Is 'electability' everything?

The quality of the attacks on Ron Paul has not been impressive so far and has been deteriorating, with some rather over-the-top rants.


And the vehemence with which some people oppose Ron Paul is a little bewildering: if the critics think Paul is a 'kook' as some of the less imaginative call him, or 'your crazy old uncle who lives in the attic' as some other critic ungraciously called him (and these are 'conservatives' speaking, by the way) then why are they so upset over his candidacy and his ideas? If he is a fringe figure who has a slim chance of being elected, or even nominated, why waste any time denouncing him? Just ignore him as the irrelevancy he is.

However it seems that many 'conservatives' or Republicans, most especially the devoted party types, are worried that Paul's candidacy may siphon off a few votes from their fave candidates, and given that Giuliani and Romney and the fast-fading McCain need whatever support they can glean, since they are generating only lukewarm support, I suppose it makes sense for some people to try to discredit Ron Paul. Or maybe they are irritated by his candidacy because they realize that someone who actually supports conservative principles will draw attention to their candidates' conspicuous lack of conservative credibility.

Or maybe they are rationalizing their own unfaithfulness to any semblance of conservative principles.

I can't guess what motivates John Derbyshire's piece
That Old-Time Religion
which is somewhat fair to Ron Paul, but in the end, dismissive of him.

Nits aside, the broad outlook there is conservative in a way we don’t often see from a presidential candidate. It is, in fact, conservatism of exceptional purity. Reading through those policy positions, an American conservative can hear the mystic chords of memory sounding in the distance, and hear the call of ancestral voices wafted on the breeze: Hayek, von Mises, Rothbart, Nock, Kirk, John Chamberlain... Unlike the product in that automobile commercial, this is your father’s conservatism — the Old-Time Religion. What is there among Ron Paul’s policy prescriptions that the young William F. Buckley would have disagreed with?

So why aren’t we all piling into the wagon behind Dr. Ron? It’s not that the guy is personally unacceptable in any way. A pious family man, he has worked in an honorable profession — Ob/Gyn medical practice — all his life. (Paul has the slight political advantage of having brought several hundred of his constituents into the world.) He is personally charming and likeable. If not exactly eloquent in the florid, gassy manner American voters are used to from their politicians, he speaks clearly and well, keeps his wits about him, minds his temper, and holds his own in debate. With the positions he has, it’s easy to see why he’s not ahead with the media or the polls, but why isn’t he leading the pack among conservatives?
[...]
If Washington, D.C. were the drowsy southern town that Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge rode into, Ron Paul would have a chance. Washington’s not like that nowadays, though. It is a vast megalopolis, every nook and cranny stuffed with lobbyists, lawyers, and a hundred thousand species of tax-eater.
[...]
On the whole, though, we have settled in with this system. We are used to it. It’s not going away, absent a revolution; and conservatives are — duh! — not, by temperament, revolutionaries.

Imagine, for example, President Ron II trying to push his bill to abolish the IRS through Congress. Congress! — whose members eat, drink, breathe and live for the wrinkles they can add to the tax code on behalf of their favored interest groups! Or imagine him trying to kick the U.N. parasites out of our country. Think of the howls of outrage on behalf of suffering humanity from all the lefty academics, MSM bleeding hearts, love-the-world flower children, Eleanor Roosevelt worshippers, and bureaucratic globalizers!

Ain’t gonna happen. It was, after all, a conservative who said that politics is the art of the possible. Ron Paul is not possible. His candidacy belongs to the realm of dreams, not practical politics. But, oh, what sweet dreams!''

Derbyshire acknowledges that some conservatives will be attracted to the conservative policies Paul stands for, but he then dismisses those principles as unrealistic, unattainable, and hence a chimera, a distraction.

This line of argument sounds strangely familiar; we've been here before. The example that comes most readily to my mind is the recall election of 2003, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was running against Republican -- and conservative -- Tom McClintock.

Ironically, in this op-ed piece which appeared at NRO during that campaign, the NRO editorial supported McClintock:

We know that McClintock is currently behind Schwarzenegger in the polls. But we also know that if elected, McClintock would fight the spenders and taxers in Sacramento. About Arnold Schwarzenegger we know no such thing.''

The op-ed writers were correct; Schwarzenegger has proven to be a disappointment to conservatives since taking office.

But the arguments against McClintock, solid conservative that he was, ran something along the lines of this:

For starters, Democrats know McClintock cannot win. They know that he has ran [sic] for statewide office twice before and lost both times. McClintock’s problem is not so much that he’s unknown but that Californians know about him and have rejected his candidacy time and again. Knowing this, a Democrat plot to boost McClintock’s candidacy at Schwarzenegger’s expense has already surfaced.''

And the reason McClintock was declared unelectable? He was 'too conservative', said Schwarzenegger's minions and the usual party hacks.

I don't live in California, hence I had no direct stake in that election, but I spent many an hour arguing online with Republicans on forums who kept arguing that McClintock should drop out and let Schwarzenegger have a clear field; after all, we all knew, said they, that a 'right-wing' type like McClintock was a loser. ''You don't know California; no right-winger can win. Schwarzenegger is the best we can get here. McClintock is a purist, he's too conservative, he'll lose. We need a moderate, somebody who is electable.'' So they got their wish: Schwarzenegger was elected. What's the old saying. be careful what you wish for?

This argument, that McClintock was unelectable, was the most respectable argument against the 'too-conservative, too-purist' McClintock; the less intelligent critics made constant cruel remarks about his slight strabismus, and ridiculed his appearance, much as some of Paul's more dimwitted opponents resort to cheap shots about his age or his haircut.

But it seems to me that Derbyshire is resorting to those old arguments about how being too conservative is political poison. How many times have I heard the 'pragmatists' drag out that quote from Bismarck about politics being ''the art of the possible"? In other words, we can only ever hope to elect candidates who hew to the accepted party line or who don't rock the boat too much, because to support principled men (or women) dooms us to unelectability and political oblivion. Ultimately the message underlying this mindset is that we are doomed to the status quo, however corrupt or pedestrian or hopeless or unacceptable that status quo is. The status quo, the presently accepted order of things, or some slight variant thereof, is all that is 'possible', and we are doomed to the 'possible', to more of the same, in other words.

Thanks but no thanks.

At some point, this mindset becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we decree that anybody who is radical enough to try to remind us of the Founding Fathers' principles, or even the principles of a half-century ago, is 'unelectable' because he is quixotic or a dreamer or a wacko or a kook or a 'reactionary' or a purist or unelectable. I wonder how many people back in the 18th century said the same things about our Founding Fathers? It seems that a substantial percentage of people in that era were not in favor of our independence from Britain; no doubt they thought the Founding Fathers were extremists or 'fringe' elements. Most people prefer the 'devil they know', the status quo; no matter how unacceptable things are, we are used to them, and few people like real change; it's disruptive and it's frightening for many people. And it's especially frightening to those who have a vested interest in keeping things just as they are, for example, party functionaries and people who are insiders in the existing political structures. Or media people.

But if we continue to insist that only people who hew to the existing party line are 'electable' then we guarantee that only such people will ever be nominated and elected. How can we declare in advance that a certain candidate is unelectable? Why even have elections if we know in advance who can or cannot be elected? Let's just poll the party members and media elites and let them tell us who we want. That seems to be what our system amounts to, if these people can tell us in advance who we will or won't vote for.

The only way we can know who the people will choose or won't choose is to let them choose, and let them do so in the voting booth.

If I had my way, we'd stop running so many polls which tell us every other day who and what we want. Polls are intended to influence opinion and shape it as much as to check and report public opinion.

As others have said, the only polls that matter -- or should matter -- are the ones on election day, when we cast our ballots.

But the idea that conservatism cannot do anything but rubber-stamp and preserve the liberal status quo is to make conservatism merely a useless philosophy that does little but try feebly to slow down liberal change, and preserve yesterday's radical left innovations.

And Derbyshire's argument that we couldn't, say, throw out the U.N. because of the predictable howls of protest from the left means essentially that we can't do anything that upsets the left and provokes one of their frequent tantrums. If that is true, we are really and truly done for as a country; reversing some of the harm done by leftists is essential if this Republic is to survive, and we have been far too cowed by the left's hissy fits for too long. Let them howl like spoiled children; they've been allowed to blackmail us by means of their emotional abuse and the result is the chaotic society we live in today.

And the oft-repeated cliche that you can't turn the clock back -- who decreed that? I turn my clock back every fall, when we go back to standard time. I turn my clock back when I travel west across time zones. The idea that once liberals have done something it can never be undone is absurd.

