.

The headlong rush to an uncharted world

A roundup of some of the more noteworthy observations on the sudden increase in momentum in the push for homosexual "marriage":

John Kirkwood at ClashDaily.com  He covers the disingenuous tactics used by folks ranging from pro-change-the-definition zealots to ho-humlive-and-let-live types to Christians who don't want to be labeled bigots. Several razor-sharp zingers here.

Claire Spark on the nuanced considerations that aren't getting an airing in the way this culture battle is framed.

Mona Charen at NRO.  She succinctly lists the five main reasons why conservatives are losing this battle:

Champions of same-sex marriage are carrying the day for a number of reasons. (1) The advocacy embedded in popular entertainment such as Modern Family andBrokeback Mountain has been funny, touching, and disarming. (2) Proponents of same-sex marriage appear to be asking for simple justice. (3) Americans would rather stick pins in their eyes than willingly hurt anyone’s feelings. (4) Proponents seem to be embracing the conservative value of marriage.

Beyond all of those factors, though, the most potent argument in the SSM quiver is the race analogy. During oral argument at the Supreme Court, advocates argued (as they have elsewhere) that impairing the right of homosexuals to marry is analogous to proscribing interracial marriage. If that’s true, it’s game, set, and match. If SSM is like interracial marriage, then the only possible motive for opposing it is bigotry.

I'm fairly confident I'll run across more such essays worthy of adding to this roundup as the day unfolds.  Check back.

On that foul, stinking red / pink "equal" sign everybody is changing their Facebook profile to

I was glad to see Chris Wysocki at WyBlog mention it (and link to a more direct addressing of it at a Catholic cultural-observation blog).  I'm kind of surprised none of my fellow rightie bloggers are taking it on yet, though.  (As Wysocki notes, maybe it's because Cyprus and North Korea, dang those pesky little nations, are vying for their attention.)

The Freedom-Haters have found their ultimate weapon: the cultural dare.  The obnoxious "equal" sign is the most obvious example of it.  (By the way, it is also emblematic of the whole fixation on "branding."  The surest way in post-American popular culture to inspire fanatical loyalty is to give something a logo and make it ubiquitous.  Early-twentieth-century Russians and Germans discovered this marketing tool in the hammer and sickle and the swastika respectively.)

The cultural dare is a passive-aggressive tactic.  It's in your face with the fiercest kind of militancy, but presents itself as the most benign of invitations to be a virtuous person.  You're for inclusion, aren't you?  You don't want homosexuals to be marginalized, do you?  It's presented in such a smiley-face way that the "average" person, that is, the person who doesn't filter sociocultural developments through a set of bedrock principles - the low-information voter, if you will - sees his range of choices for reaction as binary.  You're either on board with this, or you're a hater.

I don't often go local in these blog posts, but longtime readers are aware of my occasional rants about the omnipresence of the cultural dare in my city.  We're so damn with it around here, if you have misgivings about taxpayer-funded preschool, or using stimulus funding for eat-your-broccoli posters in those preschools, or the usefulness of junior-high "environment clubs" (I know these to be cesspools of indoctrination; the kid who was president of one of them last year wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper opposing the Keystone XL pipeline) or bang-the-drum-and-dance-for-peace gatherings sponsored by the Interfaith Forum, you are the turd in the punchbowl.

Wysocki is correct.  The point of the equal-sign push, the movement it represents, and the larger usurpation of the role of arbiter of what is normal is to obliterate and scatter that which had revealed nobility, humility, truth, beauty and goodness to humankind.  There is no room for such things in FHer World.

It wasn't about widening one's perspective or questioning one's assumptions

Ace of Spades points out the flimsiness of the claim that the Florida Atlantic University stomp-on-Jesus exercise was intended to get students to step outside the parameters of their assumptions:

Consider, there might be some kind of a bracing Kill Your Assumptions/Smash Your Symbols experience were a Christian to stomp on the name of Jesus. (Just roll with the hypothetical for a moment.) In that particular case, the Christian would, arguably at least, be learning (or at least being subject to) some kind of lesson that The Word is Not The Thing and The Symbol Is Not the Signified and also various Question Your Beliefs type kindergarten horsehshit.

But does a Muslim learn that lesson from stomping on the name Jesus? No. How about an atheist? Again, no. How about a gay guy who hates "Bible Thumpers"? No. How about a feminist who hates the Patriarch and considers patriarchal religion to be the most important perpetuator of Male Privilege? Again, obviously not.

These folks don't learn any of these Very Important Lessons from these actions. In fact, they learn the opposite lesson, don't they? While the Christian is arguably learning to "not be so tribal in outlook," or something, the other groups are learning the power of tribalism.

After all, their symbols aren't being smashed. The symbols of their Destested Enemy are being smashed. Their Symbols are being elevated by contrast to the treatment of the Symbol of the Enemy.

This isn't just about double-standards. It is about that, of course, but it isn't just about that. It's also about the bizarre assumptions encoded into the Non-Thinking among our supposed Cognitive Elite.

Because, obviously, if you wanted to teach all students something along these lines, you'd ask each to smash the symbols of something personally/psychologically important to himself or herself. How on earth is a committed Patriarchy-hating church-hating feminist learning about smashing her own symbols by trodding on the symbols of the Other? In that case, she learns no lesson at all, except "You're awesome and people who disagree with you suck."

What lesson is that? We do not need to teach people to have an overinflated opinion of themselves and to denigrate the beliefs of people not like them. People are already kind of pretty good at that already.

Now, if the professor asked the Christian to stomp on Jesus, the Muslim to stomp on Allah or Mohammad, the feminist to stomp on a Giant Vagina costume, and the atheist to stomp on a sheet of paper reading "Trivial acts of intellectual rebellion will make Daddy notice and love me,"then I concede the lesson would have had some actual purpose to it. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the lesson -- it's still too much to have a state-funded school demanding public renunciations of faith from its students -- but I would concede there was some sort of lesson lurking around there. Or, if not a lesson, at least an experience. (And experience is the raw stuff of "lessons.")

