Once again, the Left’s attack dogs in media and entertainment continues their campaign against female conservatives (and women in general) by substituting misogynistic schoolyard name calling for reasoned debate and skipping genuine criticism for the sake of elitist, nitpicking faux outrage over verbal gaffes.
In response to the messiness of recent misogynist ad hominems against Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and others by an illustrious line up of reasoned, critical political scholars that include second rate comedians and fifth rate nearly unemployable wannabe journalists (Bill Maher, George Lopez, and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, leading Conservatives miss the big picture.
Many Conservatives are baffled by what has become known as Palin Derangement; a bizarre fixation by the Left on all things female and Conservative. many cannot grasp the reason that intelligent, beautiful, Conservative women fill the Left with dread.
In their columns for Fox News.com writers Penny Young Nance and Angela Tantaros offer the usual Conservative talking points — a mixture of bewilderment, genuine insight, and evasive sidestepping of the main issue. Read the rest of this entry »
It is likely that most persons have lost interest in the madness that is the government vs. taxpayer melt down in the state of Wisconsin. As well they should have, it had become nauseating.
The sheer lunacy of State (or federal) employees contriving a self serving, phony, yet epic battle of good vs. evil so as to grab or hold on to handouts, kickbacks, or extorted wealth has become so commonplace throughout the country it had ceased to have much immediate relevance.
This coming from a blog written out of Albany, NY — a state capital that is the gilded perfection of the government employee’s entitlement mentality.
When public employees (read that: government workers) bicker, barter, blackmail, or ball out their own “employer”, the state (or the fed), an ’employer’ that is ostensibly a collection of fellow workers since the actual employers are the tax payers it is, however, always troublesome.
The Wisconsin Meltdown, a nightmare one could not have conceived of pre Tea Party, is of course a trial balloon with national import.
It was worth the effort then to keep eyes and ears attuned just in case things heated up, if they took on new dimensions and, most crucially, if any truth actually seeped out between the soundbites and faux outrage.
Such truth has seeped out of the mouths of the self entitled bastards in Wisconsin’s largest State employees union.
In the wake of today’s horrendous attack which killed a Federal Judge, a nine year old child, and has left a question mark over the life of a Congresswoman from our home state of Arizona, Hadenough.us hopes for and calls for a still quiet on the home front of ideological rhetoric. For so long now an ominous trend towards hostility and (implied) threats has prevailed in our nation’s political and ethical public discussion.
Did I miss the memos from the White House and Congressional Quarterly in which Democrats admitted that their philosophical Emperor of progressive taxation has no clothes? Did Christianity’s Holy See forget to send out their letter of resignation in the last issue of Guidepost? How could there have been a second Renaissance and yet the Enlightened New York Times fails to report it? Have the alleged defenders of values — Progressives and Religionists — not heard that their preachers and prophets have admitted defeat, have admitted they’ve been promoting a mirage, and have acknowledged that their agenda is dead? Read the rest of this entry »
As this is being written, a partial revolution is happening in American politics. A once in a lifetime, clearcut repudiation of a party’s agenda occurred in the midterm 2010 elections. I say partial, not because there were not enough House wins for Republicans to provide a mandate undoing the Obama – Pelosi – Reid “hope and change” trifecta; not because the Senate remains in Democratic control, offering our Republic a gridlocked Congress; certainly not because spot light Tea Party candidates failed to win key races. It is a partial revolution because the message that was sent to Washington, to the “mainstream” (and thus clueless) media, and the two main parties has apparently not been heard, if the reactions of the media, the pundits, and the parties are any indication. Read the rest of this entry »
In 1967, Professor Arthur A. Ekirch (1915-2000), announced that the American Left was on life support with his publication of The Decline of American Liberalism. In “Decline..”, Professor Ekirch, himself a Liberal, described the chaos and inconsistencies within the framework and the philosophy of American Liberalism, yet he offered no explanations and no solutions which might save the Left. I would like, in the wake of N.P.R.’s firing of Juan Williams, to say that there were and are no solutions, and to announce that as a political force and as ethical and philosophical theory, American Liberalism (and its underpinning, Progressivism) is no longer in decline. The plug has been pulled on the patient by the Left’s friends. Liberalism is dead. Read the rest of this entry »
We, The American Tea Party Movement – the Republic’s defenders against injustice, tyranny, and Statism, have had enough. We are ending this phony dialogue on motivations and our identity. We have allowed a year of unwarranted and unprovable attacks on our character, our identity, and our motivations to go unanswered in the vain expectation that our opposition would be rational enough to see that schoolyard taunts are not the same thing as intellectual argument. We expected our opposition to act in their own interest and cease the nonsense when it became apparent to them that no one was buying what they were selling. We assumed that our silence would be understood. On that, we were mistaken. As a result of the NAACP’s ridiculous “vote” on our character and their demand that we apologize for each and every individual within our movement who might hold racist thoughts or opinions, we have been forced to respond.
