The Sword and the Olive Branch

I’m off to D.C. tomorrow for CPAC.  I’m not bringing a laptop, so this means no more Afghan Whig for the rest of the week (I’m neither Afghani nor a whig, but that’s a different story).  Expect something from All American Mike to fill the gaps.  Let me know if he craps all over Rushbo or the religious right, so I can put the smack down on him when I get back. 

Take care,

-Afghan Whig

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How to deal with liberals.  Part one: Learn to distinguish between open-minded liberals and lost causes. 

Figuring out the difference between which liberals to befriend and which ones to manage will save a lot of valuable resources, notably time.  You wouldn’t date anyone immune to your charms, so why would you talk politics with someone who’s demonstrated no inclination to respect your beliefs?  To keep from speaking in vain, learn how to distinguish liberals who may be receptive to conservatism’s message from those who won’t budge.  At first, we might assume that includes all of them, if only because our personalities are shaped by an extraordinary range of variables.  That may be true, but refusing to recognize the difference between generally tolerant individualists and stubborn idealists will help make real dialogue with the left possible, as opposed to an interpersonal quagmire. 

Weeding through the left’s ranks, we can immediately rule out reaching out to people who are afflicted with psychological disorders, not only to avoid cruel exploitation, but also to protect us from their unpredictability.  I don’t know who Charlie Manson would vote for, but he would make a terrible political acquaintance.  After he carves an elephant into his forehead, the G.O.P. would immediately lose a hundred years of progress. 

Those without a conscience should also be vetted out.  Develop the ability to spot liberals with a reasonable capacity for empathy.  For example, when talking to potential liberal subjects, see if their eyes light up when someone artfully explains what “neo-conservatism” actually is.  If they respond by yawning or turning away, they’ve probably made up their minds about “neo-cons,” which makes political conversations with them pretty much useless.  But if you suspect curiosity on their part, you may be sensing an opportunity to delight them. 

Through example (I’ll expand on this in the future) Ann Coulter teaches a lesson about peering into the hearts of liberals.  Because so many Americans are polite, middle-class, and conventional (right down to their political activism, which is manufactured by movies such as An Inconvenient Truth) it can be difficult to tell whether or not the liberal you are talking to is an everyday Joe or a deep blue activist.  We can test them by saying something ambiguous, something which can be read in several ways.  Float a bland opinion towards your target.  Say that Ronald Reagan was a wonderful President.  Moderates will either politely disagree or not care.  Left-wing activists, on the other hand, will spout off about Reagan’s alleged assault on school lunch menus, Iran-Contra, and even AIDS.  We know we’re talking to an unmovable object if they include snide remarks about Alzheimer’s disease. 

If the historian Robert Greene is correct when he says “a perfectly satisfied person cannot be seduced,” then the third group of liberals to forget about includes those whose comfortable lives make change seem threatening.  Professors who make six figures a year, committed family men, and rich entertainers are stubborn precisely because they don’t want to risk challenging their comfortable status quo.  One reason leftist radicals hate happy, traditional families is because someone whose ultimate obligation is to their family likely won’t leap at the opportunity to be obligated to an ideology instead.  This cuts both ways.  If your anti-conservative subject has established a day to day routine, consider another target.  They have no incentive open themselves to us.  Their families, friends, and occupations compete with politics to fill their emotional voids.  The hard work it would take to reexamine their liberalism could veer them away from the sheltered American life they’re accustomed to.  Better to focus on more vulnerable demographs, such as students, fumbling young adults, and political independents.

When surveying potential mates, remember that what a person says about their beliefs doesn’t necessarily indicate their willingness to accept change.  When given a strict choice between the two, look your target’s capacity to consider your viewpoint, rather than their demeanor.  The most polite liberals in the world can also be the most hardened.  The civil PBS crowd is one of the last places a conservative should expect to receive a fair hearing.  Conversely, loud, demonstrative liberals are not necessarily the most difficult to exchange ideas with.  Ward Churchill has debated David Horowitz in good faith.  Rosie O’Donnell has given a thoughtful interview to Bill O’Reilly.   Bill Mahler is friendly with Ann Coulter (not that way, I think).  In more general terms, someone who shouts through a microphone that they support amnesty for illegal aliens may not have any real justification for their beliefs.  They may even agree with all the reasons people oppose amnesty (such as that it rewards people who hold America’s immigration laws in contempt)!  To put it another way: “No on proposition 19” doesn’t always mean “No on proposition 19.” 

One of my best friends, we’ll call him “Silent Bob,” leans noticeably to the left.  How left?  He enjoys books by Barbara Ehrenreich.  At face value, that alone could make him a lost cause.   Socialist literature doesn’t exactly engender an easy-going attitude. 

The first time we ever hung out, we argued politics for hours.  He would invariably posit the liberal side of issues such as the Iraq War, and I would defend conservatism on whatever front he attacked.  He didn’t hold back, calling G.W. a “f**king idiot” and the like.  At times, he sounded more like Keith Olbermann than a normal person.  Usually these things end like a western marriage—with murder-suicide, but my initial discussion with Silent Bob defied our meaningless philosophical differences. 

He passionately presented his beliefs, yet this didn’t keep him from digesting mine, even if he didn’t always like how they tasted.  To this day still don’t agree on a whole lot; he probably still votes for everyone I vote against.  None of that matters.  What’s meaningful is that he doesn’t view conservatives as lesser people than anyone else.  I’m not aiming low; this is a success story: subverting irrational devotion to the left will make us more friends than demanding any kind of allegiance to the right.  On a face-to-face basis, liberal confrontation on the meaning of conservatism is always preferable to liberal indifference. 

In summary, the first step to dealing with liberals involves identifying the open-minded ones.  The best way to do this is to look past how outspoken they are, and instead concentrate on how much they’re willing to listen to conservative discourse.  If someone refuses to empathize with you, despite a good faith attempt on your part to do the same, you have enough of a moral high ground to dismiss them.

Cross-posted at

Tags: liberalism, liberals, seduction
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How to deal with liberals (Introduction)

This begins with a nagging question.  “What can conservatives do to relate to liberals”?  This isn’t a frivolous intellectual exercise.  To paraphrase Dennis Miller, America is turning left like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.  We elected another Jimmy Carter to the White House, the millennial generation is starting to resemble a cornier version of the radical baby boomers, and the natives are clamoring for handouts in lieu of self-sufficiency.  The more I think about it, the more I want to move to Western Canada once it becomes a sovereign nation. 

Conservatives have traditionally been good at approaching this question from a macro perspective.  The first canon of conservative thought is that all political problems are essentially religious and moral problems.  Modern conservatives have added “cultural” to the mix, but the idea is the same: win the culture, and the people will follow.  But the culture wars are just as much a bottom-up struggle as they are a top-down slobber-knocker.  So we can’t escape the annoying truth: we must a find a way to relate to liberals.  If we don’t, we’ll continue to cede an important front in the culture war, and the unique and wonderful ideals of American conservatism will still be threatened by extinction.    

It’s a discouraging prospect.  Even in boom times, conservative philosophy doesn’t lend itself to polite, comforting, dinner party banter.  Ostensibly insensitive notions are what make us conservative.  Ideals such as limited governance and assumption of risk will always seem callous to the young, whom Robert Bork correctly notes are prone to moral absolutism, and they turn off shallow individuals whom are more impressed by the symbols of goodness than the real thing.  Being a right-winger means forever risking scorn by pointing out that throwing money at schools/social programs/housing won’t necessarily improve those things.

Being a heartless conservative can make relating to people difficult, which is depressing—loneliness is misery.   Not “fitting in” to certain circles because of one’s political alignment is silly, but nevertheless stinging.  Let’s assume that you’re having a tough time establishing rapport with some of your more artistic, progressive friends because you don’t like the current President of the United States.  You could change that by wearing an Obama t-shirt and whining about “neocons,” but what if you value the same parts of your identity that keep you from being accepted by the groups you always come in contact with?  What if you enjoy being the kid with the purple hair?

You could just saying “whatever,” and ignore everyone who disagrees with you, but then you would be submitting to mediocre defeatism.  Besides, a capacity to relate to people somewhat different than us distinguishes successful human beings from forty-year old adolescents.  Not a lot of CEO’s write memoirs titled “F**k It.”  Besides, what if the liberals you don’t share anything in common with are related to you; what if they live with you?  Will you simply cut Mom, Dad, your boss or your children out of your life every time you unearth incompatible fragments of their personalities?  What if they’re co-workers you can’t run away from, people you need to build at least a professional level of trust in order to perform your job?   Does it make more sense to quit your job than to find a way to deal with their quirks?  Everyday life requires us to develop a flair for ignoring differences in opinion, even if those opinions are religious or political. 

Imagine a world where conservatives had to preemptively rule out establishing humane connections with liberals: work would become unduly stressful, friendship a rarity, and dating single women would be impossible!  Fortunately, bonding with our ideological counterparts doesn’t need to stress us out.  Most liberals are well-adjusted people whose politics take a back seat to the rest of their lives.  This doesn’t mean that ideology never inhibits friendship; our beliefs are intertwined with our personalities.  Yet in diverse communities (as opposed to, say, multi-ethnic college faculties where everyone votes democrat) politics rarely erect hurdles too high to jump over.  Liberals are as scared of us as we are of them!

Despite that, a significant cultural divide currently keeps conservatives from holding hands with liberals.  Part of the problem is America’s current tendency towards idealism; in our periodic battle to re-shape culture, liberals are discouraged from accepting us for who we are (and vice versa, to a limited extent).  That politically-minded Americans can so easily spend all of their time in isolated ideological communities (especially online) also contributes to the problem, and I haven’t seen much evidence of cross-pollination between red and blue America to offset this.  Whatever the roots of our animosity are, conservatives need to make sober, calculated efforts to bridge the gap between “us” and “them.”   If we truly want liberals to treat us as moral and intellectual equals, we can’t just sit on the couch and expect them to call us out of good will.  We must open up and risk being rejected by our fellow, left-wing Americans. 

In today’s acrimonious age, crawling into the hearts and minds of liberals is the only non-coercive thing which can give them incentive to understand red America.  So how do we achieve the admittedly imprecise goal of persuading liberals to relate to us?  The same way one wriggles into anyone’s heart: seduction.  I’m not suggesting we sleep with liberals to make them like us better (fighting off Bill Clinton joke) but keep the strategies of seduction in mind when dealing with liberals.  Audacity and aggression (ála Ann Coulter) on our part will earn one-night stands from them in the form of meaningless concessions (“Yeah, Bill Clinton was a liar/communism doesn’t work/George W. Bush isn’t stupid, but…”) yet as with any meaningful courtship, connecting with liberals on a deep level takes time, patience, and attention to detail.  With a lot of help from books such as Robert  Greene’s The Art of Seduction, drawing liberals to the right involves, at minimum, focusing on those susceptible to conversion, disrupting their faith by activating their individualistic impulses, entering their spirit, isolating them, and finally, closing the deal.  In the future, I hope to cover all of these bases. 