We can nominate an 'electable' Republican who is no conservative, and 'win' as a party, but if conservatism loses, and we elect more of the same failed policies, the Republic loses. What do the fortunes of the party matter, if our country goes down? What have we 'won' if we get another open borders, globalist, big business, interventionist, disconnected elitist?

There's something to be said for daring, and stepping out of line, away from the failed status quo, and trying something different -- or, going back to the tried and true which did work for us for centuries. We know the status quo does not work. Doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result is madness, so the saying goes.

''If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.'' - Russell Kirk

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” - C. S. Lewis

Blogs for Borders Video Blogburst 07/31/07

From Jake Jacobsen at Freedom Folks:

This week's burst tells the story of Terry Funderburk, an American citizen nearly driven out of his profession by illegal aliens. His one man protest is a fairly good working definition of irony!

And of course the 100% Preventables!



Read Terry's original story here, follow up here. A follow up letter from Terry is here.

Technorati Tags: illegal immigration, invasion, terry funderburk, south carolina, murder, mexico, charles derrington, nashville, drunk driving, new haven, ramos and compean,

'Forbidden thoughts'

Almost Forbidden Thoughts
Clyde N. Wilson, Chronicles

“Without censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way. ”
—Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Address

We all know that there are truths that are almost never stated publicly in the U.S.—truths that media, politicians, and “intelligentsia” pretend do not exist. Astute observers, Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn among others, have noted that in “American democracy” public discourse tends to group-think and is neglectful or hostile to ideas lacking group-think respectability.

Some of these truths are things that absolutely everybody knows but may not be mentioned without penalty. Others have been so long buried under complacent or expedient denial that much effort is required to discern them.

Here are a few of my almost forbidden thoughts. Doubtless you will have some of your own.''

The first of Wilson's 'almost forbidden thoughts is this one:

Heredity has as much or more control over our individual fates as environment; i.e., intelligent children tend to come from intelligent parents.''

I agree with that thought, and it is amazing how unacceptable that thought is to most people, regardless of their political leanings. Many conservatives, or should I say 'conservatives' visibly chafe at the introduction of that idea into a conversation.

Why, I wonder? Because, possibly, egalitarianism is such a pervasive idea, accepted by many who consider themselves conservative as well as liberals. And to hint that intelligence may have a large hereditary or genetic component makes many people uncomfortable. I notice that a couple of the comments following Wilson's piece call this idea into question, because they see, implicit in Wilson's simple statement, an apologia for eugenics. I think that may be a twisting of what he has said, and a conclusion that is not warranted. He does not say that unintelligent people ought not to reproduce or that intelligent ones should have more children. He does not say that society should create incentives for intelligent people to have children or disincentives for the unintelligent. He simply says that heredity may be a large factor in intelligence.

I think it's an important idea because if it were ever to be accepted as true, it would largely discredit many of our educational policies, for instance, programs such as 'No Child Left Behind', the Bush-Kennedy effort at closing the so-called 'achievement gap.' Only the belief in the blank slate theory of child development and intelligence justifies efforts like this rather unsuccessful policy. And as long as people avoid facing the reality that children are not blank slates with equal potential from the git-go, we will be throwing good money after bad, trying to close the 'achievement gap.'

There is evidence of hereditary differences in IQ.
But because this is an idea that conflicts with our egalitarian ideology, the facts have to be buried, explained away, or discredited. So on and on we go, in a vain attempt to 'level the playing field.' As long as we deny facts and statistical evidence, we are doomed to repeat the same failed policies again and again. And what does the myth of the blank slate and equal potential do to race relations? It perpetuates anger and frustration and endless accusations of 'racism.' After all, if there are no heredity-based group differences in intelligence, then the 'achievement gap' must be the result of discrimination and 'racism', or malice on the part of the majority. And the racism implication also provides a built-in excuse for the achievement gap.

One of Wilson's other 'forbidden thoughts' had to do with the racial aspect of crime, to which a commenter takes exception, although not convincingly. However as another commenter notes in that thread, the exception taken by one commenter simply corroborates Wilson's description of the ideas as 'forbidden', since forbidden ideas will elicit exactly that kind of gainsaying response.

I agree to some extent with the truth of most of Wilson's 'forbidden thoughts', although I can't speak to the question of how corrupt the state of Massachusetts is.

I agree with him that Lincoln is not the saintly figure that popular history makes him out to be, but given my Southron roots, it's unlikely I would see Lincoln as a hero.

If I might add any forbidden thoughts of my own, I would repeat some of the 'forbidden thoughts' I have expressed so often here: like this thought: immigration, regardless of whether legal or illegal, has not been an unmixed blessing for America. In many cases it has not been a blessing at all, but a curse.

America is not a nation of immigrants.

The Statue of Liberty is not an advertisement for Open Borders.

Emma Lazarus's amateurish poetry on the Statue is not gospel, and it has no force of authority.
'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...' was not part of our Founding documents or ideals; it was no more than the overwrought ramblings of one woman.

And here's a forbidden thought: 'wretched refuse' means... what? In modern colloquial English? Do the open borders cultists really want to call immigrants that?

Another forbidden thought: Ellis Island is not a holy shrine, and those who passed through it are not some kind of saints to whom the rest of us must make obeisance.

Legal immigration is not good in and of itself; it is good only in limited numbers, and as long as the immigrants themselves are people who can adapt and fit into our existing country, and contribute thereto.

Continual population growth is not a desirable thing for our country.

Our country will not become depopulated without constant immigration.

Concern for the environment is or should be a conservative principle.

Concern for overpopulation is NOT a leftist idea that should be scoffed at by 'conservatives.'

Our economy does NOT rely on immigrants, legal or illegal.

Immigrants did NOT build America.
Slaves, likewise, did not build America.

'Hard work' is not the only qualification for would-be immigrants. The world is full of 'hard-working people.' They are not all entitled to come here because they are 'hard-working.'

Mexicans are not starving.

Illegals are not 'forced' to come here.

Latinos or Hispanics are not necessarily 'hard workers', regardless of the positive stereotypes.
(How do I know this? Take a look at Latin America, or at your local colonia or barrio. I rest my case.)

Latinos or Hispanics are not necessarily 'devout Christians' with good 'family values.' That hype probably was hatched by the RNC, or La Raza, or both, working in collusion.
Stereotypes are stereotypes, and flattering stereotypes like the above are just as overgeneralized as negative stereotypes sometimes are.

Making up flattering falsehoods about races or ethnicities is dishonest, regardless of the 'good intentions' supposedly behind the flattery. A lie is a lie is a lie. Telling a lie often enough will not make it so, no matter how benevolent the intention is.

Many of the politically correct, multicultural and diverse commercials and movies and TV shows are lies, based on some kind of fantasy world bearing no resemblance to the actual world.

Stereotypes, although overgeneralized in some cases, generally reflect reality, to some extent. Stereotypes are often substantially true.

And here's one: if secession was wrong and if it constituted 'treason' then how do we justify the Revolution against British authority? If it was right to forcibly drag the South back into the Union, would the British not have the right to drag the American colonies back under the rule of the British Crown?

I could go on, but that's my list of forbidden thoughts.
Any contributions from my readers?

Fluff and nonsense

Our cotton-candy-fluffy-bunny news

...To confirm the permanence of our society's deterioration, news of Lindsay Lohan, as well as the meltdown of Britney Spears, spread across TV screens Thursday and Friday like a bad virus on your computer. Yet these are these stories Americans want. We clamor for news about our favorite celebrities. Does she trim her nails herself? Did he have a weekend fling on the beach? Will they get married, or just continue living together for the next 12 years?

Why are we so shallow?''

Are we so shallow?
I've blogged about the issue addressed in this article before: our junk-food news, or as Jonathan Krive calls it, our cotton candy news.

I question whether we are fed this stuff because of public demand, or because for whatever reason, our media elites want to feed us this non-nourishing, empty-calories substitute for real news of importance.

There are elements of both aspects: if people are demanding this non-nutritive filler as their 'news'-- and I suspect a certain segment of the public does prefer it -- it is because of decades of dumbing-down, in our media and in our school system and our popular culture generally.

Still, I encounter plenty of people, not overly educated or highbrow people, high-school educated, not hard news junkies, who express disgust at the surfeit of the 'bimbo' stories. Outside of Lohan's fanboys and fangirlies, I think many people wonder why the news channels waste so much airtime on Lohan's misbehavior. It is not just overeducated, ultra-serious people who are disgusted with the cotton-candy, bimbo-oriented 'news' on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. It is average people too who are sick of the fluff and nonsense that fills our news channels and those supermarket magazines.

However it is probably true that the younger generations in particular, having grown up in a trivia-driven, celebrity-fawning culture, are more accepting of it. And these younger generations have, not coincidentally, grown up with an educational system that neglects the basics and focuses on making kids 'feel good about themselves'. There is also an overemphasis on Politically Correct ideology at the expense of teaching young people about their own heritage and culture. I've heard from some of them that they spent more time in school learning about (probably apocryphal) African kingdoms than about the founding of our country, or about the English traditions from which our unique American system derives.