Our response is this: We are school teachers, firefighters, shopkeepers, elected officials, homemakers, retirees, students, bankers; we are police, business leaders, husbands, wives, small town merchants. We are the voice of every American who believes that his life is his own, and that his neighbor is not responsible for or entitled to either his failures or his successes. We are the voice of every American who believes that he answers to the dictate of his own conscience, not to the demands of the barrel of a gun. It matters not whether that gun is held by the hands of a street thug, or a thug in Washington, our response is the same, a gun is not an argument.
We have been stoic in the face of the intellectual equivalent of the barrel of a gun as an argument. Namely, unprovable smears that racism is the motivation for our opposition to the “fundamental transformation” of America. The fact that this transformation is coming via the hands of a black president does not change the fact that it is a transformation into Statism, which we abhor. We do not care that the vessel for that transformation is a black president, we oppose the change, not the man.
As to the man, we do not withdraw our recognition that he is a radical, regardless of his race. We do not withdraw our assertion that his past and current associations with radicals matter, and should not be ignored, regardless of his race. We do not withdraw our acknowledgment of his accomplishments or his achievements, regardless of his race. We do not believe race and identity are equivalent, though many of our opponents do.
As to our identity, we define it, we do not allow the Alinsky method to define it for us. To that end, it is interesting that we have been painted as ignorant and incompetent on one day, and well coordinated astro-turf the next. It is interesting that we have been portrayed as violent extremists one one day, and passive social security recipients the next. It is interesting that those who comment on our motivations frequently surmise that we must be unemployed layabouts while we are actively opposing policy that would make such a life untenable. It is utterly fascinating that our opponents are unable to use reason and logic. Finally, it is beyond comprehension that they have not yet figured out who we are.
We are the voice of reason in an irrational world, and we will not be silenced or muted into submission by accepting an unearned guilt. We are the choir which is the combined voices of America.
For those who have demanded that we repudiate or apologize for the small fraction of racists who may believe that they are tea party members or that they hold our values,; for those of you who demand that we do the logically impossible and, by default, prove our lack of racism – we say: are you serious? We can not, of course, prove a negative, except by implication. So we call out those who believe without evidence that we are motivated to oppose the radical that has inherited the sixty plus year old Progressive agenda at the peak of that agenda’s success, because that President happens to be black. We will be happy to engage on the merits of that argument, and on the merits of our ideas for the future of our Republic. We will not, however, continue the absurd distraction that is identity politics. We are too busy and have too much to do to engage in such nonsensical distractions.
We are too busy transforming America back to the vision our founders had for her to distract ourselves by engaging with those who wish to alter our identity in the minds of our fellow citizens, when those citizens have not yet met us face to face.
I respect and admire the professed goals of Conservative or Libertarian leaning sites. Certainly this is the case with NewsReal, at least as reflected in their mission statement, as it shows a respect for ideas and an understanding of their importance. I only wish that that much understanding and respect was reflected in the actual analysis and reporting. We are all engaged in the battle for man’s mind, and we all are fighting for the recognition of man’s right and his need to use it. When political writers are so concrete bound that they are unable or unwilling to see the implications of evading central points or completely miss the most crucial intellectual issues underneath the material they are looking at, those writers are not helping the cause, they are standing in its way or harming it. One cannot fight a battle if one does not know the stakes, the enemy, or the means to fight it.
It has become a near cultural myth that in the battle trenches of WW1, soldiers found that if three of them took turns lighting a cigarette on the same match (commodities such as matches were conserved due to short supply) , that there was enough time and light for the enemy to hone in on their target. Hence the superstition regarding using the same match for more than two smokers at once. In much the same way, when one reads three articles out of three from the same source, and those articles provide little analysis that is appropriate to the subject matter, yet much in the way of hyperbole and standard talking points, it is a sure bet that it would not be likely that one would derive much benefit by sticking around while the enemy, who ought to be easy to disarm, takes easy shots at the straw men those writers created in attempts at avoiding making philosophical arguments.