I think life has granted me some authority to speak on this issue.  I get along with my leftist friends so well some of them insist that I’m not really conservative.  Others tell me I’m not like other conservatives; I’m the exception to the rule.  Whenever I’m told these things, I’m reminded of the phrase “I don’t mind black people, but I hate… (you get the point).”  It’s how they preserve their prejudice against Republicans while simultaneously justifying their friendship with me.  I defy all of their feverish misconceptions about right-wingers.  I don’t tell anyone they’re destined for hell; I don’t want to eliminate minorities as competition, and anxious young women feel shocked that I don’t endeavor to control them.  

I’m not special.  I don’t know any conservatives like the extremist authoritarians liberals make movies about.  I know some who are condescending, too goofy to take seriously, and even a few crazy ones, but within rightist circles, I don’t know any Nazis or even minor-league racists.  All the Christians I know are more or less sensible about their attempts to win people over.  I’m sure somewhere resides a little Eichmann that happens to identify with something under conservatism’s “big tent,” but actual totalitarianism won’t include anyone in the right’s large constituency.  Any one of us can touch liberal hearts and minds, given the correct approach is used.

So where should we start?  By observing our prey.

Cross-posted at

Tags: liberalism, liberals, seduction
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Tags: millennials, New York University
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So I leave this Wednesday for D.C.  I’ll be seeing CPAC for the first time.  Because of mitigating circumstances (girlfriend) I’ll miss most if not all the first day.  No Biggie.  My priorities at CPAC are thus:

1- See Mitt Romney speak. 

2-Check out the vendors.

3-Mingle.  Hope to pick some good brains. 

Yes.  I’d rather look at t-shirts than socialize.  I hope to pick up a couple of obscure books as well. 

My best friend, All American Mike, will be blogging in my place until Tuesday.  I don’t feel like packing my GF’s laptop, and I don’t want to be gouged by my motel to use their business center, so I likely won’t be pooping out any posts after tomorrow night. 

I’m going to start packing in earnest tomorrow.  Tonight, I’m focusing on more immediate concerns, such as eating the food in my kitchen which will spoil if I leave it here over the weekend.  The menu for the next two days is half a steak, one hamburger, half a chicken patty, some aging heart attack fries from KFC, a burger king patty/hockey puck, lettuce, and a cucumber, with chocolate milk and grapefruit juice to wash it down.  It’s not going to increase my carbon footprint because they’re all leftovers, but I don’t feel bad because I know I’ll make up for it eating out every night for five days.   Think globally, act with your stomach. 

Later,

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Why The Dark Knight isn’t a conservative film

The post 9-11 era hasn’t been a golden age in cinema.  Today’s comedies aren’t trail-blazing satires; they’re not even original.   Pay for a comedy today, and chances are you’ll be throwing ten dollars at yet another stoner film or half-hearted romantic / buddy movie.  Will Farrell, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn have been making the same movies in different forms for over a decade.  In efforts to placate America’s hyperactive sense of nostalgia, filmmakers have ceaselessly been remaking retired semi-popular shows our modern culture’s image, taking away the dated charm that made Starsky and Hutch (just to cite one example) barely palpable.  Today’s most intelligent movies, the semi-independent films made in the I Heart Huckabee mold, are often enjoyable, but are also excessively subdued to the point of distaste.  There’s a fine line between clever and glib, and the Parker Posey crowd reliably stumbles back and forth over it.  Even our landmark epic, The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t hold a candle to The Godfather or original Star Wars trilogy. 

Immersed in cinematic crap, I was beginning to worry that the millennium’s first decade of cinema would never find an identity.  When our documentaries are more compelling that our fictions, our imaginations are in poor shape.   One reason Americans are into short-term nostalgia is that today’s films are blandly formless.  Like bad Jazz music, every wonderful effort such as Kill Bill has been drowned out in a self-indulgent sea of promising stanzas that are never fully realized.  Today’s films have no coherent theme like the earnest but corny 1980’s or the colorful reactionary impulse of the 1990’s.  From the style to the dialogue to most of the pop culture references, a movie filmed in 2002 is difficult to distinguish from one produced five years later.  The Dark Knight may have changed all of that in 2008. 

Out of a combination of apathy and frugality, I don’t see a lot of movies soon after they’re released.  For example, I just saw King Kong (2005).  But I loved the last Batman movie, Batman Begins, and everything I heard about the second Christian Bale effort appealed to me.  It was supposed to be engaging, complex, and inconsolably bleak—it’s as if it were made with my personal cinematic tastes in mind.  So last summer I stood in line for an hour with hundreds of other Southern Californians, 80% of which were likely transplants from another region.  It was worth the wait plus twice the admission.

The plot was so detailed that I couldn’t give it justice without turning this into an essay, so I’ll only skim over it: The Joker runs around terrorizing Gotham in novel ways while Batman risks exhaustion trying to stop him.  Several subplots complicate their efforts, which are so personal and dogged they resemble a particularly sadistic team-building retreat.  Before we go much further, one thing must be said: while the film was not sexual at all, nor particularly violent, I wouldn’t take a child to it, superhero worship be damned.  The characters and plot were too compellingly depressing. 

As several reviewers have mentioned, the most memorable character in the Dark Knight is The Joker.  I know Heath Ledger’s death must have earned him some accolades out of sympathy, but his performance was truly Oscar-worthy.  The awards he’s won from this role are due to more than polite posthumous fawning.  Ledger continued the tradition of memorable portrayals of the Joker, and raised the bar for future incarnations of the villain. 

Batman’s alpha-nemesis has always been a product of his time.  Cesar Romero was an over-the-top villain in the “BAM,” “POW,” “WHACK” Batman of the overwrought 50’s and 60’s.  Jack Nicholson played a polished, charming Joker in 1989, a mechanically polished, transitional era in pop culture.  In 2008, America was defined by a long-growing fetish for authenticity.  Hence, Ledger’s Joker isn’t overtly powerful or strong or even unbelievably intelligent; he’s just creepy.  He’s not a charmer who inspires loyal devotion, but a nerdy-voiced, greasy-haired weirdo who needs to threaten to blow himself up to survive leaving a room full of conventional thugs.  The new Joker can only inspire loyalty through money, fear, and exploitation of the mentally ill.  Otherwise, he’s relegated to recruiting gullible youths like a white supremacist.

Despite all of his ostensible vulnerability, Ledger’s Joker drew inspired the worst in me.  I often root for the villains in movies because they’re less detestable than Hollywood’s cloying impressions of heroism (See: Revenge of the Sith).  Yet I wanted Batman to use every resource he had available to kill The Joker, just to put an end to his terrorizing tactics.   What makes the Joker so villainous is that he’s perfectly at ease with his violence.  There is no grand motive other than to fulfill his urges.  Like everyone else in America, he is simultaneously acting out and being himself.  Today, nothing could be more resonant. 

Christian Bale also puts in a good performance, as well as one my favorite actors, Aaron Eckhart, who took on the movie’s most difficult role by portraying a realistic goody-good in Harvey Dent.  But as deep and complex as The Dark Knight is, the movie isn’t as good as Batman Begins for one reason: Batman Begins didn’t have a fascistic undertone.  To understand what I mean, we must discuss the script’s treatment of the aforementioned Mr. Dent. 

In juxtaposition to The Joker’s self-indulgent anarchy, Dent is an idealistic Gotham city attorney.  Like Rudy Giuliani, he spends his time persecuting the mob and ignoring death threats.  Unlike Rudy Giuliani, Dent is presented as a lofty paragon, a spotless human being cosmopolitan women like Rachel Dawes (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) want to marry.  As the story progresses, Dent finds himself entangled in The Joker’s feud with Batman, and by the end, The Joker has him kidnapped along with Rachel.  Dent, tied to a chair in a room full of 55-gallon drums full of explosive liquids, is told by the love of his life over speakerphone (she’s tied up at another location just like his) that she’ll marry him.  Dent tells her that she’s going to be o.k., but soon his brand-new fiancée is blown up and half of his face is burnt off as Batman inadvertently saves him instead of Rachel. 

Thus Harvey the light-bearer, whose self-sacrificial dedication to law and order couldn’t save the person closest to him, becomes Two-Face, a psychopath who decides whether his victims live or die based on a coin flip.  Embittered and driven, Harvey embarks on a quest to confront everyone who could possibly be held culpable for Rachel’s death (except for The Joker, who convinces Harvey he’s just a loon who can’t be held responsible for his crimes, sort of like the way America is blamed for Islamic terrorism).  This includes not only the corrupt officials who sold him and Ms. Dawes out to the mob (which contracted The Joker) but also Commissioner Gordon for tolerating so much corruption in his own office.  Two-face even threatens to kill Gordon’s pre-teen son, forcing Batman to kill Gotham’s former golden boy. 

While all of this is disturbing on some level, none of it is as depressing as the way Batman decides to deal with Dent’s death.  Because Dent’s crimes toward the end of his life could compromise the cases he made against hundreds of criminals, Batman decides to whitewash Dent’s final hours by all but forcing Police Commissioner Gordon to lie and say Batman committed all of Harvey Dent’s murders and then killed Dent in cold blood.  All because Batman decided that instead of the truth, Gotham “needs a real hero.”  The movie ends with a disgusting press conference, where Gordon plays his part and presents the whole of Dent’s life as heroic.  To be consistent, the next Batman movie will be required to have Che Guevara-like murals of Dent spray-painted on all the brick buildings. 

The movie didn’t have to end this way.  It could have been handled in a manner similar to this:  Batman, acknowledging that Dent had it in him to kidnap the police commissioner’s family and almost kill a child, allows Commissioner Gordon to tell the public the truth: Gotham’s white knight was overwhelmed by The Joker’s devilish ability to justify bad behavior.  Dent was constantly burdened by death threats, the love of his life was murdered, and half of his face had been burnt off.  None of that excuses the crimes he committed in the last hours of his life, but neither does it erase his past good deeds.  We still have Batman, but let Harvey’s story remind us that to truly keep Gotham afloat, we must remain vigilant against not only Gotham’s criminals, who we are in the middle of a virtual war against, but our own dark urges, which we can control.  Yes, we may have to try a few cases again, but that’s a consequence of having rule of law as opposed to a police state.  

But the end of the Dark Knight isn’t as nearly thoughtful.  Instead, Batman takes the blame for Dent’s crimes, unnecessarily inhibiting his own ability to confront evil.  He initiated dishonesty on the part of Gotham City’s law enforcement.  Yet for all of that, the only thing Batman accomplished was to make himself feel better by bearing someone else’s guilt.  Oh, and he compromised his future crime-fighting endeavors by turning an entire city against its most powerful hero, who’s too afraid of being held to unrealistic standards.  What’s so conservative about that? 

The Dark Knight has been mistakenly characterized as a right-wing fantasy.  While it’s refreshingly devoid of liberal moralizing, and even includes scenes where Batman beats The Joker during interrogation and commits one-time surveillance on his entire city, a vigilante’s disregard for legal protocol is not exactly uncommon in crime-fighting movies.  This film actually has little to say about the children of Russell Kirk.  More than anything, the Dark Knight is not some godforsaken political commentary, but the best movie of its era, an unmatched product of its time in terms of quality and the public’s positive reception to it.  But perhaps I’m overestimating Ledger’s performance; it could never be as creepy as real life, where tens of millions saw a movie, yet no one seemed to notice its implicit approval of whitewashing a political figure’s sins for the greater good. 