How can young people take an interest in the actual news of what is going on around the world, and hope to decipher it, without a grounding in history and political science and geography?

Krive, in the linked article, quotes from Joseph Farah's piece on 'The dumbing down of America.'

In that piece, Farah quotes questions from an eighth grade exam from the year 1895.
For example, these questions on American History:

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?''

Now I, despite having had a good solid education back in the olden days, might have to struggle a little on some of those questions, but I wonder how many could answer more than one or two nowadays?

Back in the era in which that test was written, an eighth-grade education was all that many Americans would have; they had a graduation ceremony at the end of the eighth grade school year, and received certificates, following which many of them would proceed to some kind of apprenticeship in a trade or livelihood of some sort; only the more academically talented would go on to high school, and even fewer of those on to college. That was perhaps a better system. It's often been said that an eighth-grade education then was better than today's high school education. Nowadays, even the high school education has been woefully dumbed down, so as to allow as many as possible to 'graduate', and then go on to college, where they are really out of their depth -- despite the fact that college, too, is watered down and geared to the lowest common denominator.

Even when I attended college in the 70s, my counselor, in helping me put together my class schedule, commented that few students were choosing a classical education, with basic courses like World History, English literature, and so on; most seemed to be choosing psychology and sociology and 'relevant' courses like Minority History and Women's History. Once the old core requirements were dropped and dumbed down and the politically correct pabulum offered, most students opted out of the basics and chose the fluff. Nowadays we read of classes having to do with the 'gay experience' and pornography, as well as the frivolous courses on popular culture, which is, after all, ephemeral.

The goal these days seems to be to grind out as many 'graduates' as possible, rather than to truly educate and enlighten the majority of students, or to fully develop the talents of the more able. And the goal is also to make students 'feel good about themselves' by forcing some kind of pretended 'equality' among people, with the mediocre student and the laggard not made to feel inferior by some inconsiderate prodigy.

So whose interest does it serve to make people more shallow and ignorant, or to focus their attention on the antics of drug-addled 'celebrities'? Are we fed this stuff because the media elites truly think it is newsworthy? Is it simply eye-candy, because people want to look at 'beautiful people' like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan? Or is it meant to distract us from the real, behind-the-scenes, world-changing events? Is it just a sideshow to keep us occupied and to further dumb us down?

Or is it merely another side-effect of the feminizing of our society? It does seem that many women are more focused on the doings of other women, the clothes they wear, the hairstyles, the plastic surgery, their private lives, who they sleep with and/or marry, and so on? I'm a female and I know that not all women are into this gossip as news thing, but a good percentage of them are.

Just look at the TV channels which are 'women's channels': the Lifetime Movie channel, which specializes in soap-operaesque movies about domestic abuse, troubled romances, and so on, and the Oxygen network, which takes a relentlessly PC, 'you-go-girl' look at the world, with focus on 'women's problems': relationships, fashion, sex, body image.

Back in the 1970s, in the era in which feminism was commanding so much attention, Irish writer Desmond Fennell
wrote a piece which asked an interesting question. I cannot locate anything of the piece online, and I no longer have it, but his question was essentially 'why do feminists act as if woman has no soul?' The question was in response to the new 'feminist' talk shows which were all the rage then: there were many such talk shows, hosted by some earnest feminist, interviewing other women of course, on subjects of interest to women. Fennell, if I am recalling correctly, pointed out that the women never discussed deep spiritual or philosophical questions, but only things like women's health, relationships, body image, and feminist politics and letters. They seldom seemed to deal with the wider, more inclusive world. The same gynocentric concerns are served up by Oprah and her ilk today. Fennell pointed out that the feminists criticized the 'misogynistic' prejudices of early theologians who questioned whether 'women had no souls' -- and yet the feminists themselves seemed to corroborate that opinion by dwelling only on parochial female concerns, mostly of a fleshly nature. That same observation can be made today.

But I stop short of blaming only my fellow females for this phenomenon of junk news. Maybe the reasons for this trend include a little of all of the above.

So what, if anything, can we do about it, if we don't like it? The usual answer is 'just turn the TV off', which may not be bad advice, but even those of us who turn off, tune out, and drop into the real world instead of the TV world, still have to deal with the reality which is fed and fostered by the trashy content of the media. And if we have children, those children are affected by the unfortunate trends, unless we truly do drop out and homeschool them and isolate them from the worst excesses of junk culture.

But my concern is the dire state of our country, and of the West in general, and the fact that the cotton candy news is acting to dull people's awareness, to merely keep them entertained and distracted. The junk news is empty calories, taking the place of necessary mental nourishment.

Ultimately this junk news diet will be deadly to our Republic, producing, as it does, dulled and disconnected citizens who lack information or critical thinking skills to make responsible decisions about our future.

Does it help to write to the networks or other news media and make your concerns known? Or will they respond once they lose sufficent viewers and readers? We read every day about how the dead-tree media, the old print newspapers, are losing readers at an alarming rate. Has this changed how they do business? I see no evidence of that yet. And with cable TV, news channels are not subject to the same pressures as newspapers, considering that cable channels are carried as part of a package, so that the channels with a tiny viewership are not eliminated from the lineup.

The only hopeful sign I can point to is that people are slowly getting disenchanted and downright fed up with their TV news and newspapers, and many are looking elsewhere, as on the internet. And now the blogosphere is an alternate source for news and especially opinion and analysis not allowed by the narrow standards of the controlled media.

I can only hope that the TV news media and the dead tree media will become increasingly irrelevant and obsolete, and that people will turn to sources which treat them as sentient, thinking human beings and not as dull-witted units of consumption.

America, our house divided, Part III

As Rick Darby put it the other day, on his Reflecting Light blog,
New Haven secedes from the Union

New Haven, Connecticut might in fact be said to have seceded, like all other such cities who decide to officially flout our existing laws on immigration. In the article linked and excerpted below, the arrogance and defiance of the Mayor, John DeStefano, Jr., and a number of other 'diverse' scofflaw residents, is on parade for all America to see:


Immigrants, Supporters Pour in For ID

...Visitors signing up for the city’s new Elm City Residency Card passed through a gauntlet of protesters on the way into City Hall. The line included undocumented Mexican immigrants, like Jaime Rojas and (pictured with Ruby Diaz), who saw the card as an “opportunity” for a safer life.

Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. commended undocumented immigrants for their “courage” in enduring the suburban hecklers on their way in. “Tell me who represents the best of America — who’s outside or who’s inside,” he said.

[...]The city created the program because U.S. legislators “don’t have the will to pass a coherent border strategy,” the mayor said Tuesday. Instead legislators have allowed immigrants to move here, but forced them to be “invisible,” said the mayor.

The card, which offers a range of services to people of all ages, was conceived as a symbolic gesture of recognition and a way give immigrants acceptable ID to open bank accounts, so that they won’t be easy prey for robbers. DeStefano urged those who live in the city to support one another by getting the card.
[...]West River Alderman Yusuf Shah heralded the program: “We believe that services should be given to everyone equally, to everyone.” Two days after aldermen approved the ID plan with an overwhelming 25 to 1 vote, federal immigration agents swept the city, arresting 32 people whom they charged were illegal immigrants. In the terror that followed, parents were afraid to leave their homes to pick up their kids from school. Some said that sense of fear would scare immigrants away from signing up for an ID.
Pasqual Rojas (pictured at left), who came here illegally from Mexico 14 years ago, said he wasn’t afraid. “I want to be part of New Haven,” he said in Spanish. The card would be signify “they respect us as citizens of New Haven.”
[...]Kimber said he was supporting the ID because “it is every religious leader’s moral obligation to stand up for the disenfranchised… I do not want people to suffer as African-Americans did when they came to this country.”

“If you look on the coin, it says ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — so they’re right on the money!” said Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh (pictured at left) before snapping a photo for his city ID. ''

So, in the above article, those heard from include Mayor DeStefano, Alderman Yusuf Shah, Pasqual Rojas (who, after 14 years in New Haven, still no habla Ingles), Harold Koh, and an African-American, Mr. Kimber, who sympathizes with illegals.

What's wrong with this picture? It seems the 'diversity' is being heard from: apparently all hyphenated 'Americans', one of whom can't or possibly won't speak the language of the realm, but where are the old-stock Americans? Do they not have a right to be heard?

Here is one of the most outrageous parts of the article, for my money:

Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. commended undocumented immigrants for their “courage” in enduring the suburban hecklers on their way in. “Tell me who represents the best of America — who’s outside or who’s inside,” he said.