As an illustration of my point, in Ron Radosh’s five paragraph letter of July 17, 2010, ostensibly written to discuss the threat of Islamafascism, he spends four of them worrying about a concrete; the wishiwashiness of other Conservatives when it comes to prosecuting the war and the threat such fence sitting creates for Republicans in future elections. Seriously? Where is the discussion of the nature of religious thinking, and the mystic and statist view of reality and man, which by definition must be held by those who approach to politics via religious fundamentalism? What about the refusal of our government to assert its right to self defense? Why not face head on the specific views within Islam that lead to direct attacks on freedom and, ultimately, enslavement? Electoral concerns are treated as the most crucial thing in a letter that begins by showing sincere concern about “the very real threat posed by radical Islam” as well as worries about conservatives who “either ignore or deny that such a threat exists, or believe that it is not a dire one, and that we can pursue a modern policy that comes close to appeasement”.
If Conservatives continue in this vein and evade the crucial issues, not only are we guilty of appeasement, but we will be surrendering any claim we would have as defenders of Americanism and America. All this in a piece which announces that it will offer a way to avoid “the flight of the Conservatives” following the flight of the intellectuals. If this be the nature of today’s Conservatives, it is appropriate that intellectuals fled already.
Greg Victor’s post on July 17, 2010 ought to have charged headlong into the most pertinent criticisms possible about the nature of rap and it’s effect on those who are it’s intended targets. It could have looked at the nature of the artists who create such trash; how they show disdain for the interests of their minotity fans by presenting such horrendous attitudes in regards to women, education, responsibility, and family and the role these things play in black success. It could have decried the de-volution of the music; an art which once celebrated black individualism and creativity and placed upon an alter the notion of success in the face of adversity. Instead of focusing directly on the major complaints which black men and women themselves have about rap; that it is the modern equivalent of a minstrel show and that it reinforces the worst racial assumptions of its target and largest audience – 15-25 year old suburban white males, Victor assumes it will be far more effective in the quest to promote conservative values to take pot shots at the intellectual vigor (or lack of it)of two bit artists and their non-abandonment of a black president.
If this is the state of cultural analysis in America, it is no surprise that our culture has gotten to such a state.
Finally, in David Catron’s work on the appointment of President Obama’s “health care” czar, who is an advocate for rationing, there is no mention of the rights of the doctor to practice medicine with his mind free from coercion, no mention of the danger presented to patients by doctors willing to work under such a system, and not a hint of criticism of the prior crown jewels of socialized medicine, Medicare and Medicaid, which most Republicans and Democrats support. Despite their failure to perform, their outrageous costs, and the implied premise smuggled into the programs – that we as individuals owe another human being health care simply because they don’t have any, Conservatives remain fans of Johnson and Roosevelt’s little children. Medicare and Medicaid (as well as Social Security) are still that pesky third rail, even for the alleged defenders of Capitalism and individualism. In a third showing in three articles, the ability or willingness of the writers to “say something original that isn’t just conservative boilerplate”; consists of avoiding the mere mention of the methods by which Conservatives could fight socialized medicine, if they genuinely desired to, and the writer focuses instead on a range of the moment weak jab against rationing and a backhanded slap at Barack Obama. If we Libertarians and Conservatives fight against Obamapelosi care in this manner, we deserve to have our healthcare rationed.
That would be three on that one match of fellow conservatives and libertarians. As an atheist, I hold no superstitions, but as committed to reason as I am, I understand that this will most likely earn the ire of potential allies, but with friends of liberty such as these, or at least with the non-message message these friends bring to the table, who needs liberals?
As a closing point, in emphasis of the three articles above, I offer three quotes by America’s philosopher.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
“Slavery is freedom. Colorblindness is racism. Smears are political arguments. Thugs are freedom fighters”. Orwellian projection regarding our descent into a statist utopia is a bit trite and obvious. Media narratives regarding the “racism” of the Right have become more so. Conservatives, Libertarians, and sundry Tea Partiers now dive into the muddied waters of the Left’s latest game of “marginalize political opponents with invective and secret coding.” Ominous foreboding for the November elections.
Hadenough US 