But of course they did not do that, because they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't even think of doing that. Because they do not want to ask any part of the Leftist/Diversity coalition to give up, or even question, any of their bugaboos and shibboleths. In fact, the entire exercise, as constructed, is simply a coalition-unification exercise which increases In-Group Solidarity by identifying an Out-Group Other and inviting the In-Group to further debase the Out-Group, and moreover takes it one further step by demanding the identified and marginalized member of the Out-Group himself participate in and thus condone his own debasement.

The bizarre assumption at work here seems to be that Only Christians are capable of tribal and/or irrational thought, and thus that only Christians need to be "educated" out of such thinking.

In post-America it always comes down to that.  It is the Christian who must puke all over himself to prove he's not a hater.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The CBO now says that the US will never reach full employment during the Most Equal Comrade's rule.

Because we've spent the last thirty years fooling with Agreed Frameworks and Six-Way Talks and giving provocations a pass

North Korea's rocket and artillery forces are on their highest alert level ever.  The announcement of it includes talk of the US mainland.

At least we're finally trying to muster some degree of actual seriousness about the spike in NorKor bellicosity, signing a new treaty with South Korea that unprecedentedly specifies the role the US would play in an attack on the South.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

In other words, no one’s going to assume that a conflict erupting on the border or in the Yellow Sea is just an accident any longer.  The US and South Korea are both warning Pyongyang that it will react as though the DPRK intends to open a wider war in those circumstances, striking back not with corresponding force but with overwhelming force. Over the last several decades there have been a number of these hot flashes in a cold war, but most of them have remained single-incident flashes that ended quickly and without engaging wider forces.  Thanks to the rhetoric and the actions of Kim regime, those safety valves now appear to be off the table.

The next time there's  a downed-airliner / torpedoed sub / rocketed fishing village-type incident, it will be impossible to respond with the usual "this-is-unhelpful" rhetoric.

And there will be one.

One of those factoids that speak volumes about where we are in post-America

Per Census Bureau data, most illegal immigrants are getting some form of welfare.

The FHer way: don't wait for public opinion to come around, head right for the federal courts

Excellent Rich Lowry column at NRO on the rush to take DOMA and Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court.

There's been a palpable uptick in the push for homosexual "marriage" recently, and it bears all the signs of another coordinated effort by various FHer groups.  One tactic they're using is language manipulation, such as bringing the term "opposite-sex marriage" into common usage, as if it were just one boutique option available to people among the possibilities.

We're headed toward a world in which we're all interchangeable subjects of the state, outwardly sharp and skilled and civic-minded, but absolutely hollow within.  A word where technocratic go-getters drop their babies off at day-care centers, text their "partners" a few times throughout the day, spend their evenings at meetings on how to "improve their communities" with bike trails and surveys on nutritional intake, and then head home for some obligatory face-time with "family" members.  It is a world without any music, literature or art that's worth a damn.  It's a world where no one bursts out spontaneously in guffaws.  It's a world where people quietly stuff their sense that the ediface cannot last, that the leviathan state cannot, ultimately, fulfill the functions of a Creator who, in those weird Scriptures people in remote village still consult, has a plan much different from the one they're living, a plan that would impart some warmth and humanity to their lives.  But, alas, the species opted for a different route, and now the clock is ticking.

Even with the MEC's swing through the region, US influence in the Mideast is not exactly increasing

The coalition of forces opposed to Assad in Syria seems to be collapsing, and

the Maliki administration in Iraq spurns Secretary Global Test's pretty-please request that Iraq quit letting Iran use Iraqi airspace to fly arms to the Assad regime in Syria.

We're so hosed - today's edition

In a blog post the other day, I posed the question, just exactly what about the Patty Murray budget plan would be superior to the Ryan plan?  Of course, the answer is "nothing," but let's head off any notion that that makes the Ryan plan the essence of what the country ought to do about its debt and deficit.  It's not. 

For one thing, the assumptions built into it don't sufficiently undo the damage wrought by this regime:

The U.S. population has been growing at 0.8% or 0.9% per year, and, the argument goes, federal outlays must grow by the same percentage.  There's some truth to this requirement -- more people means more Social Security checks.  But I'm not sure this needs to be a rigid ratio -- we don't build 1% more bridges to accommodate 1% more people.

In any case, the Ryan budget adds more than enough spending every year to keep pace with inflation and population growth.

The big problem with all this "responsible, balanced" spending is Ryan's starting point of $3.53 trillion.  The massive spike in spending under Obama -- "emergency spending to avert a worldwide financial meltdown" -- has become the new baseline, accepted even by the GOP.

Of course, the regime's propaganda arm made sure it was DOA anyway:

Our lazy, dishonest media, however, tell a different story.CNN: the Ryan budget "cuts taxes while balancing the budget over 10 years by slashing spending by $4.6 trillion."Mother Jones: "Rep. Paul Ryan's (D-Wisc.) 'new' budget slashes government spending levels to their lowest since 1948, with $4.6 trillion in cuts to things like Medicare, Medicaid and other programs for the poor."NYT: "By cutting $4.6 trillion from spending over the next decade ..."This $4.6 trillion number comes from comparing Ryan's budget not to reality (it increases spending), but to the CBO February 2013 Baseline, which lists $46.099 trillion in outlays over ten years.  Patty Murray's Senate budget proposes outlays of $46.362 trillion, so the revised story ought to be that Ryan wants to take $4.9 trillion away from struggling seniors and hungry children.

The ongoing hollow debate about the budget is like so much else about our current juncture: whether it's important for words to have meaning (think "marriage"), the plainly silly, indeed, infantile, proposals for addressing the false crisis of climate change, the ongoing outreach to a religion that will not disavow its violently radical adherents.  Plain truth and common sense recede into the mist and the conceit that the human species can re-invent itself becomes the order of the day.