Apparently, the Mayor prefers his fellow scofflaws, the illegal immigrants, to the real Americans who exercised their Constitutional right to peaceably assemble, and express their disagreement with his actions. And notice the protesters are referred to as 'suburban hecklers.' What kind of snide putdown is that?

So it takes 'courage' to be a sneak thief and a criminal? Or does it take 'courage' to step up and get your freebies from a scofflaw, aiding-and-abetting city government? Courage is not the word that comes to my mind; brazenness comes to mind, as do phrases like unmitigated gall, shamelessness, arrogance, and nerve. But those don't mean the same as 'courage.' Courage implies a nobility of spirit, and a willingness to act heroically despite great danger, none of which are evident in any of this 'diverse' collection of individuals from victim groups.

The use of the word 'courage' implies that the illegals are somehow beset by various dangers. Dangers from whom? From mostly emasculated law enforcement officials, who have been hamstrung by PC judges and federal officials who don't want them to do their jobs? Danger from whom? Torch-carrying, pitchfork-wielding redneck citizens? Name me any attack on illegals by 'nativist' Americans. It hasn't happened. They are in danger from no one, and they know it; their brazen, in-our-face, behavior proves that. If they were afraid, and if they were in danger, illegals would not be stampeding across our borders by the thousands every day, and they would not be pelting our Border Patrol agents with stones or otherwise taunting and baiting them.

This nonsense about the poor beleaguered immigrants 'living in the shadows' is ridiculous, and whoever invented that silly cliche is as dishonest as whoever invented the laughably inaccurate phrase 'Religion of Peace.'

Mayor DeStefano is of course a Democrat, but to be fair, there are many Republicans who support open borders and illegals.
The most common factor in these attitudes seems not to be political party, but ethnicity and recent immigrant roots. And true to form, we read here:

An hour’s drive from Danbury, in New Haven, where almost a quarter of citizens are Latino, the contrast in attitudes toward the undocumented population couldn’t be more stark.
It starts at the top with Mayor John DeStefano Jr., a second generation American.

"I am all for extending the same benefits and opportunities to these folks that were extended to my grandparents," he said.

As for deputizing police to act as immigration agents, DeStefano said no such request will ever come out of New Haven.

"In the process you will collapse our economy and paint with a broad brush immigrants to this country under the guise of people’s fears about terrorism," he said.

In fact, the police are weighing a policy that would specifically prevent their involvement in immigration matters.

DeStefano’s response to these issues is visceral. Fears about anarchists at the beginning of the 20th century fed the execution of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, he pointed out. "I don’t think it is a part of American history that we should be proud of or should repeat," he said.''

So here we have the Immigrant Grandfather/Ellis Island Syndrome. Sure, there is the occasional exception but far too often there is a correlation. And notice that DeStefano associates immigration restrictionism with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which many Italian-Americans see as 'persecution' of Italian immigrants. Whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty is inconsequential to their apologists: they were poor immigrants and that makes them martyrs. The popular liberal wisdom is that they were victims of the 'Red Scare' and xenophobia.

So as the quote from Mayor DeStefano indicates, he has a 'visceral' response on the issue of immigrants. This, in my mind, disqualifies him from being a public official, because it's tantamount to saying that he has a deep-rooted bias based on his own ancestry and family history, a bias in favor of immigrants. This to me is reminiscent of the Illinois school board official who ruled in favor of admitting illegal immigrants to the school system; in an angry outburst he declared that his parents were immigrants and that he would not brook any anti-immigrant sentiment. How is this kind of naked bias allowable in a public official, who is supposed to be capable of objectivity, and to be 'disinterested' in the true dictionary definition of the word?

It appears as though objectivity and disinterestedness are simply quaint cultural artifacts of Anglo culture; it seems only those of Anglo or other European descent even acknowledge the desirability of those qualities. Everybody else seems to operate on the basis of ethnic bias or plain old resentment of traditional majority America.

And of course ethnic solidarity is intrinsic to all of us, even those of us who have learned to subordinate it to some kind of greater good. But maybe we who have tried to be objective and fair to all are being taken advantage of and suckered by all the 'new Americans' who laugh at our gullibility while they unashamedly act on behalf of their own ethnic interests.

As America becomes ever more a house divided, we will see more polarizing, and people of non-Anglo ancestry, whether they be Italian-Americans or other Ellis Island descendants, or Americans of Hispanic descent, will have to declare which side they are on. It won't be possible to stay neutral as the sides line up.

We saw that in the events in Morristown, N.J. yesterday, too.

America, our house divided, part II

Back in the 90s, I spent some time living and working in New Jersey, and I have ex-employers and friends who still live there. I've been saddened to hear that New Jersey is now one of the more invaded states in the country, with a large illegal alien population as well as great numbers of legal immigrants, and sizeable Moslem colonies in Jersey City and elsewhere.

Today this news story appeared in the Newark newspaper:
Immigration protests draw 500 to Morristown

An estimated 500 people descended on Morristown this afternoon for dueling protests on illegal immigration and immigrants' rights. The crowd waved signs and at times chanted heatedly, but stopped short of causing any major disturbances.

Protesters grew more vocal as the afternoon wore on, with both sides waiting for Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello to take the stage. Police outfitted in riot gear with helmets, batons and pepper spray surrounded the stage, while a line of reinforcements arrived to barricade South Street.

Despite some heated exchanges between the groups and two arrests, the rallies were peaceful.''

Now I know Morristown fairly well; it was not far from the small town where I lived while I was in New Jersey. The town I lived in was a safe, prosperous, 'bedroom community' with many residents who commuted to New York City to work. Morristown was a short trip from where I lived, and I often went there on weekends to shop, see a movie, or go to restaurants. It was a pleasant town, not a big town, and there was not that much 'diversity' there, although I occasionally saw Hispanic people, possibly Puerto Ricans or Dominicans. Mexicans were a rare sight there at that time.

Now, however, it looks like Morristown is now 'enriched' with diversity, enough so that hundreds of illegals and their leftist accomplices rallied there today.

But the Star-Ledger's statement that the ralllies were 'peaceful' is not what I have heard; there was apparently an assault on two of the attendees who were protesting illegal immigration. The only source which seems to give an account of this violence is this one:

Conservative activists attacked at Secure Borders Rally in New Jersey

...As two of the participants were leaving, a male and female, their vehicle was attacked. The victims were pulled from their car and beaten and the vehicle was smashed and looted. Members of a violent Marxist gang, known as the ARA, had shown up at the demonstration to scream profanities and may have been involved in the attack.

This is not the first time that violent white Marxists and/or pro-illegal alien Hispanics have attacked conservatives at public demonstrations. It has primarily happened in Southern California in the past. Far left organizations, such as the SPLC, constantly say that conservative secure border activists will promote anti-immigrant violence with their “rhetoric.” However, every instance of violence has been perpetrated against conservatives, not by them.''

Wonder why the mainstream media do not report incidents such as this one, in which the illegals or their leftist sycophants commit violence? You can bet that if any of the anti-illegal, pro-borders people assaulted anyone, it would be the top of the news on all the cable channels, and trumpeted in the headlines. And next would be a pious editorial lecturing about the 'growth of hate' and xenophobia, and the usual suspects at the SPLC would be quoted about the dangers of 'righwing hate.' But when the illegals and the lefties assault someone? It's seldom reported, or it's reported only by conservative sources and goes down the PC memory hole quickly.

Some people will object to the source I linked here, the Council of Conservative Citizens website. Why? Because the usual suspects on the left have called the group a 'rightwing extremist' or 'racist' group. Quite honestly whenever these self-designated PC policemen condemn groups like the Council, I take that as an endorsement of their soundness. If they have these leftwing Politically Correct groups denouncing them, they have to be telling the truth.

I invite readers to check the website's Statement of Principles; I found nothing there to disagree with.

But most of all I am disgusted that nice towns like Morristown, though thousands of miles from the Mexican border, are now 'border towns', with American citizens squaring off against each other -- over illegals. What is wrong with this picture, America? What is wrong with America and Americans when we not only fail to protect our borders, but when, even worse, we are warring against each other over the invaders? And make no mistake; that's what is happening. The invaders have us at each others' throats.

Some will think that's hyperbole on my part, but is it? So far, mostly the war is a war of words, but words often lead to actual violence. And the rhetoric has been heating up for years, with the leftists foaming at the mouth over 'hate' and 'racism'. Does it never occur to the leftists that their language and now their actions epitomize the very thing they claim to be opposing? Do they not see the hate in their own rhetoric and in their violence against fellow Americans?

The details on the assault in Morristown are not clear; it may have been illegals who did the attacking and beating; or it may have been angry young home-grown leftists, or some combination thereof. But even if it was illegals who did the actual violence, they are being given support and encouragement by American-born people. And those renegade 'Americans' should be held to account for it.