Cross-posted at

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So it’s already been a month at The Sword and the Olive Branch.  What have I learned 1/12th of the way through my rookie season? 

1) Microsoft Word does funny things to html.  I didn’t want to believe it at first, because I like Word.  I know where all the options are; it looks nice, and I love the Calibri font.  That doesn’t stop Word, upon being transferred to my blog, from making some

       paragraphs look like this.Or closing the gaps in between some sentences.  Or inserting strange line breaks (I can’t even recreate this one at the moment).  Word doesn’t even convert well to open office.  So reluctantly, I’m saving my drafts online, which is a little discomforting.   I’m a creature of habit, and I feel more secure when my drafts are safely and securely stored exclusively on my PC. 

2) The way I’m blogging right now, I give myself no time for contemplation.  This is the most serious threat to “Afghan Whig,” as it’s affected my judgment and made my new hobby feel like a second job.  Without time to read books, absorb the news, and polish my writing, the quality of my work will deteriorate (in some ways it already has).  My first month of blogging followed the same economic logic as social security:  I was spending way more knowledge than I was taking in.

This is causing me real stress.  If it ever gets to the point where I’m blogging more than I’m learning, I’ll cut my losses and dedicate my website to music I like (p.s.  Does anyone within earshot know where I can find videos from Slayer’s “Diabolus in Musica”)?

As a result, The Sword and the Olive Branch is going to take a more personal tone.  Contrary to what I learned in school, my best writing comes when I’m not crafting my message towards a certain audience.  When I worry how my readers are going to react, I find myself pulling my punches and trying to be too clever.  It kills my personal voice, which is really all I have to offer.  Bloggers come a dime a dozen, but there’s only one of me.  That’s going to show in the upcoming months. 

Expect to see more short posts, more interesting links and images, and more unpolished immediate reactions.  When it comes to my editorials and essays, I’m going to start deffering to quality over quantity.  Also, I can go for weeks and not find anything in the news that interests me.  So I’m going to post on more topics which may not be timely (as in leading the headlines) but are relevant anyway.  For example, I have something on illegal immigration coming very soon (possibly tonight). 

In addition, I have no time to work on the nuts and bolts of html and the technical points of online publishing (I use this term in the loosest sense).   For the most part, I’m winging the actual blogging process; I’m still an internet newbie.  For example, I’ve examined every line of my style sheet, looking for the section that makes my links default to green.  I can’t find it.  I think the code was split in four pieces and scattered to the four corners of the internet.  It’s gotten to the point that someday I’m going to print out my style sheet, shred the fucking thing, and burn the shredded pile out of frustration.  Sooner or later I need to actually read the HTML books I bought in December. 

3) I’m not a social butterfly.   I already knew that, but blogging in a vast community of people I’ll never meet has reminded me just to what extent.  I almost skipped buying tickets to CPAC for the first time this year because the thought of being stuck in conference rooms full of opinionated strangers sounds slightly less fun than shaving with a cheese grater.  But Mitt Romney’s speaking, and my girlfriend has always wanted to see D.C., so I’ll be there (All American Mike will take over the site if terrorists take control of one of my cross-country flights). 

I despise networking; twittering’s a chore (although I did have fun live-tweeting the Oscars); I don’t generally like leaving random comments on anonymous blogs, and I hate promoting myself.  I’d rather my work speak for itself.  Since that’s not going to get me any traffic when I’m competing with thousands of like-minded peers, I’m going to save up to hire an agent to do all the cyberspace glad-handing.  For my free blog.  With no advertising.  Perhaps I need to think this one through. 

4) For a conservative, I’m terrible at adhering to convention.  I’m still learning blogging etiquette, and I think I’ve inadvertently alienated some people with my approach to blogging.  I’m still not sure what “Hat-tip” means, but it looks pretty ridiculous when I see “Hat tip: Hot Air via Conservative Grapevine via cracked.com.”  What if I find, via Yahoo!, a silly video everyone has linked to?  Will people believe I didn’t get it from the thousands of bloggers who got there first?   When I get time, I’m going to hunt for the internet version of the Chicago Manual of Style. 

5) Finally, I know The Sword and the Olive Branch needs some work, especially concerning continuity and appearance.  Expect a re-vamp later this year after I figure out exactly what I want in a custom-built wordpress theme. 

Later!

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For Mike and Jim:

8-bit Slayer.  I love the scream.

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Dark Tranquility has a video showing what’s it like to grow up in Europe:

Music Video Code by Metal Video

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Read parts one, two, and three

Part four: Purposeful Confusion

Eric Alterman has a bad habit of confusing the meanings of terms which are as plain as day to neutral observers.  It’s a pattern that has sustained his entire career.  In the past he’s bent over backwards to read the worst in Ann Coulter’s glib quips.  It continues in Why We’re Liberals as he professes not to understand what conservatives mean by “liberal elitism.”  Yet nowhere is his seemingly purposeful confusion more apparent than his denial of liberal judicial activism. 

In a short chapter on the subject, Alterman follows what has emerged as a common rhetorical formula for him.  He claims to misunderstand his opponent’s dialectal approach, denies that it can be understood, and then fills the void he created with a meaning that buttresses his argument.  In the case of “judicial activism,” he purports not to understand what it means, and then claims it “has rarely if ever been defined.”  Here Alterman is using an articulate version of the passive-aggressive “I don’t even know what you mean,” in response to slogans one doesn’t like.  It’s safe to presume that Alterman’s misunderstanding is a rhetorical technique, because it isn’t followed up by even a token attempt to grasp the term as it’s used. 

Reading fiction often requires a voluntary suspension of disbelief.  One can’t enjoy a story about dragons, wizards, or totalitarian conservative governments without the ability to ignore the fact these things just don’t exist (which isn’t to say there aren’t corrupt conservative regimes).  We need to use the same technique to follow Alterman’s logic on judicial activism.  After the professor decides that judicial activism is a meaningless term, he defines it in a way that supports his general anti-conservatism, but unfortunately has no bearing on how the term is actually used.  First he cites a study that defines judicial activism as a tendency to strike down legislation as unconstitutional—in other words, for judges doing their job.  The study suggests that conservative judges are the most activistic.

The problem with a lot of serious political science research, partly out of the need to limit difficult variables, is that it tends to saddle complex political terms with simplistic definitions.  Outside of political newbies, no one reduces political conservatism to a mere resistance to change as much as the engineers of political science studies.  Hence the simplistic equation of activism with finding laws unconstitutional.  Even if it wasn’t obvious in the first study Alterman uses, the first clue that something reeks about the whole thing is it’s dubious conclusion.  Because of a sloppy definition of judicial activism, anyone taking the study at face value is led to believe that Clarence Thomas is more than twice as activistic as Stephen Breyer.  The equivalent would be a carefully plotted, five-year long survey undertaken by graduate students which concluded that Rush Limbaugh was twice as liberal as Keith Olbermann.  Should I be more inclined to buy into the “proof” that Rush is actually more liberal, or should I wonder if the grad students are using a definition of liberal no one else uses? 

The second flawed study Alterman cites isn’t truly an alternative to the first.  It just measures judicial activism by a tendency to strike down executive acts instead of legislation.  Predictably, small-government conservatives find more executive acts unconstitutional than statist liberals do.  In both cases, Alterman is conflating activity with activism. 

Alterman’s clever chapter is disturbing because it doesn’t take much effort to understand what conservatives generally mean by “judicial activism.”  Loosely, it means judges interpreting the Constitution in ways that correspond more with prevailing trends than with established principles. This doesn’t mean there isn’t any debate over the meaning of “original intent,” the importance of statutory laws in relation to constitutional law, or whatever keeping with the “spirit of the Constitution” entails.  Conservative opponents of judicial activism are chiefly concerned with keeping judges from arbitrarily imposing their views on others.  Even conservative novices know this—which means that Alterman, too smart and intellectually curious to simply overlook something central to his argument, has purposefully went out of his way to avoid understanding what he’s talking about.  At least here, the author is demonstrably more ideological than intellectual. 

Conclusion

So what general impressions does one come away with after reading Why We’re Liberals?” 

Firstly, liberals are capable of self-criticism.  It may come sandwiched in between layers of anti-conservative vitriol, but it’s there.  Alterman is no shill for communism.  His take on affirmative action is to approach it through class instead of race, which is at least one step up from the lowest rung of identity politics.  Alterman is individualistic enough that I imagine that I could have a good faith dialogue with him; he doesn’t share President Obama’s habit of talking past conservatives, recycling academic talking points as if he’s still on the campaign trail. 

Secondly, even the most educated liberals are dismissive and uncurious about conservative ideas. This happens because the left’s problem isn’t the absence of a moral code or education; it generally has plenty of both.  No, what the left needs more than anything is humility.  Liberals look down on those who aren’t liberal.  Blanket claims that liberals are smarter, kinder, and more sacrificial than conservatives are not uncommon even among the most cultivated progressive minds.  This arrogance has kept them from learning any lessons from the conservative movement. 

This won’t change anytime soon.  Until a dominant segment of America comes to understand that political alignment doesn’t dictate character, liberals and conservatives will jockey for moral superiority.  In the meantime, conservatives should remind the left that being liberal doesn’t mean you’re smarter, more caring, more tolerant or less capable of pettiness and crime than anyone else.  It just makes you liberal, that’s all.  Until this sinks in, Americans will keep using liberalism as a status symbol, something to signify that they’re well-educated, thoughtful citizens (think PBS license plate frames). 

This is one of the most important fronts in the culture war.  Not until the veneer is stripped off of liberalism and all of its subsets will American politics even have a chance to become an intellectual endeavor, as opposed to a vehicle people use to feel good about themselves. 

Finally, liberals are insecure about their beliefs.  Alterman’s worst moments don’t come when he strays to the far left, but when he’s inappropriately lashing out against the right.  When he carelessly tosses around accusations of bigotry, it betrays an insecurity which belies his aptitude and relative affluence.  Liberals wouldn’t feel such a strong urge to lie or call their opponents hate mongers if they were truly convinced they had the intellectual high ground.  Confident people argue with ideas; insecure people embellish anecdotes.  This suggests that liberals can be persuaded if they would actually listen to conservative arguments.  Thus, the most difficult left-wingers to talk to aren’t necessarily the furthest to the left, but the most defensive and uncommunicative.

So in the face of liberal intellectualism, don’t be intimidated.  Eric Alterman is one of the most intelligent liberal authors I’ve read, and his philosophical soft spots aren’t much different than Sean Penn’s.  If you find yourself debating a liberal egghead, don’t feel as if you need to be clever or conniving.  Just make your case as if you were sharing ideas with anyone else.  Obviously there will be a lot of disagreement, but you’ll be surprised at the things smart liberals concede.  Open up to them, empathize with them, and if they get too full of themselves, give them a good rhetorical smacking. 