A very good question

Will the MEC have anything to say about Kermit Gosnell's victims?

We now see what the real strategic objective of the MEC's Israel visit was

You have to hand this to him: He has really refined the art of appearing to be some kind of global visionary while very deftly orchestrating the West's demise.

Turkey is responding to that forced call at the airport from Netanyahu by saying it's still too early to send an ambassador back to Jerusalem, or to call off the prosecution of the Israeli generals involved in the flotilla raid.

The whole point of the trip was to put Israel in a position of humiliation.

LITD will never back down from its stating of the fact that this regime is orchestrating planned decline - today's edition

The FHers are determined to break the back of this nation's fishing industry.

"Creepy" begins to characterize it, but is still a vast understatement

The EPA, citing the Freedom of Information Act as justification, is doling out private information - physical addresses and e-mail addresses, among other tidbits - about cattle ranchers to radical environmentalist groups.

Now, let me get this straight . . .

. . . the budget the Senate passed in the wee hours increases taxes by $975 billion over ten years, and in 2023 we'll still be running a $566 billion deficit?

And this is superior to the Ryan plan because . . . ?

And what kind of pressure was brought to bear to make this happen?

Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator looks into the circumstances and implications of Netanyahu's apology-for-Turkish-deaths-when-the-Hamas-aid-flotilla-was-raided phone call to Erdogan.

So does Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

Apparently all that talk about the Eurozone's financial crisis abating was a bit premature

. . . and, ironically, one of the EU's tiniest members, Cyprus, is the catalyst of the latest round of jitters.

Why won't Ariel University students be attending the MEC's Jerusalem speech?

Because their school is east of the 1949 armistice line, and the MEC thinks he can tell Israel that that ought to be its border.

They're not taking it lying down, though.

The full magnitude of our civilizational rot

Following comment threads under articles, columns and blog posts is not generally among the most productive uses of one's time.  That's basically so because, in our very late-in-the-day time, they tend to deteriorate into unenlightening exchanges of snark that afford the reader no insights beyond the original piece.

Just now, though, I found one that was as edifying and clarifying as anything I've read in days.   The column that engendered this particular thread, a piece by David Limbaugh at Townhall on the ruptures and fissures within today's Republican party, is itself a bracing alarm bell.  He covers the establishment-consultant-vs.-principled-firebrand divide that is the main focus of most pundits right now, but also points out the peril in some other fault lines, most notably the scorn with which the "social-issues" pillar of conservatism is dealt by an increasing number of folks who, at the same time, say they vehemently oppose the policies of the MEC and the FHers.  (That's LITD lingo for Most Equal Comrade, that is to say, Barack Obama, and Freedom-Haters, aka Democrats, for anyone new to this blog.)

His piece is thoughtful, indeed, soulful, and, in my opinion, he quite adequately explains why the culture-and-values pillar of our worldview is indispensable.

Not so the snot-nosed venom-slingers who chime in underneath.  Here are a few examples of what such types think passes for carefully reasoned argument:

Boy, talk about an article full of ignorance. Hey, Dave, take your three legged stool and shove it. Wtf is a Regean principle? Nice man worship there you chump. Libertarians laugh at your pitiful hypocritical self.

Dave how bout you cut the craap and call your code phrase "social conservatism" what it is. Using government force to impose your personal beliefs and preferences on others. You're a fake conservative as far as I'm concerned. Individual liberty is conservative. You apparently won't ever get it. Go start some new freak party for you and your ilk.

LOL!!! You can't whine about freedom and liberty and at the same time snivel about how 2 adults exercising their free will to marry each other is a detriment to "society."
You don't give a rat's keester about freedom for everyone - you just want the world to be the way you want it to be so you pull that "what's good for society" crappola. 

And if this the very first time you're wondering about the future of Repubs, then you truly do live the Limby Fantasy Life just like your blubbering Bro' 

You're wrong, David. There is no Conservative "split" between Republicans and Libertarians. It only seems that way because you think Libertarians are just Conservative backsliders. You suffer from the same disease as Dumbocrats -- you think Government should enforce your version of morality.
Libertarians don't "favor" sin. They just want the Government to get the hell out of our lives and quit enforcing ANYBODY'S morality.
It's not a split, its a coalition against the greater Dumbocrat enemy. If it seems like a big deal, its because the Libertarian movement is growing -- the formerly liberal baby boomers are finally growing up.

That's a good thing. 

As is the case in so many situations, I am drawn to some thunderously relevant points made by Diana West in her indispensable 2007 tome Death of the Grown-Up.   A principle that informs the particulars of the arguments she makes throughout the book is Lionel Trilling's notion of shaping a life.  (Her discussion of it appears at about 7 minutes into this interview by Michelle Malkin, although you should watch the whole thing.) What Trilling was talking about was the idea, found in pretty much all Western societies, but really in various forms in societies generally, that an individual ought, at a certain point in his or her development, to start giving thought to how to orchestrate the phases of his or her existence.  That point would be the moment when one begins to consider that earthly existence does indeed come to an end.  IF one has had any kind of moral / philosophical training, one sees that one's life's meaning will largely hinge on having contributed something worthwhile to the world.  The question then becomes, what equips one to so contribute?

Now, go back through the comments I've re-posted above, and see if you can find any understanding of the value of Trilling's idea.  Of course you can't.  The defense of these commenters rests entirely on the value of getting to do whatever you damn well please.

This perhaps gets to the heart of why I find arguments over marijuana policy so tiresome.  The point is not whether weed fans are more mellow than heavy drinkers, nor is it the role weed has played in the development of American music in the last 100 years, something that as a scholar and teacher of that subject I know to be significant.  It's the fact that the basic human urge to get off, while innocuous enough in and of itself, is not among the human being's most ennobling traits.  Is that the highest (excuse the pun) we aspire to?  Is that why the Constitution is worth dying for?