Not so very long ago I made a fairly innocuous comment to a female relative about how a certain department store was courting illegal customers by offering credit applications all in Spanish. Now if they were legal, surely they would not need Spanish applications, would they? However this relative of mine snapped at me saying ''I would rather the Mexicans than some of these sorry white people.'' And her comments were said with a lot of anger. I thought, again, what is wrong with this picture? My own blood kin is angry at me for saying something critical of illegals, and she is saying she prefers Mexicans to some Americans. How did it come to this?

Whenever Hollywood made movies about the War Between the States, the breathless narration during the trailer always said: ''Brother against brother! Families divided!" Actually I think there were few families actually divided, with one brother in blue and another in grey; maybe in the border states where sympathies were mixed; not in the South. However this incipient civil war will pit brother against brother and families will be divided; most families have some mix of those with conservative traditional values and loyalties, and those with liberal 'we are the world' multicultist delusions. And then there are the families into which immigrants will have intermarried, further clouding loyalties and increasing divisions.

This is part of the phenomenon I blogged about the other day, 'America our house divided.' When we have a good proportion of the population inculcated with the idea that all discrimination, even the most logical and sensible, is tantamount to 'hate', which merits the harshest of punishments, then our country hasn't got much of a chance to recover control and impose sensible controls on the invasion. And the fact that our fellow citizens, including sometimes even our own neighbors and relatives, think that those with traditional values are 'haters' and 'racists' means that there can be little accommodation or compromise; somebody will have to change their thinking. Either we will have to change and conform and become docile members of the multicult, or they will have to change their thinking and realize that they are the extremists and the haters. The latter does not seem especially likely.

The present situation seems untenable, especially with the continuing influx of ever more divisive immigrants who will further destabilize our society and further catalyze the disorder.

Now it's not impossible that some liberals or 'moderates' might have epiphanies, and might be awakened by the increasing chaos and disruption in our society, but there are too many who simply blame all the trouble on us, on those of us who are merely trying to preserve our country, instead of on the intrusion of the immigrants.

Even some conservatives say that they don't blame the immigrants. I can't count the number of times I've heard a 'conservative' say 'I don't blame the illegals, they're just doing whatever they have to do to survive; I would do the same in their shoes.' My response is 'Really? You would break into someone's home and steal and lie to survive?" Did people do such things en masse during the Depression, when there was real hunger and want? Even if they had, the illegals are NOT starving and their survival is not in question. If you want to talk about survival, it's we whose survival is in question; the illegals are sitting pretty. They have successfully broken into Fort Knox, otherwise known as the U.S.A., where they have the keys to the kingdom. They've got access to Uncle Sam's bank accounts, with a free ride guaranteed them and their offspring: handouts galore, free education, free health care, interpreters, citizens who lean over backwards to be 'sensitive', churches who cater to them and put them on a pedestal, politicians who pander to them shamelessly. Please don't insult my intelligence and ask me to see illegals as poor waifs who are struggling to stay alive in a hostile world. They are on Easy Street. It's increasingly we who are out in the cold, and our wishes ignored and our voices excluded.

It would be wonderful if the current madness in our country was the result of some physiological malady which could be diagnosed and cured tomorrow -- but unfortunately it seems like a sickness of the soul, a plague of self-hatred and of hatred of those like oneself.

The liberals, always great devotees of pop psychology, are always prattling about 'self-esteem' and the vital importance of 'loving oneself' as the key to all success and fulfillment. Yet they are at the same time preaching that as a nation, we have to hate ourselves and prefer all others over our own. It's just one more contradiction, one of many in the senseless liberal worldview.

Update: Here is a much more complete account of what happened at the Morristown rally, although it does not mention the assault. It does mention the disorder and the arrests, along with the names of those arrested. They are apparently all or mostly Americans, not immigrants, judging by their names.

Girls, mild or wild

'Good' is Not a Bad Word
by Chuck Colson - Breakpoint

Eight years ago, a young writer named Wendy Shalit took the culture by storm with a radical book called A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. While many people embraced the idea of a return to modesty—especially the young women whose struggles and aspirations Shalit wrote about—others were appalled. “I knew that my arguments . . . might be challenged,” Shalit recalls now, “but nothing prepared me for the tongue-lashings I would receive from my elders. . . . [Feminist writer] Katha Pollitt called me a ‘twit.’ . . . The Nation solemnly foretold that I would ‘certainly be embarrassed’ and regret my stance ‘in a few years.’”

Well, it’s now been a few years, and Wendy regrets nothing. On the contrary, she has a new book out, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. As the title proclaims, Shalit is still convinced that true strength and happiness come not from deadening one’s emotions and having sex for fun, but from practicing modesty and self-restraint.

And guess who’s on her side?

As Shalit recounts, “To find out why modesty is more appealing to younger people, [feminist writer Katha] Pollitt might have talked to her own daughter, Sophie, who . . . was disgusted by contemporary sexual norms.”

Colson's article then goes on to tell how some feminists' daughters, like the daughter of feminist writer Erica Jong, agree with Miss Shalit's point of view. It's obvious that the feminist ideology has not been a great success in achieving a better society in which women are 'freer' and safer and more 'autonomous', but instead, too often, young women feel more vulnerable and more distressed by the shabby state of male-female relationships, in which heartless, soulless 'hook-ups' often substitute for romance or loving companionship.

Shalit in her original book also made the point, a valid one, that many 'conservatives' who ought to have been on her side tended to dismiss some of her concerns as being feminist 'whining' and complaining. If she said that young women felt vulnerable or treated as objects, this was decried by many 'conservatives' as feminist victim rhetoric.

She said:

First, I want to invite conservatives to take the claims of the feminists seriously. That is, all of their claims, from the date-rape figures to anorexia to the shyness of teenage girls, even the number of women who say they feel ‘objectified’ by the male gaze. I want them to stop saying that this or that study was flawed; or that young women are exaggerating; or that it has been proven that at this or that university such-and-such a charge was made up. Because ultimately, it seems to me, it doesn’t really matter if one study is flawed or if one charge is false. When it comes down to it, the same vague yet unmistakable problem is still with us."

I think conservatives probably went too far in deriding some of the claims of young women about date-rape, for example, simply as an unthinking knee-jerk reaction against feminism. If feminists claimed that date rape occurred at a certain rate, then the 'conservatives' immediately rejected the claims as feminist propaganda, and tended to deny that rape was as common as feminists said -- just because feminists said it. Surely there is a better and more honest way: examine statistics, and pay attention to real-life anecdotes. We can't rely on anecdotes alone, but when you see patterns, those patterns are telling. I have heard stories from women and girls whose honesty is not in doubt; conservatives have been too quick to downplay and deny that women's rape claims are true.

I agree that false rape claims do happen; I believe that women sometimes do make false claims for vindictive reasons or for other reasons: to escape consequences for some bad judgment on their part, or to get attention and sympathy. But to acknowledge that false rape accusations are made (as with the Duke Lacrosse players) should not mean that we declare all rape claims to be lies or feminist whining.

A while back, when basketball player Kobe Bryant was accused of rape, I was staggered by the number of 'conservatives' who were quick to condemn the accuser as a liar and a 'gold-digger' or attention-seeker. I could not and cannot see how her claims would enrich her or bring her fame; instead, she was exposing herself to being called a liar and worse.

I think in an overreaction to feminist claims about rape, both 'date-rape' and forcible stranger rape, many 'conservatives' have dropped the traditional chivalrous protection of women and have been too quick to disbelieve women who have in fact been victims of rape or other sexual crimes.

Another recent case in which people, both men and women, have been quick to condemn a young woman was the Natalee Holloway case, in which the missing young woman was condemned as a slut, a whore, and worse, for having apparently left a club with a young man she just met. Yes, if that's the way it happened (and we have only the suspects' word for it) she certainly showed poor judgment, but did she deserve rape and/or death as a punishment?

I think conservatives have been too quick to adopt the harsh tone of lesbian libertarian writer Camille Paglia, who tends to blame young women for their poor choices. Paglia somehow has been established as a 'conservative' when she is simply anti-liberal (and often anti-traditional, hence anti-conservative). And she is a feminist, for Pete's sake, yet she has many ardent 'conservative' admirers. Conservatives are all too often easily pleased; anybody who insults liberals is taken to the hearts of these 'conservatives' as being on our side. Paglia is not on the side of traditional values, in any way. In her own words:

I'm someone who is on the record as being pro-pornography--all the way through kiddie porn and snuff films. I'm pro-prostitution--I mean really pro, not just pro-prostitute and against prostitution. I'm pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-drag queens, pro-legalization of drugs.''