Read this at

Tags: Eric Alterman, judicial activism, why we're liberals
Posted in Belated book reviews, Essays | No Comments »

I just found this while researching something for tomorrow’s late afternoon (probably midnight Saturday) post.  It’s old (from 2003), but a goodie:

The Onion: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does.

An excerpt:

“As recently as 15 years ago, a woman could only feel empowered by advancing in a male-dominated work world, asserting her own sexual wants and needs, or pushing for a stronger voice in politics. Today, a woman can empower herself through actions as seemingly inconsequential as driving her children to soccer practice or watching the Oxygen network.”

 

Cross-posted at

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb.  Let’s hope President Obama’s fellow Democrats are correct when they claim that he’s as opposed to a nuclear Tehran as George W. Bush is. 

…the more things stay the same.  Activists are protesting the New York Post over this Sean Delonas cartoon:

I’m not a big fan of the cartoon’s woefully tone-deaf attempt to equate the current government (which is being lead by an African-American) with an out-of-control celebrity chimpanzee.  But the more I read the consciously offended protestors’ sermonizing statements (“How dare you violate the President of the United States?”) the easier it is to look past the drawing’s dull humor. 

Other than that, I think I speak for most Americans when I say, “yawn.”  

Continuing the theme of President Obama’s post-racial America, Attorney General Eric Holder somberly lectured Justice Department employees yesterday about how the United States is “essentially a nation a nation of cowards” when it comes to race.  Apparently concerned that Americans don’t mingle more outside their ethnic enclaves, he told the employees that they have a special responsibility to advance racial understanding.

Holder’s remarks have been compared to one of Obama’s speeches about race, which is accurate in that some of Holder’s soft-spoken oration is appealing.  He emphasized that Americans must be more frank about racial matters, which at least implies that he’s not afraid of strong, vocal opposition to left-wing notions of racial justice.  His talk about honest dialogue and accepting criticism where it is “justified” are likely mere platitudes, but they at least make me feel hopeful about the relationship between African-Americans and the rest of the country.  He even acknowledged that Black History month is an “artificial device” used to promote discussion about racial matters. 

Yet Holder erred when he claimed that Americans “simply do not talk enough” about race.  Really?  Rare are the neophytes who won’t bloviate about race until they pass out from a lack of oxygen.  If there exists one political discussion every American has participated in, it’s the one about slavery, affirmative action, and reparations.  Perhaps Holder is worried that Americans are sick of racial conflict, especially when both sides are segregated by large, semantic spaces (see above). 

Besides, why is the Attorney General concerned with turning law enforcement’s attention to the common sociology professor’s pet peeves, especially when property crime is almost certain to rise as the economy falls, giving certain people an excuse to steal?  It’s not the Justice Department’s job to advance a specific brand of racial harmony; it’s their responsibility to maintain peace, so Americans of all races can prosper under rule of law.  More Americans arguing about proportional representation from a standpoint they haven’t budged from since high school won’t achieve that. 

As always seems to be the case in Obama’s young government, there’s a left-wing subtext underlying Holder’s words about the importance of racial dialogue.  About three-quarters of the way through his sermon, Holder states that if the social problems affecting the poorest parts of the country aren’t addressed, they’ll affect the entire nation.  This is simply a version of the left-wing argument that crime is perpetuated by socioeconomic means, as opposed to moral deficiency.  So how come Mr. Holder can’t just spit that out?  Why does he need to smuggle it into a ceremonial speech like pork in the controversial stimulus law?  It appears as if the Attorney General needs to think more deeply about his own invertebrate insincerity. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: AG Holder, Iran, Obama, race, Sean Delonas, Stimulus cartoon
Posted in Current Events | No Comments »

Few things have shaken my admittedly weak faith in my countrymen more than this advertisement (see below). 

Commemorative political memorabilia is nothing new.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see a set of James Buchanan plates in a flea market some day.  But this was just one more piece of evidence that President Barack Obama is the most crassly commercialized political celebrity since the mediocre diarist Che Guevara.  The last time I was at Wal-mart, two men were standing outside selling coat racks full of nothing but Obama clothing.  They even had Obama-themed women’s leggings. 

What stands out about the ad is that it’s clearly not offering the coin enthusiast’s equivalent of Honus Wagner tobacco cards.  Firstly, the commercial plainly states that they’re selling ”four official U.S minted coins” layered in 24-carat Gold, and then colorized (which makes them numismatically worthless).  Secondly, I’m no coin collector, but the part where the narrator says, “the Obama-John F. Kennedy half dollar coin,” sets off all kinds of red flags.  Thirdly, 20 seconds in, the commercial shows four coins being superimposed with full color images of the new President!   

The Home Shopping Network is hawking the glorified change as well.  Here they plainly state that they’re selling “colorized” half-dollars, quarters, and golden dollars. 

 Why is this relevant? 

Hat tip: Hot Air

I almost feel bad that shady vendors are taking advantage of Barack Obama’s overly excited fans by selling them cheap merchandise that isn’t nearly as nice as it looked on the commercial.

Almost.  The buyers (one of whom saw this commercial with Montel Williams, which also communicates in no uncertain terms that these are George Washington dollars and JFK half-dollars with Obama added on) bear most of the responsibility here.  Apart from not having the common sense to refrain from purchasing several copies of a unique collector’s item until seeing at least one, the United States Mint issued an  advisory about Obama coins last December, which the owner would have come across in a simple Google search.  Also, the joyless souls at NPR were on this story as early as January.   Don’t these people have internet?   They scammed themselves.

There are no innocents in this conflict.  The vendors are taking advantage of the weak-minded, the buyers are allowing their emotions to get the best of them, and even Montel Williams betrayed his fan’s trust by proclaiming how proud he is of such shoddy merchandise.  This is Obama’s America, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Obama coins, obama supporters
Posted in Current Events | No Comments »

 The biggest reason populist conservatives are so unpopular.

 (I’m determined to get through this one without using the “L” word).

George W. Bush and Sarah Palin are the most despised elected Republicans in recent memory.  Even though his Presidency is over, George Bush’s most extreme opponents are fantasizing about trying his administration for war crimes.  Sarah Palin is still kicked around in certain circles and falsely portrayed as the reason the disloyal, uncertain, and uninspiring presidential candidate John McCain lost the 2008 election.  

It’s plain to everyone that there exists a core group of Americans who sneer down at conservatives simply for the sin of being right of center, but Bush, Palin, and the populist conservatives just like them are hated with a vigor that would be more appropriately directed at someone who suffocates infants in the maternity ward.  Anyone strolling through the internet last fall would have found it difficult not to trip over mean-spirited hecklers purposefully spreading malicious rumors such as the lie that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent.  There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that both of these Republicans are too normal.   Neither Bush nor Palin seem to make any effort to portray themselves as part of some insufferably articulate, tea-tootling ruling class. 

The historian Robert Greene shares a story in The 48 Laws of Power about the last King of France, Louis-Philippe.  He came to power during the 1830 July Revolution after Charles X was forced to go into exile to avoid being murdered by revolutionary zeal.  Louis-Philippe carried himself not like a king, but like the French middle class.  He constantly downplayed his status, treating guests in his palace as if they were in his position.  In addition, he wasn’t a friend of the nobility.  He didn’t speak their language or adopt their symbols.  He called himself the “King of the French” as opposed to the traditional title “King of France.” 

Eventually Louis-Philippe’s everyman act wore on the French, who started to look down on him.  It got to the point where the powerful banker James Rothschild publically berated the King for being late.  After riots broke out over electoral reform, the “King of the French” rewarded the rioter’s violent behavior by firing his prime minister and appointing a replacement with more revolutionary sensibilities.  Predictably, this emboldened the mob, and eventually they surrounded his palace.  In the tradition of French leaders confronted by political extremism, Louis-Philippe tucked in his tail and fled to England, leaving the country to fend for itself.  It turns out that even people clamoring for equality at all costs don’t want a ruler just like them. 

Flash forward to Bush and Palin now.  As a result of their plain-spoken manner, liberals like to pretend that George and Sarah are so dumb it embarrasses America.  This is simply poor man’s elitism.  Both Republicans were popular governors, far more successful on a state level than a national one.  After governing the lone star state, George Bush was elected twice as President of the United States, which took a lot of guile, especially considering that he was re-elected after starting an immensely unpopular war.  Even the stingiest parent would be proud of their child if he or she grew up to become president.  Surely being the son of another former President helped Bush achieve what he has, but no all rich children are smart enough to make the most out of their privilege.  Has anyone who doesn’t own a police scanner heard of Al Gore III? 

As for Palin, she led a complex proposal that ensured that when 35 trillion feet of cubic gas under Alaska’s North Slope comes to market, it would allow for competition and growth, have clear and objective measures of progress, and preserve Alaska’s sovereignty.  She then ensured that the proposal would get voted on.  And if that doesn’t convince you, even the Democratic feminist and former editor in chief of Ms. Magazine, Elaine Lafferty, concedes that Palin is “very smart,” and feminists don’t concede anything to the right.  Yet even though it can probably be demonstrated that Bush and Palin are more happy and successful than most of the population, their opponents are still able to portray them as barely one step up from Joy Behar. 

Of course Bush and Palin aren’t fantastically stupid, but they’re portrayed as such because they’re too much like the Americans we see every day.  More than even real tyranny, the mere appearance of commonality is something people don’t want in a leader.  People like to imagine they’re being led by the best and the brightest.  We don’t want to know that our presidents, governors, and judges are just like us, only more educated and driven.  We feel safer pretending that our elected officials aren’t capable of making the same dumb mistakes we make.  Politicians aren’t supposed to have ideological biases or speak like regular folk, because no likes to deferring to their equal. 

This is why being articulate is so important in politics.  The largest blow to Sarah Palin’s image hit home when the media exposed her lack of aristocracy, for the privileged class is trained to have a least talking points ready for all situations.  As for G.W., his speech flubs are proof that our politicians are human, which is why they’re called “Bushisms” and obsessed over by the mediocre masses.   How can the government be responsible for our well-being when our leaders are no better than we are? 

Bush and Palin’s penchant for regular, unpolished communication not only sounds dumb to some people, but it seems inauthentic.  Again, the presumption that politicians are better than everyone else is the culprit.  When political figures make obvious attempts the act like someone they’re not, let’s say they pop out of tanks even though it’s obvious they’re not military types, it gives the impression that they have no self-respect.  Instead of selling you their ideas in their language, they pretend to be in tune with people they share little to nothing in common with.   So when Sarah Palin speaks in plain English, as opposed to iambic pentameter, it seems as if she doesn’t respect her position.  George Bush’s casual approach to the speechmaking (he’s often glib and tends to speak in platitudes) made him look un-presidential.  They both ignore when I now humbly deem the first rule of democracy: no one wants to give power to someone they can’t pretend is better than he or she is. 