There was one comment under Limbaugh's column that waved an outstretched hand against the onslaught and sent it reeling back on its heels with its bitter truth:

This column is prescient, as David Limbaugh normally is, but its not hard to explain this generational shift in the republican party. Young republicans were not sheltered from Cultural Marxism. They were every bit as indoctrinated into CM over the past 30 Years as their democrat counterparts, and like their democrat friends, they have no personal or emotional attachment to classic western civilization, which is to say Christian culture, which was American culture prior to the cultural/sexual revolution, because its something they have never known. Their only reference to classic western civilization is watching old movies or TV shows on TCM or Nick at Nite, but its something they themselves have never experienced ....

... and the generation that could tell them about it in positive ways, rather than the liberal depiction of a repressive, racist society they get in school, is quickly passing away. 
Its not like when some of us were young, growing up during the height of the counterculture, but our parents and grandparents were children of the 30's, 40's and 50's and they could recall and explain Christian culture to us in a way that made us long for those days, not mock and ridicule it. 

Well todays youth are the children of baby boomers and post boomers, the generation that rejected Christian culture and embraced Cultural Marxism, so no-one was there to recall Christian culture fondly for them, the only narrative they are familiar with ... 

As I say, I am an academically trained cultural historian, and I can attest that my biggest challenge when teaching a subject like rock and roll history is even beginning to convey to people born well after the counterculture emerged victorious over traditional, normal culture what that culture was like.  For my students, it's like studying the ways of some ancient and long-dead society.

Limbaugh is not wrong.  When he says that "the hard truth is that the movement inside the Republican party to abandon social conservatism is nothing short of a political death wish," he's stating plain fact.  This country will realize it is starved for some spiritually substantive guideposts, and when it does, it will be deeply disappointed if the party it assumed would provide it is empty-handed.

The unlikely figure to be discovering the virus that causes Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Pat Caddell who has served as a consultant to some of the most freedom-hating, decline-loving Democrats of the last half-century, tells the CPAC attendees that the party that is their ostensible home has no idea what it is up against, and is proceeding with utter cluelessness.

If you thought Kerry, Hagel and Brennan were awful . . .

 . . . take a moment to look into the career of the MEC's pick for Labor, Tom Perez.

I tried; I really tried . . .

. . . to find some substantive evidence that John Boehner didn't have a fatal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.  But the SOB is plumb ate up with it.  Says he "absolutely trusts" the Most Equal Comrade and has a great relationship with him.

Here's what I have to say to the Most Equal Comrade: Listen you stinking totalitarian, the free market will decide what kinds of fuel America's cars ought to run on

On Friday, he exhorted Congress to spend more borrowed money on biofuels research and grandly proclaimed that the country needs to wean its automotive fleet off of gasoline.

Doesn't sound like the kind of guy who is inclined to green-light the Keystone Pipeline.

A community organizer of excruciatingly refined tastes

I wondered all day whether it was worth my time to blog about the food taster episode.

It is.  Is there another viable explanation for not eating the lobster salad and the blueberry dessert besides that proffered by Susan Collins?

The fact that we're paying for someone to hold that position ought to be the front-and-center gripe about this.

But with this guy, the main issue in these situations turns out to be his arrogance and his utter removal from what it means and has meant to be a normal American.

I'm not talking silver spoon; there are pretty clearly times when his resources were thin.  It's the lack of interest in how real American life works.  He's been so obsessed with fundamental transformation all his life, he's never stopped to adequately consider what it is he intends to transform.

Sarah Palin is one of the world's coolest people and those hard lefties who dismiss her as a joke hate everything great about Western civilization

Her speech at CPAC.  Well, not the whole thing, but the slightly-ribald-yet-perfectly-appropriate-because-it-celebrates-basic-human-robustness joke and the 32-ounce soda pop gulp.

She, as us boomers used to say, knows where it's at.

A very, very flimsy reason for changing one's views on a subject ostensibly driven by one's core principles

Scott Johnson at Powerline on Rob Portman's "evolution" on homosexual "marriage."

Money quotes:

Senator Portman’s column in support of gay marriage seems to me to fall somewhat below the standard of seriousness that he himself has set on other issues of public policy.

Now a conservative who cites his “faith tradition” seems to me a fellow who has fallen victim to Stockholm Syndrome. Is it rude to wonder whether he takes the tenets of his faith to be true?

Portman has put family concerns ahead of a particular tenet of his religion, and then tried to reconcile his faith and his family concerns by appealing to the former at a very general level. 

Not everyone who is deviating from the divine order of things wants to force the destruction of that divine order

I realize I have not yet weighed in on either the election of Pope Francis or this year's CPAC.  One - I guess we should make that two - of those cases in which pundits across the spectrum jumped right in on  those developments and said everything I'd have to say, at least for a few days.

Now I can see that the areas of cultural and spiritual overlap between them are what interests me most about each.

The obvious noteworthy elements about the selection of Cardinal Bergoglio - his being a Jesuit and an Argentine, his mix of scholarly rigor with a hefty dose of everyday-life-type experience - have been amply covered.  A fair amount of attention has also been given to the ridiculous expectations of the Left that he - or whoever had been selected - would bust Catholic doctrine wide open with some kind of revolutionary progressivism.  The idea that this moment in Church history was going to be an opportunity for wild departures concerning marriage or gender and how either relate to the priesthood was the stuff of FHer fancy.

Probably the closest to a must-read about Pope Francis I've come across is Mary Eberstadt's essay at Time, in which she says that he embodies contemporary Christianity's overall dilemma, which is winning souls in an increasingly secular world.