Some 'conservative'. Some advocate of women.
More from the same piece

Like when this huge, nasty expose I wrote for Arion at Boston University came out, and the San Francisco Examiner magazine made it its cover story this summer. They asked me, by the way, "Would you pose as Madonna for our pages?" And I said, "No, but I'll do something just as good." So I posed in a purple miniskirt with a whip and chains in front of a porn store. I thought for San Francisco I should do that--make an extra effort!

So at any rate I got these wonderful moving letters from San Francisco and from the Bay Area--people who said that they were weeping, crying as they read my piece. They said that "for twenty years I've seen our Sixties ideals seem to be betrayed--I felt lost and uncentered--and when I read your piece I remember again the fire that we felt in the Sixties, I remember again what we were working for in the Sixties." Okay, so this is what I'm doing. I'm trying to bring back out of the woodwork all these Sixties people. Come out, come out, wherever you are!''

Paglia occasionally says a true thing, but she is no conservative, and should not be a darling of unthinking conservatives just because she insults their enemies occasionally. I see the same phenomenon with figures like Christopher Hitchins and Andrew Sullivan, neither of them conservative, yet they are still fawned over by conservatives because they aim barbs at favorite targets of many on the right, and they do so with verbal skill or eloquence. Yet they should not be mistaken for conservatives.

So Paglia is right to an extent; she is right that feminism has tended to infantilize women, a point which I have made myself on occasion. We might expect liberal feminists to adopt an infantilized victim image of women, but when conservative women embrace that image of women and defend women who ought not to be defended, on the basis of their helplessness, this is distressing. Women are not helpless and are not exempt from responsibility.

Infantilizing women, and inculcating them with the idea of their helplessness and lack of accountability is not the traditional way; women may have been 'second-class citizens' by our modern liberal standards in the old days, but they were brought up to believe that they were responsible for the choices they made, and they were taught that they had better choose rightly or there would be consequences. Hence young women, in the unenlightened pre-feminist days, were taught that public drunkenness, or even private drunkenness, was a bad and immoral choice, and that it left them very vulnerable to any number of possible fates, none of them good. Rape or worse would be a potential fate of a young woman who got falling-down drunk, or allowed herself to be alone with a strange male. Young women understood that, and behaved accordingly, and those who did not, were at the very least, likely to have their reputation diminished, and to find themselves gossiped about and sometimes shunned. Was this cruel? Maybe; but it brought many a young woman back in line, or deterred her from getting out of line in the first place. Better to be shunned or chastised and to avoid the wrong path than to become a drunk and a promiscuous slattern. And nowadays, drunkenness and sluttish behaviors are the norm for many young women, not the exception.

So was Natalee Holloway to blame, as many conservatives assert, for whatever sad fate overtook her? In some sense, maybe, but does her irresponsibility absolve the guilt of whoever abducted and/or killed her? Hardly.

The young woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape seems to have been less to blame, considering that her job brought her into contact with Bryant, and she may have been alone with him in the context of her job. So was she irresponsible? Most of us can't decide that because we don't know the facts. She may have been star-struck; some young people rashly believe that celebrities are not capable of criminal behavior.

But these young women are all in a sense victims, although I hate to use that odiously overused word, of our current society's libertine norms. In a world in which many young people have a careless and callous attitude towards sex, regarding it as a mere animal act, it's not surprising that 'hook-ups' are the norm and promiscuity no longer scandalous. And in such a degraded atmosphere, there will be more sexual advantage taken: drunk young women are vulnerable. And the dropping of social censure for drunkenness is a contributing factor. It used to be that drunkenness, or alcohol use in general, was considered 'unladylike'. Nice girls did not get drunk. But with the triumph of feminism, with women vying to outdo males in excesses like social drinking and promiscuity, being 'ladylike' was declared to be oppressive for women. It was male chauvinism that invented the image of the 'lady', so the feminists said, so the ladylike ideal must go. The word 'lady' became a fighting word, a grave insult, for feminists. Women must never be called 'girls' or 'gals' or 'chicks', and worst of all was the word 'lady'. because the 'lady' was a prisoner of the patriarchy, with censorious males telling her not to do this and not to do that; her freedom demanded the discarding of all rules of ladylike behavior. Women were thus encouraged to curse and swear like sailors, drink heavily like men, go everywhere unescorted, including into bars (remember ladies could not enter some bars unescorted in the old days). Women suddenly adopted a number of other risky behaviors like hitchhiking alone, often with bad consequences. And the feminists refused to see that their reckless casting off of old taboos and social roles made women immensely more vulnerable to the predators who unquestionably exist out there.

Feminists did women no favors, though they claimed to be 'liberating' women.

But Wendy Shalit is right; conservatives have overreacted against feminists and have thus turned against women in a sense.
Feminists may have exaggerated the victimization of women, and diminished their responsibility for the misfortunes that followed feminist 'liberation', but the fact is, women ARE vulnerable, if only by virtue of the fact that women are not the physical equals of men. And the 'conservative' women who believe the feminist nonsense about women being the equals of men in the military and in police work are as much fools as the liberal feminists on this score. Women, aside from the occasional amazon-type, are simply not a match for men in size and strength. Women and girls are more at risk out there in a world with too many predators and deviants, Paglia and her ilk notwithstanding. Shalit tried to make that point: women are vulnerable, and we have to re-instill in our girls the need for greater vigilance and 'ladylike behavior' so as to minimize the risks. Yes, we can teach our girls to defend themselves as best they can, but to teach them that a few martial arts lessons will make them invulnerable while walking the streets at 2 A.M. is to delude them. And yes they should be taught to use firearms, but we should also teach them that it's still better to live a life which does not expose them to needless risks, and that the old-fashioned ways and norms were much healthier and safer for women than this egalitarian jungle in which foolish and reckless and misguided young women are exposed to dangers their grandmothers would never have imagined.

We do need a return to modesty and to some kind of sanity regarding sexuality and the balance between the sexes. Clearly the 'new' ways pushed on us by the left since the 1960s are not working; they are destroying the very basis of our society.

'Conservatives, beware...'

Fellow blogger Flanders Fields warns us:
Don't Trust Fred Thompson

...I will not consider one who pretends to be a conservative but who gets into office to carry water for the leftist corporatists who run our political world in the USA, other countries of the Western world, and much of the entire world.''

And here we read about Fred Thompson's Pan-Islamist Campaign Manager, Spencer Abraham, described as an Islamist sympathizer and open borders advocate.

Although we read Thompson's comments on the appalling Hazleton decision, and we see that he is essentially saying the 'right' thing, (though he carefully refers to illegal immigration only), talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words. So despite his saying what a prudent candidate would say about the court decision on Hazleton, his choice of Abraham speaks louder than his comments about illegal immigration. And by the way, if he has gotten religion on illegal immigration, he has only recently done so, since he has never shown any restrictionist leanings in his past.

This report from CNN.com tells about the woman protester in Houston who was removed from a welcoming reception for Thompson.

A woman screaming “you’re not a real conservative, sir” was removed by police from a welcoming reception for likely GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson Wednesday morning. A second protester was also taken from the room.

Houston police officers escorted the woman — as well as a man — from the hangar at Hobby Airport, where Thompson was shaking hands with a crowd of supporters. They were not arrested.

The woman questioned Thompson as he talked to reporters. She asked him why he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and noted that the organization supported the North American Union with Canada and Mexico.”

Unfortunately the Fredheads will dismiss this woman, whose statements were substantially correct -- Thompson is not a conservative and is a member of the CFR -- as a 'liberal' or a 'crazy.'

These comments illustrates that mindset:

Fred Thompson is a conservative and he scares his opponents - Democrat and Republican alike. I am excited about him entering the race and look forward to sending him more money.'

There are quite a few comments from readers below the story, and it does appear as though there are plenty of people who are not taken in by Thompson's masquerading as a conservative, which is a hopeful sign despite all the enthusiasm from the GOP faithful and the Fredheads.


Richard Viguerie issues his own warning: Conservatives, Beware of Fred Thompson

The frustration of conservatives is understandable. Faced with the prospects of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, or Mitt Romney as the next Republican presidential candidate, many are pinning their hopes on former Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee.

Could this actor-politician be the new Ronald Reagan?
Mainstream media types assure us that he is. His record suggests otherwise.

This is the second time conservatives have pinned their hopes on Thompson. When he was first elected in the Republican sweep of 1994, he was seen then as the “new Reagan”—a charismatic movie star turned politician. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole quickly picked Thompson to give the five-minute GOP rebuttal to President Clinton’s economic address, and no less than The New York Times swooned with its headline the next morning, “A Star Is Born.”