In addition to that, no one likes being talked down to.  If a politician starts adopting your southern accent when they never had one before, their appeal to regional ties is so obvious they may as well be using baby talk.  “HOW Y’ALL DOING?  I SURE HATE THEM RICH PEOPLE.”  Thus, Bush and Palin’s plain language risks offending people because it seems condescending.  Regular Americans don’t know politicians well enough to trust that their common lingo is sincere.  Ironically, this pretty much guarantees that a working-class person will never be elected by the working class.  No one believes Barack Obama is representative of his constituency, unless they’re only counting professors who make six figures.

The lessons conservatives can learn from misguided populism are many.  One, don’t act as if you’re a lower class than you really are, it’s condescending and smacks of insincerity.  People don’t mind if you’re true to yourself and your own culture, as long as you demonstrate a respect for their values.  Two, don’t be inarticulate, it convinces people you’re dumb even if all the remaining evidence suggests otherwise.  To have any chance of winning the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, Sarah Palin will have work hard to convince Americans she’s not the dope her opponents gleefully portray her as.  The most important part of that will be learning how to act like part of the ruling class.  I’m no advocate for shallowness, but when it comes to persuading the masses, appearances may actually be everything—who a politician is isn’t nearly as important to his success as who the people think he is.  Three, if you ever become King of France, don’t preclude Elvis’s look. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Bush, communication, palin
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

From feministing, my favorite humor site. 

Check it out at Modern Conservative

Tags: Feministing, obama supporters, Valentine's Day
Posted in Comedy | No Comments »

Like a gallstone, Hugo Chavez’s referendum to eliminate term limits in Venezuela passed over the weekend.  This isn’t a testament to Chavez’s charisma.  Nor is it a telling anecdote about Venezuelans.  The willingness of a population to give up Presidential term limits actually highlights the power of dependent thinking.  Like the comically hapless future Americans in Idiocracy, it’s human nature to fear taking responsibility for our well being.  When we’re not brave enough to accept freedom’s assumption of risk, this results in stronger government.   

This is how socialists, nay, dictators of all stripes maintain their power in the modern era.  First the modern dictator takes an already vulnerable population (ex: the poor) and makes them dependent on his benevolence by offering them goodies:  affirmative action, price controls, whatever it takes.  Then the modern dictator convinces the masses that he (or at the very least, his party) is the only one who can give the people what they need.  The people, who are actively discouraged from comprehending a life without the crutches of welfare and other government programs, are compelled to vote for the kind-hearted master who makes their well-being possible.   

This starts an ugly cycle of co-dependence where the government, rewarded for pandering to the lowest common denominator, endeavors to encompass even more citizens under its web with bigger programs and more subsidies.  This creates a larger pool of citizens who don’t mind the expanded welfare state that benefits them at the expense of the successful, which in turn increases the democratic dictator’s chances of being elected to another term.  The modern fascist’s path to power involves convincing as many of his countrymen as he can that they’re invalids, incapable of finding happiness without the state’s intervention.

The longer this goes on, the less likely a peaceful change will occur.  Just as children will defend their parents to the very end because their livelihood depends on them, supporters of the benevolent dictator will slander the government’s opponents, cheat them out of elections, and even resort to the radical tactics of violence and intimidation to protect their Mommy state.  I’m not calling Barack Obama a dictator, but the biggest story of the 2008 Presidential election by far was ACORN’s alleged voter fraud, but the fickle people were more interested in Saturday Night Live skits and Sarah Palin’s inconsequential contradictions.  This demonstrates the masse’s willingness to overlook authoritarian indiscretions as long as those authorities are acting in the “people’s” interest. 

Education cannot break this cycle: even learned citizens are apt to vote according to their own short-term perspective (immediate job security, increases in minimum wage, feeling good about themselves) rather than their nation’s long-term prosperity.  Revolution cannot break the cycle.  Outside of a well-regulated militia (those words sure sound familiar) no one can match their own government in terms of men and firepower.  Outside of a Soviet-style collapse, the only thing that can break the cycle of dependence is moral renewal.  A citizenry which would purposefully place power in the hands of a Mussolini, a Castro, or a Chavez is suffering from moral deficiency.  Sadly, this appears to be the natural state of things. 

No one walks into a voting booth intending to vote for a monster; every vote in a democracy is a self-serving one.  Some of the reasons Venezuelans voted to eliminate term limits are that Hugo Chavez provides them with education and health care, and he “empowered them with the discourse of class struggle.”  “Empowering” someone with “the discourse of class struggle” is only the legitimization of blaming your relative poverty on someone else.  Chavez gives a powerful voice to Venezuelans who don’t want to believe they’re largely responsible for their own well-being.  But the rhetoric of class warfare only rationalizes inequality; it does nothing to truly explain it, and thus fails to alleviate it.  The only remedy for this is to train people to be truly selfless; to encourage them to look outside narrow class and group interests when they approach the political realm. 

The co-dependent Venezuelan masses just voted to concentrate more power in one man’s hands in a time of worldwide uncertainty.  If the economy continues to sputter over the long term, don’t be surprised if emotionally valetudinarian Americans are tempted to do the same by 2016. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: dependence, Hugo Chavez, Venezulea
Posted in Current Events | No Comments »

What’s the purpose of having a blog if you don’t share things no one cares about, such as your personal rankings of all nine Metallica Albums? 

Music video of the week:  The Pursuit of Vikings, by our docile Swedish friends, Amon Amarth. 

Music Video Code by Metal Video

My favorite kind of metal:  hard-driving riffs coupled with a recognizable beat.  The only thing that could make this song better would be if Timo Koltipelto from Stratovarius (or a similarly melodic singer) covered the vocals.  It would be the perfect combination of raw and haunting.   But that’s just my opinion. 

p.s.  It’s kind of funny how their heads spin throughout the entire video. 

Oh, and here’s my Metallica list, excluding albums full of cover songs (Garage, Inc.), and glorified live albums (S + M)

1.  Master of Puppets.  A powerful first three songs, including Battery, give it a very short leg up on #2. 

2. Ride The Lightning.  A remarkably polished second album, especially for 1984.  Fade to Black may be the group’s best song ever. 

3.  Metallica (The Black Album).  Overplayed, for sure.  If you listen to a rock station in Iowa for a few hours, you’re all but guaranteed to hear something from their 1991 masterpiece.  I know a lot of Metallica purists despise the album because the band deviated from their roots here (read: it was a commercial success) but there are just too many good songs on the album to rank it any lower.  All by itself, Enter Sandman would have made an obscure metal band a huge one-hit wonder.  Instead, it’s just one more notch on Metallica’s belt.  A side note: I would like to burn the opening stanza of My Friend of Misery in every liberal’s brain at birth. 

4.  Kill ‘em All.  Motorbreath and Phantom Lord are greatly underappreciated tunes.

5.  …And Justice for All.  Something is off about this album.  One would think songs like Blackened, One, and the title track would put this in the top three.  But there are two huge drawbacks to Metallica’s 1988 effort.  One, it sounds like it was recorded on a Furby in someone’s kitchen.  Two, perhaps because of the terrible production, the second half is barely tolerable.  Maybe this is the reason the following “Black Album” sounded so smooth. 

6.  Death Magnetic.  It’s surprising how low this sits on the list, considering that it was well-received by most of the Metallica fans I know.  I think I loved it for a short time because it suggests Metallica is becoming a metal band again.  In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Anthrax’s We’ve Come for You All, which was also a much-appreciated, if not exactly great ninth studio album from a band which released a few duds after 1991. 

7.  Re-Load.  The Memory Remains and The Unforgiven II redeem an otherwise forgettable experiment.

8.  Load.  This one has three good songs.  Hero of the Day, Bleeding Me, and King Nothing.  With the exception of HOTD, none of them hold a candle to Re-load’s two gems. 

9.  St. Anger. Word is Metallica rubbed a Mexican drug cartel the wrong way, and they were forced to record this piece of garbage lest their entire families be raped and beheaded on public access television. 

On that note, have a nice day!

Tags: Amon Amarth, Metal, Metallica
Posted in Weekend garbage posts | No Comments »

It turns out that I’m not the first one to think of putting this on a t-shirt.  Oh well; I wasn’t going to capitalize on it anyway. 

Did they take my idea, or did I take theirs?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feministing has posted some of the dumbest comments they’ve received about contributor Courtney E Martin’s recent appearance on the O’Reilly Factor (complete with melodramatic feedback such as, “an attack on one feminist is an attack on all of us”).  A sampling of their sampling (original typos included):

“I love your juttting lower jaw and crooked face. You have a face for a writer.”

“…I would toss you to the predators. I would trade you to the predators. I would betray you to the predators. I would NOT want you to pass on your weak genetics.”

“Hey Thin Lips -
You are a typical feminist, very possibly a dyke, and (predictably) you totally lack a sense of humor. But don’t worry, sweetie, you’ll find a husband/wife eventually. There’s gotta someone out there who will find you attractive.”

Assuming they’re legitimate (one can never tell in today’s age of victim ideology) these statements are disturbing because they’re clearly coming from the right—no one outflanks feminists on the left.  I’m not bothered by the prospect of these words being used to make conservatives look bad.  We’ll all be portrayed as knuckle-dragging misogynists no matter how we confront left-wing women.  The problem with comments like these is that they reflect an inability to keep one’s emotions in check.  Wrath is an indulgence.  Lashing out at someone by calling them a dyke (or worse) isn’t empowering, but a sign of desperation.  Grow up. 

I don’t mean to sound uptight.  I don’t subscribe to the “blunt object” versus “scalpel” school of thought.  The abolition of blunt weaponry leaves few tools for satire and sarcasm.  But rhetorical broadswords need to be used in an appropriate context to even have a chance of landing any blows.   Besides, any self-proclaimed progressive with enough self-awareness to title a column, “Obama is not a God,” deserves at least one sincere argument. 

 

NPR’s hyper-conventional audience is up in arms over Fox News/NPR contributor Juan Williams again (Last August, he opined that Michelle Obama sometimes utilizes a “kind of militant anger”).  This time it’s for calling the First Lady a potential liability because she instinctively plays the victim card and blames America.  Particularly spicy was his comparison of her to the late Stokely Carmichael, a Marxist black separatist who coined the term “black power.”  Obviously this is much too colorful for NPR, but anyone who cares to follow Mr. Williams should know he appears in forums which allow for this type of frank conversation.

Even if the radical activist comparison was over the top, Williams has a strong case.  Mrs. Obama’s idiosyncrasies don’t just bedevil her husband through her occasional sharing of bulletin board material, such as when she called America “downright mean,” or ill-advisedly commented about being proud of her country for the first time as an adult; she has a marked defensive streak, as evidenced in this NewsBusters video.  Defensiveness is harmful because it’s a universally off-putting trait.  It gives the impression that one is liable to take offense to anything; hence the First Lady risks stigmatizing the White House with a prickly manner that undermines her grace.  In an era where every personality flaw can be magnified and distributed in seconds, Mrs. Obama’s attitude is a legitimate concern that’s being overlooked amidst the outrage directed at Williams. 