Regarding the other current event, CPAC, while considered ineffective and perhaps even irrelevant by some conservatives (a view that's not universal), has been a treasure trove of electrifying speakers, from Allen West to Pat Caddell to Amity Shlaes to Rand Paul - to name but a sampling. (To be sure, the organizers also included some irrelevant - indeed, non-conservative - head-scratchers, such as Donald Trump and Mitt Romney).

So where is the convergence of which I spoke in paragraph two?

It's certainly there in the matter of homosexuality.  Here you have a religion, Christianity, that says that homosexuality is a violation of the way God ordered the universe.  On the other hand, you have an undeniable segment of the population that professes a same-gender orientation and considers itself conservative - as in embracing all three pillars of that worldview.

My sense, from conversations over the years with conservative homosexual friends, is that all they ask in that realm of their lives is to be able to work out their salvation privately - which is  way salvation is worked out for anyone anyway.  They are absolutely correct that, as advocates for the free market, a vigilant foreign policy, and, yes, a sociocultural view rooted in upholding basics like commitment, loyalty, decency and dignity, their presence at the table is essential.

When one considers the type and degree of attack on our three pillars by the Left in all its manifestations, it makes no sense to exclude anybody who might have some useful ideas on how to defeat our common enemy.

Remember, we are talking about conservatism here - which means recognizing and honoring immutable truths.  If some brethren who admit to being in a particularly vexing spiritual position are willing to so recognize such truths, shouldn't we enlist their insights on the 85 percent of common ground we have with them?

I may have some more thoughts about areas of overlap between these two news items.  The point, as Breitbart, Mamet and many others have stressed many times, is that culture is upstream from politics, and no wonkery or back-room machinations are going to be effective until we have a solid sense of how to engage the culture.

The Most Equal Comrade is a totalitarian who hates freedom and American greatness - today's edition

He's going to tell all federal agencies that they must consider "global warming impact" when planning any projects.

The normal-people sector of post-America, beginning with the National Association of Manufacturers is "freaked out."

Whoops

Just deleted my latest post in the course of trying to put up a post with a YouTube video.

Sorry about that.

Everything but actually answering the question

Allahpundit at Hot Air gets, by way of commenting on Andrea Mitchell's reaction to it, to the essence of the exchange between Dianne Feinstein and Ted Cruz yesterday:

How many decades does she need as a “thought leader” in the Senate on gun control to be able to explain in a pinch why it’s not an infringement on the right to bear arms to ban certain types of weapons? The closest she gets to a legal point is mentioning the Heller decision in passing; the rest of it is all variations on “don’t you know who I am?”

This is the leftist method of persuasion:  raise the emotional pitch, in this case with "I've-seen-the-bodies" rhetoric, sufficiently to crowd out reason's primary role in formulating policy and crafting law.

The only thing one should take FHers seriously on is their objective of planned decline and tyranny

Senator Patty Murray puts forth the first Freedom-Hater budget in years, and it increases federal spending 62% over the next ten years and doesn't even address our debt / deficit.

I lick my chops at the opportunity to polemically disembowel any leftist pundit who tries to position this joke as superior to Ryan 3.0.

One of those tipping-point-ish indicators of just how far removed we are from when we were the United States of America

One in three US students gets his or her stinking lunch paid for by the federal leviathan.

So many reasons this is a dark bit of news:

Planned decline - the Freedom-Hater overlords are pleased as punch that the masses have been brought to their knees economically.

Intrusion - Since the leviathan is footing the bill (actually, you and I are), they can reserve the right to impose all that "healthy" crud that kids are throwing right in the trash can all across the nation.

Abolishing of the local level of government - Not only are you paying for the lunches of the kids down the block, you're also paying for them for kids across the continent.

Destruction of the family - subsidized lunch means one less parenting consideration for the mind-numbed comrades to have to fool with.

The two latest reasons why this is no time to give up on repealing FHer-care - today's edition

It's going to cost more to take your pet to the vet, and

because applying for FHer-care is yet another interaction with bureaucracy, it's a nightmare of filling out byzantine forms.

The two latest reasons this is no time to surrender in the twilight struggle against FHer-care

The Five Guys burger chain is raising prices as a direct result of the totalitarian monstrosity.

Take a look at the height of the stack of FHer-care regs to date.

Very nice smackdown of Steny Hoyer

I came across Hoyer's Politico column this morning and, as is often the case, waited to respond to see if someone would do so as effectively as I would.  Bingo.  Joel B. Pollack at Breitbart handles the matter quite deftly.

Look for a lot of this crud about "balance" and "revenue" and "middle class" and "students" and "women" to bubble back up to the surface as the Ryan plan gets discussed, much like sewage in a clogged toilet.

Get your kids out of government schools - today's edition

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has gone full-tilt Orwellian.  It proposes that students

Wear a white wristband as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband.

Set aside sections of the day to critically examine how privilege is working.

Put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege.

Kyle Olson at EAGNews also notes that

The Wisconsin DPI also sponsors several similar programs, including CREATE Wisconsin, an on-going “cultural sensitivity” teacher training program which focuses largely on “whiteness” and “white privilege.”

Government schools are sewers.  If you love your kids, pull them.  By lunchtime today.

 

 

 

Why we are so hosed

Paul Ryan's latest budget plan is his best yet.  He shortens the time frame for balance from 30 years to 10.  He gets even bolder regarding re-defining our big entitlement programs.  And he guts FHer-care. Beautiful and glorious.

It is, as versions 1.0 and 2.0 were, the only attempt in Washington at an actual solution to our existential  threats of overwhelming debt and government intrusion.

And the fact that it is universally deemed to be DOA in the Senate, and that it goes without saying that it will be demagogued everywhere from the NYT op-ed pages to the walls of your leftist Facebook friends, is the clearest indicator available of how utterly mad our whole nation has become.

Another zealot for re-inventing the human being

I'd never thought about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg much per se.  I knew she was all about empowering women, according to her definition of that phrase, but she was one of many who have made that their central cause.