He turned out to be a shooting star—a dazzling flash in the sky, soon gone, not there dependably, night after night, like the Big Dipper. Or, as The Tennessean later put it, “A year ago [Thompson] looked like a rising star. Today he looks more like a fading comet.”

Especially to conservatives who have taken the time to examine his record.''

Among the reasons Viguerie mentions for distrusting Thompson: his handling of the Asiagate scandal, the Clinton White House's Asian fundraising irregularities, the McCain-Feingold Act, his ''failure of the Goldwater Test'' - which means his failure to show opposition to big government, his "failure of the 'Reagan Test" the question of whether he surrounds himself with conservatives.

And then there is his overall record: 8 years in the Senate, during which he voted:

FOR restricting the rights of grassroots organizations to communicate with the public.

FOR allowing the IRS to require political and policy organizations to disclose their membership—a vote against the constitutional rights of free association and privacy. (The Clinton Administration used such IRS intimidation against conservative groups that opposed them.)

AGAINST impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, specifically the reappointment and reauthorization of managers (drawn from the Republican membership of the House Judiciary Committee) to conduct the impeachment trial in the Senate.
[...]
AGAINST restraints on federal spending, specifically the Phil Gramm (R-TX) amendment to limit non-defense discretionary spending to the fiscal 1997 levels requested by President Clinton.

FOR affirmative action in federal contracts.

FOR the Legal Services Corporation, the perennial liberal boondoggle that provides political activism disguised as “legal services” to Democratic constituencies.

FOR an increase in the minimum wage, which, of course, increases unemployment among the young and poor.

FOR President Clinton’s nomination of Dr. David Satcher as U.S. Surgeon General. Among other things, Satcher opposed a full ban on partial-birth abortion.
[...]
FOR restricting the First Amendment (free speech) rights of independent groups.

FOR the trial lawyers lobby, and specifically against a bill that would put common-sense limitations on the medical malpractice suits that increase health costs for all of us. (Of course! He’s been a trial lawyer himself for some three decades.)

And, last but not least:

FOR limitations on campaign freedom of speech, by limiting contributions to national political parties to $2,000 and limiting the rights of individuals and groups to participate in the political process in the two months before elections.''

But of course all these facts will mean nothing to the Fredheads, who will respond along the lines of this commenter on the CNN blog thread linked above:

Add enough of this po’ mouthin’, Republican candidates and you all will get Mama Hilary for President. If you think she’s a choice is truely crazy. Explore what she and her hand picked leftest coilition did for Arkansas Public Schools. Heck! She almost did the same thing with the nation’s health care, You think HMOs are Heck??? Well, just keep on going after the rep. candidates and you’ll really get yours after the elections.''

When much of 'conservatism' these days consists of knee-jerk anti-Democrat reactions, and personality cultism (Fred was a TV actor on a popular show! Another Ronald Reagan!) Thompson is the kind of candidate we can expect, unfortunately.

Pets and the paranormal

'For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.' - From Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart

This story was all over the cable news channels yesterday: the story of Oscar, the cat, companion of the dying.

Grim rea-purr: The cat that can predict death

...Oscar, as everyone in this nursing home is agreed, has special powers - more even than the doctors and palliative care specialists who come to tend to the terminally ill here.

For like a harbinger of bad news, Oscar is able to discern the exact moment at which the angel of death comes to stand at their bedside. It is an unusual skill, certainly. All the more so because Oscar is just a cat.

The fluffy, two-year-old, grey and white brindled pet was adopted by the dementia unit at the home in Rhode Island and named by its residents after a famous American hot dog brand.
[...]

Yet his skills of divination are beyond question - and have even been the subject of an article in as august a publication as the New England Journal Of Medicine. To date he has predicted the deaths of 25 patients, and done so with such accuracy that he has completely won the trust of even the initially incredulous medical staff.

"This cat really seems to know when patients are about to die," says Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician at Rhode Island hospital who also attends patients at Steere House. ''

This story fascinates me, because I am an animal lover, and because animals are fascinating creatures in themselves. I believe they are much more perceptive and knowing than we humans imagine, and they are capable of much more than many of us think. We are too prone to deny that they operate on anything other than instinct, but all animal lovers know that animals are capable of devotion, and self-sacrifice. It's odd, and sometimes a cause for annoyance to me, that many people have a visceral dislike for and distrust of cats in particular. I find it strange that many people who are dog lovers seem to loathe cats as much as they love dogs. They ascribe only the worst motives to cats, even when a cat does something like this:
Alert tabby saves family from fire

The hard-core ailurophobes will say that the cat was not saving the family; it was merely acting in self-interest to save itself.

But then there was Scarlet, the mother cat, who rescued her five kittens from a fire, repeatedly returning into the fire to retrieve the kittens, and being badly burned in the process. How do the skeptics rationalize that?

I am not sure why some people have such antipathy towards cats in particular. I have heard it explained in male/female terms: men prefer dogs because dogs are hierarchical, and will treat their masters as top dog, and men like this. Women, on the other hand, are more egalitarian and prefer a pet who is not servile, such as a cat, who is independent and aloof. I think this is an overgeneralization; some women prefer dogs and loathe cats, and many men are cat lovers.

Desmond Morris puts it this way:
"Artists like cats; soldiers like dogs."
That too may be an oversimplification but there is truth in it.

Still, I get the impression from the silly cable news reports of the Oscar the cat story that many people regard cats with suspicion, and see them as vaguely sinister. Oscar the cat, rather than being a comforter of the dying old folks, was some kind of feline angel of death, according to the fools on the cable news channels, with their scripted 'jokes.'

Whatever; I'm inclined to see the story of Oscar as a heartwarming if sad story. It's sad in that so many older people live out their last days in an institution; in older times, the very old and ailing were usually looked after by relatives, and died surrounded by loved ones in their own homes or a relative's home. Now people die in an institution among strangers, and Oscar the cat may be the only one nearby to comfort them. So Oscar's presence is the only thing which makes the nursing home setting more like home, with the presence of a furry friend. And Oscar seems to know when the patients are nearing the end.

And although the skeptics deny that pets have any kind of 'sixth sense,' there is plenty of evidence that they do indeed sense things that we cannot. Those who live in earthquake zones know that their pets often behave strangely before a quake.

Predictably, the hard-nosed skeptics in the scientific profession scoff at the idea that pets can 'predict' earthquakes.

In fact, the notion that odd animal behavior can help people predict earthquakes is perceived by most traditional geologists in the West as folklore, or an old wives tale, and is often cast into the same boat as sightings of poltergeists, Elvis, and the Loch Ness Monster. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, considered an understanding of the relationship between unusual animal behavior and earthquakes to be an esoteric form of Secret Knowledge. That such strong support for the application of this knowledge exists in the East-- in long-lived civilizations like China and Japan-- is testimony to the reality of the phenomenon, as they have witnessed many more earthquakes in their long histories than has a comparatively young country like the U.S.

But not all Western geologists are close-minded with regard to the phenomenon. James Berkland-- a retired USGS geologist from Santa Clara County, California-- claims to be able to predict earthquakes with greater than 75% accuracy rate simply by counting the number of lost pet ads in the daily newspaper, and correlating this relationship to lunar-tide cycles. This maverick geologist, has been meticulously saving and counting lost pet ads for many years. Berkland says that the number of missing dogs and cats goes up significantly for as long as two weeks prior to an earthquake.''

This source tells how the animals in the local zoo became agitated right before the big Seattle quake in 2001.

Meanwhile, animals at the Woodland Park Zoo sensed what the best human instruments could not detect. Seconds before the quake struck, keepers reported that the orangutans began to bellow and the elephants (attuned to sounds far below the threshold of human hearing) became agitated. Pets all over the area disappeared for hours into secret hidey-holes.''

Pet owners, including myself, can tell similar stories about their animals' behavior before quakes. Our cat became very agitated just before a fairly sizeable quake back in the late 90s.

Unless you are a determined skeptic, there seems to be ample evidence that animals have some ability to sense things that human beings cannot sense. It may be that science has no ready explanation for their abilities, but that should not lead scientists to scoff and to rule out any such abilities, simply because they can't explain such occurrences.

Then we have the phenomenon of seizure alert dogs: dogs who have in recent years been found to have an ability to sense when its owner is about to have a seizure.

There is some skepticism about seizure alert dogs; some experts are very cautious in ascribing special sensitivity to dogs.

According to this source service dogs can help people who have various medical conditions, including diabetes and Parkinson's Disease.

In addition, dogs have been trained to assist persons with psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorder. These dogs learn to recognize changes in their owner's behavior or environment that indicate paranoia, panic attacks, hallucinations, or potentially harmful repetitive actions, for example, and may remind them to take medication.''

Then there are therapy dogs, who provide companionship and comfort to people in hospitals, nursing homes, retirement homes, and mental institutions. Oscar the cat would be in this category. There are studies showing beneficial effects, measurable improvements in blood pressure and stress hormones, with the presence of therapy animals.