NPR listeners have sent 56 “angry” e-mails and counting about the incident, but even Alicia C. Shepard, NPR’s ombudsman, recognizes the possibility that the outcry may have nothing to do with what Juan Williams actually says, only that he’s on Fox News.  Perhaps in light of this, NPR decided to preserve their relationship with Juan Williams, only requesting that Fox quit identifying Williams as part of NPR.  Fox News effortlessly obliged.

 

As I am typing this, Continental Airlines flight 3047 has crashed into a house in Clarence, New York, which is northeast of Buffalo.  49 people died from the crash, including everyone onboard the plane.  Please say a prayer for all who have been affected by this tragedy. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Continental flight 3047, Feministing, Fox News, Juan Williams, NPR, Sarah Palin t-shirt
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The Socialist Papers-Part 1 of ???

Before the big recession gave birth to premature reports of capitalism’s death, I slept easily because I knew that socialism was a thoroughly discredited theory.  No matter what the left could conjure up, it couldn’t match the comprehensive nightmare of the Orwellian (or is it Huxlean?) socialist state.  Everything I had learned about Stalin, bread lines, inherent inefficiency, political prisoners, suffocation of the press, Che Guevara, and show trials demonstrated the folly of collectivism.  When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the poster child for statist economic theory crumbled as well.  Thus, whenever I would meet a socialist I would catch myself tilting my head and thinking, “they still make you guys?”

Apparently they still do.  As the economy is falling and control freaks are eager to blame it on the scary free market, socialistic sentiment is coming back into vogue.  Newsweek ran a cover story where the authors stated (without irony) that Americans should acknowledge the growing role of the government in the economy, which implicitly means we should just accept it.  As President Barack Obama recently said about arguments that FDR mishandled the Great Depression, “They’re fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.”

Like roaches in Florida, socialism never really dies, and always comes back the moment a family stops maintaining their home.  I’m sorry, but just because the left wants the right’s “20^th-century” perspective to be outdated, that doesn’t make it so.  Reaganesque ideals are still relevant, even in the marketplace.   I admit that President Obama’s election indeed coincided with a fundamental shift in American politics, but it’s not the death of conservatism; it’s the reemergence of economic issues at the top of the political food chain.  Compared to debating the best way to parry the recession, arguing whether or not some 30-second advertisement was sexist seems silly (which won’t stop the gals at feministing from indulging in their favorite party game).

Thus, the Socialist Papers were born.  Because the struggle for economic freedom touches seemingly all aspects of life (The sheer volume of political literature dedicated to economic theory attests to that) there could be five, twelve, of fifty of these.  The ideas, motives, and consequences of socialism are so varied and often complex that attempting to slay them all in one essay would only be disgustingly disdainful.  With that in mind, perhaps I should get on with it. 

For a word that few people seem to be able to define, “Socialism” nevertheless has a strong effect.  Politicians run form the label as if were a disease.  Past intellectuals, including British historian W.E.H. Lecky and the Austrian economist Frederic Hayek, have said “socialism is slavery” during a time where it was easy to understand what they meant.  Saying that now would only cause maleducated (it’s a word now) college students to shake their heads, squint, and say, “what are you talking about?  What’s so bad about socialism?”

Even among liberals, socialism isn’t a well-understood concept.  Some describe it in terms of social justice, synonymous with “equality,” and “fairness,” which is both close and way off the mark.  Most describe it as some sort of system where the government controls the means of production, but disagree on the particulars.  Some sort of fusion between these two ideas, idealism and state ownership, lies the essential meaning of socialism.

Getting right to the point, socialism is any program that advocates state control of the economy in the name of fairness or equality (obviously this makes it potently appealing with those who believe they’re downtrodden). The more a nation’s government dictates the way business is done, the more socialistic a nation is.  Hence, the United States government’s dramatically increased involvement in the banking system in response to the economic downturn in 2008 was decried as socialistic.  I don’t even want to talk about the stimulus package.  Pure socialism is a system where literally all resources are allocated by the state. 

Thankfully today there are few truly socialistic nations, and those ones are clearly more impoverished than they were before socialism.  Few Americans would move to Venezuela, Cuba, or especially North Korea, where private property is flat out illegal via decree from Pyongyang.  Most countries, including the United States, host mixed economies; free market systems handicapped to varying degrees by excessive regulation such as price controls, state ownership of various industries, and high taxation.  Even Red China privatized much if its economy in order to grow into the power it is today. 

So what makes socialism so bad?  One, it doesn’t work.  Ever see a map of North Korea at night?  It looks like a sheet of Light Bright paper with only one of the holes punched.  Two, socialism is inherently authoritarian.  The intrusive legislation conservatives and libertarians warn Americans about ad nauseam becomes a reality in socialistic eras.  One example is price floors, which make it illegal to charge below a certain price for a good or service.   A well known slice of historical trivia in conservative circles is the fact Leo Nebbia was arrested and fined during the Great Depression for selling milk for less than nine cents a quart.  This is what happens when unity trumps liberty. 

Some defend socialism by conflating it with “fairness,” which is not only inchoate, but wrong.  The mere presence of income inequality signifies a society where people are rewarded differently for achieving different things.  This isn’t a tragedy.  If one person works their butt off, and finds themselves making six figures a year, while someone else doesn’t, and relies instead of the government to pay for their cell phones and video games (oh, and food and shelter), the former has a right to their higher economic status. 

Even those who don’t “earn” their riches have a fairer claim to their inheritance than anyone else does.  Donald Trump sacrificed his time on earth to accumulate enough wealth to ensure his children would live comfortably.  Respecting Trump’s right to pass down his wealth to his family is fairer than the government’s prerogative to take it away and give it to people who haven’t been as successful.  To demand that heirs and heiresses forfeit their fortunes because they are “unearned” is to demand that they equalize downward with the children of parents who were less wealthy, undermining mothers and fathers who’ve worked hard to give their children a better life than they had. 

In certain instances, Americans have no problem allowing luck to be a part of the income-making process.  State lotteries are such systems.  No one who has ever purchased a Powerball ticket or sat at a slot machine has any room to complain about income inequality, when a cashier can potentially bridge the entire tax bracket simply by pulling a lever on a noisy mechanism.  If it would be sadistic to allow someone to win a million dollars through blind luck, but then turn around and confiscate it to compensate everyone who didn’t win. 

This doesn’t keep collectivists from marching towards their professed goal of economic equality.  The website for the World Socialist Movement states that “Production under socialism would be directly and solely for use.”  In other words, Corporations would only be able to produce (and consequently people would only be able to consume) what the state believes is necessary.  The most glaring problem with this is that a governing authority would be assigned to dictate exactly what the people “need.”  As anyone familiar with Freidrich Hayek knows, a centralized authority, divorced from localized knowledge, cannot possibly be sensitive to everyone’s demands.  To correct this, the WSM suggests that democracy may be employed to decide what people “need,” but that would only expand the scope of the majority’s rule over the minority.  What if 80% of the people decide that the other 20% doesn’t need more living space, or a side order of fries with that burger?  What if a majority decides I don’t need air conditioning more than X hours a day in the middle of a hot, sticky summer?  Totalitarian policy is no less suffocating coming from a mob than from a tyrant. 

In contrast, Capitalism liberates us from the collective.  It allows us to peacefully live as we wish, and to consume as much or as little as we can afford.  But this is too unpredictable for the worrywart left.   The end result of all this terrible freedom might be income inequality. 

When reminded of socialism’s inherent aversion to liberty, some socialists, especially naïve college students, tell me that all work in a socialistic community would be done on a voluntary basis.  This is the first thing I think about when I hear that socialism is unrealistic.  How many people do you know would do their job for free?  Even purportedly selfless teachers complain about their pay—imagine if they weren’t compensated at all! 

A sense of duty gives hard work an admirable veneer, but it doesn’t overcome the plain fact that working 40 hours a week is not so much fun for most people they would do it out of the kindness of their heart.  Humanity’s basic sense of fairness dictates that we should be compensated in some way for spending the bulk of our waking hours away from family, friends, and recreation.  Even the world’s religions “bribe” us with the reward of going to heaven if we submit to God’s will instead of doing whatever feels good. 

Another pro-socialist fallacy is the argument that communism is great in theory, just not realistic.  Yet what’s so great about living in a society where everything you do, at least in economic terms, is evaluated on the standard of being for or against the collective?  What’s so great about living in a culture where everything you do could potentially be rejected for not contributing to the public good?  Who truly wishes to live in a place where your economic well-being is dictated by a faceless state?  I have no desire to become part of a smiley-faced version of The Borg. 

So does President Obama Advocate socialism?  Not quite.  While he’s definitively statist, and recites the tired poetry of social justice, he is not calling for the mass nationalization of industry. 

Yet socialism’s aims have changed with the times.  What most people who advocate socialism nowadays are pursuing aren’t pipe dreams about communes where currency is rendered irrelevant, but a system where the government takes pro-active measures (read: exerts political pressure on businesses) to make things “fair.”  Again, as with “need,” “fair” is too subjective of a concept to guide just governance.  In any system based on “fairness,” the spoils will go to the most articulate whiners, because they will be the ones who’ll concoct the most convincing sob stories. 

Even if socialism is realized to its fullest extent, its underlying purpose of total equality can never be.  If differences in income are eliminated, classes of people will form around beauty, presumed intellect or another factor susceptible to unfair distribution.  Only in a nation without any diversity, where everyone is exactly the same, will it be possible to erase distinctions among people.   In other words, to repeat Russell Kirk’s third canon of conservative thought, a civilized, classless society cannot exist.  

I’m just scratching the surface here.   If you want to know what socialism is really like, study the people who actually lived under it.  Just as Americans deal with their least favorite leaders by making fun of them, citizens trapped in socialist states often cope with their oppression through sardonic humor.  One of my favorite jokes, which I’ve taken straight from Radio Free Asia, goes like this:

 An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a North Korean are visiting a museum.  They come across a painting of Adam and Eve holding an apple in the Garden of Eden. 

The Englishman remarks that “The man has something tasty and is eager to share it with the woman.  Surely they must be English.”

The Frenchmen retorts, “I disagree.  They are walking around naked, so they must be French.” 

The North Korean says to all this, “they are obviously North Korean.  They have no clothes to wear, barely have anything to eat, and they still think they’re in heaven!” 

For some reason, I just remembered Obama’s inauguration. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: north korea joke, socialism, The Socialist Papers
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The Profit motive works!

Via Yahoo:  Study: Paying smokers to quit boosts success rate

According the story, 15 percent of people who were paid $750.00 to quit smoking for good were able to fend off their nicotine addiction for “about a year” and running.   That’s three times more than the control group, which must have been commanded to stop smoking for the glory of the upcoming socialist nation.

Tags: greed!, profit motive, smoking
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Follow the links to parts one and two

Part three: Elitism

Some of the most important battles in politics are waged over the meanings of words.  Responding to the rhetorical question “Why are liberals so damn elitist?” Eric Alterman writes that it’s difficult to know exactly what conservatives mean when they say “elitism.”  He then proceeds to describe exactly what conservatives mean by noting “the crime is apparently one of the mind,” and that the right judges elitism “on the basis of attitude, rather than income.”  Curiously, Alterman claims conservatives shout “elitism” to beat back liberals instead of arguing with them.  He thinks it’s used to preempt and dismiss liberal perspectives.  This is actually a mirror image of Ann Coulter’s premise that liberals use “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” and “stupid” to avoid arguing ideas with right-wingers.  Like many of Alterman’s arguments, this one is intuitively wrong, but needs explaining to refute. 