Then I caught the 60 Minutes interview with her the other day and now the Mona Charen column about her at Townhall.  As I say, Sandberg's point, as a TED talker and book author, is hardly original, but the way she frames it makes for a great launching point into an examination of what this term "women's empowerment" is tacitly assumed to mean.

For all her fancy degrees and experience in business and government, Sandberg doesn't seem to have thought about the sweep of human history much.  Here is Western society - American society, specifically - at a point where women participate and lead in decidedly unprecedented numbers, and her whole thrust is to point out all the areas in which they are under-represented.

Sandberg wants to come across as being all for strong families and well-adjusted kids and genuine warmth in real human relationships, but she's really coming to the same point as the more dime-story level of motivational speaker would come in the heyday of "you-can-have-it-all" exhortation (which, led, ironically, to a wave of women's-magazine articles looking at whether one can indeed have it all, as well as innumerable sidebars on "tips for relieving stress and taking 'me' time").  And when push comes to shove in the attempt to maintain that precarious balance, something winds up giving. Charen sees what that something is for Sandberg:

If Sandberg wants to agitate to help women think better of themselves and get the raises that are due to them, good for her.

But that's not the whole agenda. Though denying that she is judging any woman's decisions and acknowledging that she struggles with the work/family balance every day, there is a planted assumption in her advice to women that work should prevail over family. Noting the small numbers of women in top executive positions at Fortune 500 firms, Sandberg says, "The problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out."

Charen also notes that society's go-getter women are indeed taking into account the female prediliction for making sure personal relationships, particularly those within the family, are successful:

Women students at Yale Law School, for example, have published a guide to top law firms that rates them on family-friendliness. As students, these women, who can certainly command some of the highest salaries in the American economy, are thinking ahead about finding workplaces that permit flexibility.

Another noteworthy point is that her entire experience is in the realm of big-scope organizations - McKinsey & Co., the US Treasury, Google, Facebook.  And she's a pure product of east-coast top-tier networking and go-getterism.   Not a great deal - as in none, from what I can tell - of experience with the small-business female entrepreneur in flyover country who has worked out unique ways to achieve the aforementioned balance.  In short, no discernible acknowledgement that real individual freedom means that one's life can't necessarily serve as a prototype for a repeatable model.

But Charen sees the essence of the main contradiction is the Sandberg worldview quite clearly:

[Sandberg says that]  "I think a world that was run where half our countries and half our companies were run by women would be a better world."

Maybe. But I haven't noticed that women heads of government or women heads of companies behave differently than men. She's treating her preference as an assumed good. This is one of those little vanities that is permitted to women but would be unacceptable coming from the mouth of a man. No man would dare to suggest, for example, that the field of nursing or teaching would be improved if men were more equally represented.

Isn't there something chauvinistic about Sandberg's assumption?

Of course, the counter-argument is that the institutions and organizations of the world - governments, businesses, educational entities, even churches and clubs - tend to be rather rigidly hierarchical  and tend to reward behavior patterns we might associate with masculinity - aggression, sizing up one's fellows, testing others to see what they're made of - and that this makes for a colder, less nurturing world than any of us desire.

But this brings us back full-circle to what I had to say about Sandberg's grasp of human history.  It was ever thus, toots.  Men tend to pick up the chalk when they walk into the room.  Any society organized in any way other than patriarchally has been such an exception as to be negligible.

And that's why we have to classify Sandberg, for all her economics background and business-world experience, as a leftist.  She is, as all leftists are, out to remake human nature, invent a new creature, re-order a world that was constructed according to the design of One who preceded  - as in eternally - any of us humans.

The Federal Reserve is the latest entity to say that FHer-care is a job-killer

It's not just us righties predicting that this would be the result.  The Fed sees that it's already happening.

Puttin' all my eggs in the LITD basket (for the time being, anyway)

As of April 10, what has ostensibly been my "main" site, Barney Quick, Musician & Writer will cease to exist.

I just looked at the monthly Yahoo Small Business charge on the latest American Express statement and then asked myself if I was getting that much value from having the site up there.

For one thing, the last few times I tried to go in and tweak things, or even update my gig calendar, there was some kind of hose-up, and when I'm presented with hose-ups, I'm generally on the express train to Damn-It Land.  Figuring stuff out is not my strong suit.  And in the past few years I've developed blood pressure issues, so the gates of Damn-It Land is not a good place for me to go.

But for some time I've also thought about the way I want to brand myself.

The site is hardly slick; it's pretty bare-bones, in fact.  And the music clips are not necessarily the best music I've recorded.  The writing samples linked on the page for that are old and woefully unrepresentative of the breadth of what I now crank out all the time since that's become my day job.

Then there's the matter of the fine line that anybody who is simultaneously a "creative type" and a conservative must walk when presenting themselves to the world.

I love music so much, but I am utterly uninterested in the nature of what is left of "the music industry." I have accounts with a few of those "build-your-fan-base / get-your-music-heard-by-big-time-players-and-entertainment-producers"-type sites but it's been ages since I attempted to get anything going with any of them.  (Even writing about music is something I no longer seek out.  There's a photographer who is making a bit of a name for himself taking concert pictures.  I did a little work for him a while back - interviewed an up-and-coming band in our area - and now he's all the time texting me, seeing if I can go hear so-and-so with him, get in free with a press pass.  I'm always relieved when I check my calendar and find I've scheduled some previous activity.  Two recent shows were Bob Dylan and the Avett Brothers.  I hope he enjoyed himself and got some good shots.)

Am I jaded?  Perhaps so.  Another good reason for taking a deep breath and considering this matter in its largest context.

In the meantime, I have no problem blogging my tail off here, so this will be my main presence.  And, like all human beings in 2013, I'm on Facebook and Twitter.

When I ask myself, "What is important for me to do?", the answer I keep coming back to is "Whatever you can to help save Western civilization."  So, for right now, it's full-tilt LITD, baby.

The perspective of a few days

While I still agree with those who frame Rand Paul's filibuster as genuinely pivotal, it is well and proper that the tempering views of others whose concern for national security I deeply respect get an airing.

Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard points out that it should give all of us pause that Code Pink applauded what Senator Paul did.   Methinks he focuses so much on the official reason for Paul's move, and its ramifications for cross-ideology interest, that he loses sight of its sheer energy.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO quotes Hamilton's Federalist 23 in order to reinforce his point that no one in any age can know the full scope of possible threats to our exceptional and precious democratic republic.

He then, in his own words, fleshes this out. Right now, we are engaged in a protracted conflict with jihadism, and seem to have the resources we need to fight it effectively.  But the nature of the struggle could morph, or be joined by other struggles, and then we would really need to parse the Constitution for just what it does - or doesn't specify in the way of executive power:

In the ongoing conflict, the enemy does not have fortifications inside our territory that would enable its operatives to keep the police at bay. As long as we catch them in time, our enemies can be safely taken into custody. And if we catch them on the precipice of deadly action, ordinary law-enforcement principles allow for the use of lethal force to stop them.

But that may not always be the case. We could have enemies with much greater capabilities, enemies including traitorous Americans. The fact that we do not appear to need lethal military force in the homeland in this conflict does not mean we will never need it.

So leave the Constitution alone. The Constitution does not tell us what should or must be done in a particular situation. It tells us the outer limits of what is legitimate in all threat situations. To shackle our power to meet a threat, as Hamilton explained, is to put us in peril.

The goal, according to Senator Paul, is to shackle the president. That is done by trimming his sails in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), not by trimming his constitutional power.

There's no denying that this is a singularly noteworthy moment.  The filibuster's energizing effect beyond the scope of its ostensible purpose must be taken into account, by anyone interested in seeing the real present dynamic at work  in the political landscape.

That said, at some point Senator Rand Paul is going to be asked how much daylight there is between his own worldview and that of his Rockwellian father, and he'd better have an answer that satisfies the broad spectrum of conservatives.

Melvin Rhyne, RIP

Really sad to hear about this development.  Great jazz organist.  He was in Wes Montgomery's trio from 1959 to 1964, appearing on two albums from Wes's Riverside period. During that time he made his recording debut under his own name on Riverside.  Over the years also did session work with blues artists such as T-Bone Walker and B.B. King.

Re-emerged in the 1990s on the European label Criss Cross.   He was regularly gigging in Indianapolis clubs until quite recently.

The way our paths crossed: his quintet played at one of my book signings for my novel High C at the Sunset Terrace.  I called him some months in advance to book the date.  Over the course of our phone conversations and then, in person on the day of the event, at a now-defunct wine bar in Bloomington, Indiana, I discovered his crusty, somewhat offbeat sense of humor.  I remember at the end of the event, he grabbed the microphone and went into a somewhat lengthy soliloquy about the importance of being happy.

With each of these passings, an era in American culture recedes into an ever mistier past.

State Department to honor Jew-hater Samira Ibrahim with its Courage award

It doesn't take much digging to find out what this supposed champion of women's rights is really all about.

Interpretations regarding what it meant will be myriad, but it's pretty well established that it was historic

I think the list of four things Rand Paul's filibuster accomplished that is offered by Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker distills its significance pretty well.

The point is not, as the dismissive remarks of Graham and McCain suggested, whether a drone strike on an American citizen, without due process, is very likely or even remotely likely.  It's about being very clear, as we must be in all matters of policy and governmental action, on what kind of authority the Constitution bestows on whom.

And, in the climate developing this week, as the sequester does not cause mass societal chaos, Rand's stand has made the Most Equal Comrade squirm.  It brought the invincibility of the Freedom-Hater regime into question.  It showed us an alternative to despair.  The overlords and their Reasonable Gentleman sycophants do not like it one bit that we actually exercise this thing called our liberty.

We definitely want to know why they came out of there upbeat

Apparently the Pub Senators who dined with the Most Equal Comrade - while Rand Paul was back at Capitol Hill showing us all what real principle looks like - are "optimistic" about a big deficit reduction deal.

Of course, I wan't there, but I don't see it.   We all know that the MEC's primary objectives are redistribution and destroying the Republican party.  He's not going to agree to anything that doesn't tax the American people more (the "balanced approach").  So unless these guys saw him have a road-to-Damascus experience before their very eyes, there was nothing to be energized about.

It may go very badly indeed

The other day, when I put up the "Very Full In-Box" post, I did so with some degree of queasiness.

It's all too easy, after twenty-plus years of Western concern- but little substantive action - about the threats posed by North Korea and Iran, to be numbed by the announcement of new developments.  But they are real and gaining momentum.  (See today's story about NK using the term "pre-emptive strike.")

If you want a bracing dose of just how late in the day it really is, check out this column by Dr. Peter Vincent Pry at Arutz Sheva.    An EMP attack is an immediate, not a remote, possibility.

Compare and contrast . . .

. . . the way the Heritage Foundation's Hans A. von Spakovsky frames the debate about Section 5 pre clearance in the Shelby County v. Holder debate case currently before the Supreme Court, and the way Linda Greenhouse frames it on the New York Times op-ed page.


Greenhouse is perfectly happy that "later Supreme Court interpretation [of the limitations placed on the power of the federal Congress] were understood to apply to the states as well."  

von Spakovsky reminds us that the congressional districts with the greatest disparity between white and black voters where whites are the majority are found in states like Massachusetts and Washington, whereas the opposite maximum disparity is found in - Mississippi.  In other words, we've come a long way from the set of circumstances of 1965, when the Voting Rights Act became law.