Elitism is indeed an attitudinal trait.  While Alterman disagrees with this, he also perfectly understands that this is how conservatives have used it.  He’s being sarcastic in the following example, but I couldn’t describe elitism better than he did: “It’s not about where you live, how much money you have, how many security guards you regularly employ, where you summer, what you drive, what you drive when you’re driving whatever else you drive when you’re not driving that, where you went to school, or where you think people should have gone to school.”  Exactly, Professor Alterman.

Elitism isn’t necessarily about class; it’s about looking down on others.  Certainly there are wealthy elitists, but not all wealthy people are elitist.  Elitism is not contingent on class, education, or any other demographic category.  Bill Gates owns multiple cars, likely employs his own security guards, summers wherever he wants, and doesn’t have to work another minute of his life if he doesn’t want to, but nothing I know about him suggests that he’s elitist.  Yet even the poorest, white-trash leftist who looks down on Christian conservatives for not being sufficiently critical of their personal faith is displaying an elitist attitude. 

So if elitism is a shallow tendency to look down of groups of people for having demographic characteristics one doesn’t admire, then it follows that liberal elitism is the presumption that liberals are superior to conservatives solely based on political alignment.  While anyone who identifies themselves as liberal or conservative will naturally hold their ideals in higher esteem than others, what would make ideological particularism elitist is an arrogant, personal tone.  Ironically enough, Eric Alterman provides more than a few examples of liberal elitism. 

My first exhibit of Alterman’s snobbishness is his common claim that conservatives frame issues in simple “black and white” dichotomies, while liberals perceive “shades of grey.”  His strongest evidence is a study which suggests that liberals are more willing to accept new ideas, but that could signify a lack of conviction as much as it implies a capacity for nuance.  Either way, these contentions are demonstrably false.  No matter how morally ambivalent liberalism may or may not be, conservatism cannot be reduced to simplistic, reactionary protest.  

The American right has always been a predominantly literary movement, rooted and nurtured by words and ideas.  Conservatism would be unrecognizable without its literary column.  If American fascists had censored the publication of Whittaker Chamber’s Witness or Frederic Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, anti-communism may never have never caught on and induced the birth of American conservatism.  Take away Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and what we now call conservatism might have a different name.  If the National Review had never been published, conservative ideas probably would not have been able to spread the way they did in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Moving away from literature, right-wing audiences dominate talk radio, and I won’t be the first to tell you that there are far more entertaining choices of media than explicitly issue-driven commentary.  It takes more than watching syndicated episodes of The West Wing to understand conservatism. 

I don’t doubt the intelligence of liberals, but on the surface, conservative perspectives on several issues are clearly more nuanced than liberal ones.  For example, conservatives tend to believe that tax cuts across the board help stimulate the economy by allowing businesses to keep more capital to invest in more opportunities, often resulting in the hiring of new employees.  Contrast this counter-intuitive concept with the anti-intellectual left-wing mantra “tax cuts for the rich,” which insultingly implies that the rich are the only people conservatives intend to benefit with tax cuts.

Immigration is another issue which liberals frame in “black and white” terms while conservatives wrestle with its moral ambiguity.  Conservatives recognize that illegal immigration is a cultural and economic issue whose ethnic implications are incidental.  If white people with a general tendency to resist assimilation started illegally residing in America, immigration would still be a serious issue to conservatives.  A sure way to undermine American culture would be to introduce a large population of immigrants who are ignorant of, and even hostile to it.  Contrast this argument against illegal immigration with liberal protests, where poster-board advertises inanities such as “no human being is illegal;” as if that breaks the conversation wide open. 

The ideas that conservatives see things in simplistic terms is in part an unfortunate by-product of the fact that liberals tend to be self-styled moral relativists, while conservatives believe in a transcendent moral authority.  Classical conservative dogma states that matters of right and wrong lie on a plane untouched by humanity’s ability to recognize evil.  This is not the extreme moralizing position one might expect.  Even liberals generally agree that crimes such as pederasty are wrong no matter what reasons are invented to excuse them-yet this argument depends on the existence of absolute morality, even if it’s narrowly defined.  Even if one doesn’t agree with my reasoning, it’s obvious that even the most maligned conservative doctrine, absolute morality, is cerebral, and not a dippy general attachment to authority.   

Just as irritatingly condescending is Alterman’s corresponding claim that liberalism is more demanding than conservatism, which if true, would mean liberals are more self-sacrificial.  While it’s undeniable that leftists spend more time picketing and protesting than rightists, is that really a sacrifice?  The unmatched standard for mass protest happened at Woodstock, and it’s difficult to argue that attending a self-congratulatory, drug-fueled concert for days on end is more of a sacrifice than a lively vacation.  Even today’s protests are social events that aren’t exactly inhospitable to its participants.  If marching against the Iraq war was truly a sacrifice, it would have been rare, and not a predictable phenomena on college campuses and outside big party conventions the past seven years.  At its root, activism is simply the combination of belligerence and direction.  It’s not necessarily something to frown upon, but getting yourself arrested for sitting on the white house lawn isn’t nearly as sacrificial as opposing a left-wing monster, communism, by standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.

This begs the question: what exactly is it about liberalism that makes it more demanding?  No one in America is punished by the government for simply being a left-wing activist.  I could stand on a soap box all day and shout anti-conservative speeches through a megaphone and the most I’ll be accused of is disturbing the peace.  Perhaps being on constant vigil for political transgressions, i.e., always being “conscious,” can take a psychological toll on someone, but conservatives have a much clearer case that their political doctrine is more demanding.  

The absolute moral authority so important to conservative thought is just that: absolute.  It makes claims on us whether we like it or not.  For example, in the conservative mind, there are no good reasons to cheat on a spouse.  The fact that not all rightists live up to their professed ideals only speaks to how difficult they can be to uphold.  The liberal theory of moral relativism necessarily dictates that cheating is o.k. in certain circumstances.  Considering mankind’s ability to justify even the worst crimes (Al-Qaeda released videotapes with measured, if ultimately wrong reasons for attacking the United States on 9-11), that’s not anywhere near the vicinity of sacrificial.  Making excuses for stealing (my family needed the food) cheating (my wife ignores me) and lying (Republicans did it first!) is always easier than not doing those things in the first place. 

Perhaps the most glaring example of liberal elitism comes before the table of contents in Why We’re Liberals.  One of the opening quotes in it is from John Stuart Mill, “…stupid people are generally conservative.  I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”  For Christ’s sake.  Everything I’ve written up to this paragraph is unnecessary.  Mill’s arrogant proclamation describes everything conservatives mean by liberal elitism. 

Next week: conclusion-purposeful confusion  

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Elitism, Eric Alterman, why we're liberals
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Via Hot Air: Academics fishing for prejudice planted 22-year old Hailey Woldt, decked out in traditional Muslim clothing, in the middle of Alabama, and came up short.  If hatred if what they’re looking for, perhaps they should don the young woman in a NOBAMA t-shirt and follow her around New York City. 

Sarah Palin has pulled out of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, which can’t help but to diminish the event.  Despite the vapid comments from her immature hecklers, Palin demonstrated a quick mind and a sharp wit when she accepted the vice presidential nomination last year (highlights here).  People forget that soon after that speech, liberals were quivering in their boots over Palin (and McCain was handed his only solid lead over Obama) until her underachieving performance in post-nomination interviews. 

As for her “gaffes,” such as the one about seeing Alaska from her house (why is Seventeen magazine the first apolitical source I could find on this?), anyone can look like a fool if they’re defined by their worst moments.  Imagine if Palin had hit her head on a helicopter doorway, or had almost walked into a window, like Barack Obama has his first month in office.  

This gives me a t-shirt idea: “Sarah Palin is smarter than you.”  Even if it’s not necessarily true, it’s perfect because it attacks liberals where they’re most vulnerable: their sense of superiority. 

A double shot of modern-day mass mania:  A woman appears to have mouthed “I love you Barack” during a Florida town hall meeting today.  At the same Ft. Myers meeting, Julio Osegueda, a 19-year old college student, sycophantically praised Obama, preceding his question with, “It’s such a blessing to see you Mr. President, thank you for taking time out of your day!  Oh, gracious God, thank you so much!”  The Huffington Post’s title for this news item is: “Julio Osegueda, Florida College Student, Rules Obama Town Hall.” (my emphasis)

To a point, I understand where they’re coming from.  I once had a chance encounter with Dinesh D’Souza, one of my favorite conservative authors.  In our short, polite conversation, I flubbed the title to one of his books and barely spit out the thesis of another.  I don’t imagine that left a good impression.  Yet even in my dopey awe, I was able to keep from offering him my girlfriend’s womb.  While a measured amount of heartfelt admiration is appropriate towards whoever inspires you, it’s just part of the human condition, and shouldn’t be praised.  I didn’t “rule” anything when I met D’Souza, and I was far more dignified than the 19-year old pining for the Big Blue O’s attention. 

Shame on The Huffington Post for applauding this blatant subservience.  It’s insulting to the majority of citizens (including Democrats) who have enough self-respect to compose themselves in the presence of authority figures.  And the fact that Julio’s generation is ascending in these troubled times while their weakest moments are encouraged is just creepy.

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Huffington Post, I love you Barack, Julio Osegueda, obama supporters, Sarah Palin
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Some people are famous for being associated with (or related to) already renowned individuals. Kevin Federline comes to mind; so do the modern Kennedys. Others are famous because they’ve worked much, much harder than everyone else. Oprah Winfrey is a great example of this. Then there are those who seem to approach fame like pro wrestlers, launching themselves out of anonymity by starting a feud with an established superstar. What aspiring jobber didn’t want to instantly become the greatest villain of all time by breaking Hulk Hogan in his heyday? On that note, meet Daniel Borchers.

Who the hell is Daniel Borchers? Well, he’s the editor in Chief of Brother Watch, a conservative publication which made its entire November 1997 issue a tribute to Ronald Reagan. He popped up in the left-wing blogs this weekend because Connecticut’s Elections Enforcement Commission is responding to his formal complain that Coulter committed voter fraud. Coulter has been cleared of similar charges in the past.

The story would give me pause if Mr. Borchers hadn’t done something like this before. At the 2002 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he passed around copies of Brother Watch which bashed Coulter. He may have gotten away with it if it hadn’t read like a left-wing throwaway from a college bookstore. In it, he called the prolific author an “acid-tongued-blonde,” and accused her of being animated by an “emotional cauldron of hatred.” He printed that conservatives cannot “tolerate” her hate-mongering, abuse of power, mendacity, etc. In addition to that, he’s called Coulter’s fans “sycophants,” and accused the controversial writer of “dividing families,” as if her bombast was a threat to anyone’s household. I hear he’s currently selling paintings of Coulter with red eyes and a moustache scribbled on her visage.

Like a gambler who recklessly invests tens of thousands of dollars just trying to break even, Borchers has been pursuing a way to bring Coulter down since at least 2002. On CoulterWatch, another one of his websites, Daniel assails Ann about things she wrote in her first book, and even undermines his own overarching case that conservatives should be more civil by calling her “bin Coulter.” Take away his obsessive, extended relationship to Ms. Coulter, and Daniel Borchers is just another aspiring political commentator.

Mr. Borchers calls himself an “old-school conservative,” and much of the archives in BrotherWatch.com attest to this. But I’m an old-school conservative, and nothing in my education tells me that latching on to flimsy charges of plagiarism and defamation has anything to do with the six canons of conservative thought. Conservatives would be wrong to turn a blind eye to unethical behavior in their own ranks, such as former Republican Senator Ted Stevens’ seven felonious violations of federal ethics laws. But there’s a difference between righteous condemnation and Borcher’s self-serving persecution.

Even if he somehow gets his fifteen minutes of hate (or is it two minutes of fame? I always get those mixed up) Borchers might be disappointed to learn that critiquing Coulter from the right doesn’t make him special. If any of his overblown accusations actually stick to Coulter, it likely won’t make Mr. Borchers more important to the general public than he already isn’t. Here’s a list of right-wingers who have criticized Ann Coulter with more substance and class than the left’s favorite traditionalist of the week:

Jonah Goldberg states that Ann Coulter was disloyal and unprofessional after the National Review decided not to run her second column after 9-11.

David Horowitz criticizes Treason, my favorite Coulter book, for being over the top.

Michelle Malkin has never liked Coulter’s occasional “witless” taunts.

Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain all condemned her in one way or another for implying John Edwards was the new f-word at CPAC 2007.

Hugh Hewitt compared Coulter’s 2007 comment with Michael Richard’s intemperate bellowing of the “n-word.”

I think much of Coulter’s last effort, Guilty, is a rehash of Slander.

I’ve never met Daniel Borchers, but I get the impression he’s well-intentioned, but sheltered, and just doesn’t “get” Ann Coulter. She’s a fiery polemicist, so taking her at face value, which Borchers seems to have done, is to misunderstand her from the beginning. Appreciation for sarcasm, which Borchers has not demonstrated online, is a prerequisite for comprehending the post-modern conservative.

Demonstrating the left’s eager accolading of all things anti-conservative, Mother Jones Magazine has called the founder of CoulterWatch subversive. For what? Daring to say bad things about Ms. Coulter from a conservative standpoint? It’s been done (see above). Let’s face it, when a middle-aged man defends himself by noting that the FBI has determined he’s not a threat to a particular woman, desperate, not subversive, is the first word that comes to mind.

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: ann coulter, Coulter Watch, Daniel Borchers
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Ask a Conservative: what do you mean when you say that liberalism is a religion?

When conservatives compare liberalism to religion, we mean it exhibits all the bad things Bill Maher attributes to Christianity and Islam.  We are noting that liberals like spreading their message as if it were the gospel.  We are also sharing the impression that liberals seem to be intolerant of other “faiths.”  The fact that some liberals are thoroughly convinced of the redemptive power of their beliefs doesn’t help the left.  Neither does their cultish devotion to their most charismatic figures.  Especially damning are their unsubtle comparisons of conventional intellectuals with Jesus Christ. 

Despite its obvious implications, liberals don’t understand what the right means when they call liberalism a secular religion.  They instinctively respond that they’re against state-sanctioned religions, and some even protest public displays of religion, such as Christmas manger scenes.   Some liberals are such sticklers to the “separation of church and state” they even consider group prayer at public events an affront to their sensibilities.  Limited to these observations, it seems ridiculous to claim that such an ecclesiophobic ideology could be thought of as a religion. 

But that doesn’t mean liberalism doesn’t come frighteningly close.  Since religion is a comprehensive worldview based on faith and absolutes, the case that liberalism is a religion rests on the three premises.  One, liberal claims are accepted uncritically (“on faith,” so to speak).  Two, liberals practice political absolutism.  Three, the left does not defer to God’s authority, but their own.    

The left’s uncritical embrace of theories that support their worldview is easy to observe.  Many beliefs that liberals consider to be unassailable truths are actually debatable or even discredited.   Anthropogenic global warming is one.  Predictably left-wing editorials in publications such as San Francisco Gate insist that there is no debate about man-made global warming, even though more than a few intelligent experts disagree with it.  The left is even more dogmatic when it comes to victim politics.  Feminists still perpetuate the hoax that Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for violence against women, an alarming and disturbing claim, especially since even organizations committed to ending domestic violence acknowledge that it isn’t true.  This isn’t to say that conservatives don’t have a few myths of their own, but (1) I will argue until from sunrise to sunset that the right’s fringe isn’t mainstream—we reject the Birch Society, while the left embraces moveon.org, and (2), that’s beside the point, which is that liberals take many things on faith. 

The left’s political absolutism is less obvious.  One reason for this is the progressive’s affinity for moral relativism, the philosophy that morality is not universal, but dependent on circumstance.  But while it’s important to contemporary liberal thought, by its very nature relativism cannot possibly supply the moral framework the left uses to condemn its opponents.  Relativism is the voluntary suspension of judgment, and as such cannot possibly serve as the foundation of an ideology which readily proclaims that Dick Cheney/Sarah Palin/generic Republican is “evil.”  Without the recognition of a transcendental moral authority, a moral code that binds all humans across all cultures, the left would simply not be equipped to say that murder, rape, or even bestiality is just wrong.  Within the framework of moral relativism, acts as clearly perverse as interspecies intercourse can only be opposed on grounds whose shallow novelty illustrates the retrogressive potential of sophistry.  As Ann Coulter has pointed out, a relativist’s best argument against bestiality is that animals cannot clearly communicate their consent.  Liberals as a whole are simply not that stupid. 

So despite all their pretensions to the opposite, the left is not immune to political absolutism.  Taken literally, slogans such as “war is never the answer” and “no human being is illegal,” are as universally binding as any biblical verse.  The left’s black and white approach to social justice demonstrates that they haven’t rejected absolutes at all.  The leftist lawyer and commentator Susan Estrich has proclaimed that gay jokes are never funny (ignoring the evidence of many, many funny jokes that integrate homosexual themes).  So obviously liberals do have a standard for universal right and wrong, which as a rule must come from a transcendental authority.  The question is, where does that authority come from?  Who or what is liberalism’s God, so to speak? 

Since opponents of moral authority are so often self-styled intellectuals, intellectual authority seems to be a good guess.  For example, liberals who oppose torture often explain their opposition by claiming that it “doesn’t work,” instead of arguing that it’s inhumane.  Yet despites their professed affections for well-reasoned detachment, liberals aren’t always faithful to reason.  From the communes of early America to the newsrooms of today, anti-intellectual spiritualism has a legacy in the left older than our nation.  Thus, the left is not bound by pure reason.  So again we must ask where does the left found its concepts of right and wrong?

Perhaps it comes from traditional religion, such as Christianity.  But liberals will be the first to tell you they segregate their personal faith from their social policy.  Besides, the only time religion speaks in bald terms of social justice is when people use their politics to dictate the terms of their faith, as westerners are apt to do. 

So barring reason, religion, and tradition, the left must judge right and wrong on a plainly man-made set of ideals.  Surveying the left, one can roughly deduct that their secular ideals include a unrealistic definition of fairness that demands equal representation and status for all groups, an equally dogmatic notion of loyalty (or unity) which views minorities and women who embrace conservative values as apostates, a curious notion of justice in “social justice” which only applies to groups or individuals perceived to be disadvantaged, a loose definition of harm which includes being called “gay,” and finally an equally careless conception of disgust, which seems to be interchangeable with perceived harm.   

Not to sound glib, but liberals derive their complex morality from liberalism, which is another way of saying “themselves.”  If liberals are turning towards themselves or people like themselves for moral guidance, as opposed to God, they have in practice made a religion out of their ideology.  Whether you agree with it or not, this is the abridged case that liberalism is a religion, even though the left doesn’t have official churches, prayer books, or even deities.

 Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: liberalism, religion
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On Wednesday, an alleged reporter was escorted out of the White House after he jumped the rope separating reporters and private guests.  He was trying to obtain President Obama’s autograph, but the Secret Service quickly stopped him.  Apparently the President’s biggest threat really is being patronized to death. 

While some of President Obama’s fans will break the law to get his autograph, others are starting to freak out over his subdued performance.  Never mind that he’s been in office for less than three weeks.  New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is bothered that it took Tom Daschle’s resignation to get Obama to stop mimicking the elitist attitude he lectured Americans about for two years.  Dowd also complains that Obama screwed up by not editing out the parts of the stimulus bill that have the appearance (Just the appearance, ma’am?) of “Democratic drunken-sailor spending.”  Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh thinks the new President’s No. 1 problem is that he’s ceded too much ground to Republicans.  Joan Walsh, Slate’s editor in chief, imagines that Obama is losing the stimulus debate because Republicans have been lying about the economy for thirty years, and the Commander in Chief isn’t being assertive enough to overcome that. 

This swift backlash opens up the possibility that the President may be more of a mascot than a leader.  After all, he was elected for being a charismatic, minority embodiment of liberal clichés.  For example, he echoed the penultimate liberal neophyte’s talking point when he mocked John McCain for supporting “trickle-down” economics.  The liberals who voted for Obama were really voting for themselves, but now that their new toy isn’t performing like it did on the commercials, they’re getting fussy.  This isn’t the first sign that “hope” is fleeting.  Remember how gay activists felt “betrayed” leading up to Obama’s inauguration?

The shine is rubbing off of Barack Obama.  He’s starting to look tentative and dare I say inexperienced.  While he’ll almost certainly navigate his way out of his current slump, perhaps conservatives should feel lucky we’re squaring off against Obama now as opposed to 2016, where he would have potentially had five times the executive seasoning he does now.   

The dire stimulus bill is saturated with billions of dollars which have nothing to do with jump-starting the economy.  The National Review broke it down, and the vast majority of problems with the bill involve programs which simply don’t address the economic crises, and clearly should be debated in a separate bill.  These include $50 million dollars for the NEA, $1 billion for the Census Bureau, and $650 million for digital-TV coupons.  Republicans oppose the stimulus package because it truly is a Democratic wish-list.  How come Maureen Dowd seems to be the only Obama supporter who understands this? 

The abundance of wasteful spending at a time the United States should be watching its wallet is less aggravating that the impression that Democrats don’t care.  They aren’t even pretending to be the party of fiscal discipline anymore.  The aforementioned Michael Hirsh glibly excuses the stimulus bill’s manifest flaws by writing: “There’s no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles.”  Why isn’t he concerned about abuse?  What about cynical attempts to package pork in an “emergency bill?”  Asking Americans to pay $6 billion on building projects in the guise of emergency legislation is like ordering a pizza after dispatch takes your 911 call.  It’s selfish and immature and should be exposed as such.  

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Obama, obama supporters, stimulus
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