The central issue here is whether race should be a factor in establishing congressional districts. The other main issue, pretty much equally crucial, is whether states should retain the power to take a look around at their own demographic situations and perform any tweaking of perceived unequal opportunities on their own, or whether that should fall under the federal purview.

Then there's the glaring cultural question: Is the American South of 2013 a repository of bigotry and social ossification, as the snoots and pointy-heads would have us believe?

Or are individual people and families just moving around the country according to their own priorities, settling in particular locales because they like the climate or the economic opportunities or whatever?

In other words, it gets harder for the FHers to guilt-trip America as factors having nothing to do with unsavory attitudes account for societal discrepancies of a racial nature.  

People are just going where they want to go, doing what they want to do, whoever they are. You know, like Americans.

This is how Pubs are supposed to react to the Most Equal Comrade's nominees for high office

Rand Paul stages a good old-fashioned Mr. Smith-style filibuster on the John Brennan nomination for CIA chief.

The second-worst US president ever chimes in on the death of one of his favorite tyrants

Jimmy Carter wants people to remember Hugo Chavez as a champion of the poor.

And what, again, is so scary about the sequester (well, except for the military cuts)?

New ABC News poll shows that 61 percent of Americans think the civilian-side cuts involved in the big bad sequester are pretty nifty.

A very full in-box for the world's geostrategic problem-solvers

I may post about Hugo Chavez later, but, after all, he's dead, so his regime is in at least some degree of flux.

Right this moment, two other problem states have placed themselves back on the front burner among the civilized world's concerns:

North Korea announces that it declares the 1953 armistice null and void and will cut the direct communication line used at the village of Panmunjom.  And threatens to "counter [perceived Western aggression] with diversified nuclear precision strike means of Korean style."

And even Secretary Global Test must now acknowledge that Iran is hair-raisingly close to getting a nuke.

Don't let your kids anywhere near government schools - today's edition

Actor Joseph C Phillips has a fifteen-year-old son who saved up his money and bought a BB gun.  He took a photo of it with his digital camera and showed it to some friends at school.  That got him in a heap of trouble, and his parents weren't even notified.

A seven-year-old who, in the interpretation of a teacher monitoring, with a great deal of scrutiny, apparently, the breakfast-munching activities of her charges, bit his pastry into the shape of a gun, was suspended.

The first incident occurred in LA; the latter in Maryland.  Coast-to-coast totalitarianism.

Parents of post-America, get your kids out of these sewers. And teach them how to use guns.

UPDATE: Check out the decree that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has issued to that state's schools regarding gender "expression" and gender "conformity."

No guns.  No girls.  No boys.  Just neutered cattle blankly staring ahead as they're corralled into the pen.

How long are we going to keep up this "partner-in-good-faith" charade with China?

Per today's New York Times, an Iranian ship seized in Yemeni waters was carrying highly sophisticated Chinese-made heat-seeking missiles to jihadists in the Middle East.

We expect that regime to help us with Iran, or North Korea, or intellectual-property theft from our own companies right there in their own stinkin' country?

The kind of courage required for this

This has not been a good winter.  Sure, I'm current with my bills, my in-basket stays full of magazine work, music work and teaching work, and my family and friends are the delight they've always been.

But you know what I mean.  The bleakness  besetting Western civilization has gained a grim momentum.  It's present on very front, from economics to world-stage threats to the arts to human sexuality.  Then there is the mockery of the emboldened Left, whose "who-cares-what-you-losers-have-to-say" taunts and dismissals in comment threads and chats and face-to-face encounters does not in fact ring hollow.  The question of who indeed does care is front and center among our concerns.

So I'm never far from giving up these days.

That's why Dana Loesch's remembrance of Andrew Breitbart on the first anniversary of his death was like manna to me.  It was a swat upside the head.  She was saying to the likes of me, "You stand for things that are good, right and true, and you're not alone.  Do not quit standing for them."

Ive added emphasis to what I feel is the key line of this excerpt:

Be there for each other. If you agree on 80% but disagree on 20%, fine. Whatever. Stick together to accomplish that 80 and when you’ve accomplished that then fight over the rest. Don’t give up on each other. Don’t throw each other to the wolves as a substitute for the bravery required to stand and fight. You don’t have to love one another, but you do have to work together. Promote each other. Recommend one another. Support the up and coming generation. Others must take over when you can no longer fight this multi-generational struggle, so encourage them for your own sake and for the sake of your children. Don’t leave the next generation defenseless because you couldn’t sacrifice your ego.  Maintaining a strong community means no one has to alone carry the burden of “rodeo clown.” More voices, not less. Andrew understood this like few others. No one has to fear repercussions for speaking up, speaking out, speaking loudly.

Bracing stuff, no?  What a way to start a Sunday morning and a week.

The perfect moment for returning to first principles:

The God of the Holy Bible is the author not only of the visible universe, but of moral law.

The free market is the only real economic system.   All others fail.

Males and females are fundamentally different and any talk of "equality" between them must take into account their particular characteristics.

The most commonly held notion of what a family is - a man, a woman, and any children they conceive or adopt - is the best social unit in human history for learning virtue and wisdom.

The United States of America, being the peak distillation of the best qualities of Western civilization, is far and away the most righteous and essential nation-level political entity in the history of the world.

Evil exists and must be confronted.


There.  Re-stating that has definitely had a re-charging effect.

Yes, I'm sad that some of my friendships, some going back over fifty years, are probably irreparably frayed.  Yes,   I'm discouraged that certain career paths aren't open to me because of my unwillingness to keep quiet.  Yes, the task before us is Herculean in scope.

So be it.  There's one more fact that is more important than any of those considerations:  I will not live in a world where the opposite of what I stand for prevails.

This is what the rhetoric from a Senate Republican should sound like

John Hinderaker at Power Line reprints Jeff Sessions's entire floor speech imploring his colleagues to reject Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary.

Of course, Lew was confirmed, but this speech is now in the eternal record book.