So it's not at all far-fetched to believe that Oscar the cat can sense physiological changes occurring near death. Just because science cannot explain this as yet is no reason to deny that it is possible. If dogs can detect seizures and other medical conditions, why cannot a cat sense when someone is on the verge of death?

Science, and those who revere science as omniscient and potentially omnipotent, might learn a little humility. Science is, after all, simply a body of human knowledge, and as such, it is not all-encompassing, and it is still very incomplete. And science has been known to reverse itself, and to declare yesterday's certainties as having been erroneous after all.

Many of us are familiar with the story of how the scientific establishment denied, until the 19th century, that meteorites existed because they 'knew' that there were no stones in the sky, so therefore meteorites could not possibly fall from the sky. And in my lifetime, the facts about our solar system have had to be revised again and again as new data became available via space probes. So science is not infallible, being just the compiled knowledge of a number of fallible human beings. Scientific knowledge is far more tentative and conditional than many people are willing to acknowledge.

Some scientific skepticism seems to be an overreaction to the widespread credulity of our age, and some of the superstition and fascination with bizarre phenomena but skepticism, while healthy to a degree, can become too dogmatic, and too closed-minded. A real scientific attitude would imply some degree of openness, and a willingness to follow facts where they lead, rather than beginning with a desired conclusion and looking for facts to corroborate that pre-determined conclusion.

It's obvious that animals, even common house pets, have keener senses in many ways than we humans, and it is only a short step from that recognition to the possibility that Oscar the cat senses the impending death of the residents of Steere House.

And as for those silly media people who insist on making the story a grotesque one of a 'grim reaper cat' or a 'feline fatale' as the Glenn Beck show described Oscar, they are putting a macabre twist on the story which I don't see at all. Is Oscar's visiting the dying patients creepy and scary, as they imply? Or is his presence comforting to the dying? I incline towards believing the latter, but then I am not a TV personality who feels the need to make wry jokes about death omens. If, heaven forbid, I spend my last days alone in a nursing home, I hope that there is a feline presence to curl up next to me and ease my passage. Pets are sometimes the only comfort that the elderly have in this increasingly atomized, self-centered society we now live in.

"What greater gift than the love of a cat?" - Charles Dickens

Free speech, honest discussion?

In a recent discussion thread, a reader left a comment that might easily provoke controversy.
At the time the comment appeared, I judged that the comment might provoke such a response, and I considered how best to handle the situation. However, probably to my discredit, I was guilty of choosing to sidestep the issues raised by the comments, which was probably not courageous on my part. So I let the comment stand.

At the same time, the Haloscan glitch occurred, and I was unable to access my comments, manage them, or write any responses. And today when I was able to access my comments, I saw that there was a disagreement going on, with one commenter requesting that the original offending comment be deleted.

This is not an easy call for me; I've deleted comments rarely during the 15 months or so that this blog has existed. However I can and do ban people who have been uncivil and who make profane, pointless or inflammatory comments.
For some people, an anything-goes atmosphere epitomizes freedom. I disagree; I don't believe that free speech means there are no rules or standards. I don't see how a traditionalist could support that idea of freedom.

On the other hand, I am committed to following the truth wherever it leads, as I said to another commenter on another recent thread. I'm not inclined to forbid certain opinions or lines of questioning out of hand, because that approach is simply not consistent with seeking truth or having an open and honest discussion about the very real threat to our country and our culture and our very survival. These are not trivial and inconsequential matters we are discussing here, but the continued survival of our country and our posterity. America and the West are under threat from within and without and to refrain from discussing our predicament and its causes from all angles is to further diminish our chances.

Those who have read my blog for any length of time know that I am a sworn enemy of political correctness in all its forms. I find it much more than a mere annoyance, and far more than just a quaint absurdity, as some people regard it. Political Correctness is the mortal enemy of truth and honesty and fairness. As such it is one of the main factors in the compromising of our national immune system; it is one of the main weapons with which our enemies, internal and external, keep us weak and divided, and keep us from examining the truth with honesty. Political Correctness has to go if we are to continue to exist as a country, and if we are to have real freedom of thought, freedom of belief, and freedom of expression. Political correctness and sacred cows will find no friends here.

I've quoted a phrase of Carleton Putnam more than once here, and the quote seems apt here:

'I never hated anything in my life except two things: dishonesty and the appeasement of evil. These I hate with every fiber of my being. I would rather face controversy and bitterness indefinitely than surrender to either one.''

To me, avoiding the exploration of any question regarding America's predicament amounts to dishonesty. How can I forbid the asking of certain questions, especially when I oppose political correctness, and I refuse to put any group of people above criticism or questioning?

Many people who are as concerned with America's survival as I am are angry at 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestants', especially those of New England stock who all too often are liberal elitists, eager to sell America out in order to be seen as philanthropic and enlightened. I was just at another web forum where WASP New England liberals were taking quite a thrashing from several posters. Now I've said before that I have Puritan New England roots, (as well as much more numerous Southern roots), so some of the worst culprits among WASP politicians are in fact distant cousins of mine. I could name names, but I will refrain; fill in the blanks as you like. Suffice it to say that I have been critical here on this blog of individual political figures who are my own kin, albeit distant kin. As I said, I am no respecter of persons, and yes, there are too many old-stock New England elites who have no allegiance to this country and who are, quite bluntly, a disgrace to our common Puritan ancestors. So my own ethnic kin and my own extended family members are not above criticism; there are no sacred cows here.

I could, following the fashion of the day, take personal offense when someone insults WASP elites and liberal New England people, but I don't, because I recognize that there is more than a grain of truth in the insults. I could protest that there are exceptions, and complain about stereotypes and bigotry but I acknowledge there is truth in the stereotypes. That there are welcome exceptions among the 'New England WASP elite', such as my distant cousin Carleton Putnam, does not disprove the rule. He was an exception, and not typical overall.

I've been fairly hard on people of Irish and Italian immigrant stock here, but I have nothing against individuals of those groups if they are not rabid open-borders advocates or anti-American.

So when a commenter made remarks which were critical of Jews, I was torn as to whether to let the comments stand, and I ultimately allowed them. If the commenter had made similar comments about Irish-Americans, who tend to be very pro-immigrant and pro-open borders, would the same offense have been taken?

I know that the comeback would be: but the Irish have not suffered the persecution that Jews have suffered; there is no organized anti-Irish hatred whereas there is very real anti-Semitism which has resulted in genocidal violence at times in the past.

However some Irish partisans will answer that they themselves were 'targeted for genocide' by the British, and that they almost died out during the Famine of the 1840s. So on and on it goes.

But is it legitimate to place a group of people off limits for critical comments, based on past persecution? And is a fear of current persecution legitimate or overblown?

If I place one group above criticism, how does that square with honest discussion?

I can and occasionally do delete comments which are abusive, race-baiting, and slanderous. I have let stand many comments that I found to be personally insulting and rude, although I usually ban such commenters in the future simply because I am resolved that this blog will not be dominated by incivility or personal squabbles; I've seen it happen on far too many forums and blogs. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong, the conflicts tend to drive away others who prefer not to witness the disputes.
My concern is to keep the discussion here as civilized and as objective as possible.

Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. Freedom without responsibility is license and sometimes ultimately anarchy.

We have free speech in this country but this blog is not obligated to allow any and all comments in the name of 'freedom.' I do require that my commenters make their points as civilly and as reasonably as possible, and refrain from personal comments and insults.

So was the controversial comment bannable? If so, in order to be consistent and fair, I would have to ban harsh comments about all ethnic/racial/religious groups if I banned the comments in question. And I and my commenters make some rather harsh comments about certain groups here, being no friends of political correctness. But we do so in the spirit of telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. In a country which has become increasingly afraid to speak difficult truths, we have to kick over the traces or we will be history.

So it's a dilemma. I will not make a blanket pronouncement about any group being exempt from criticism or questioning, but I will ask that commenters temper their comments, and refrain from making inflammatory or malicious statements, realizing too that the definiton of what is inflammatory or malicious is open to some subjective interpretation.

I will say, on the Jewish question, that I've been among many paleos who seem concerned with Jews in particular, and I have found that often their beliefs in a ubiquitous Jewish conspiracy sound eerily like the complaints heard from militant blacks who think Whitey invented AIDS to commit genocide against them, or that Whitey induces blacks to eat pork products because they contain a brain parasite which suppresses black functioning.

On the other hand, because I differ with paleocons on this one issue, I am not inclined to dismiss everything they stand for because I consider them tainted by this one opinion. I know this is the approach of many on the 'respectable right' but I think it is shortsighted. Because I disagree with one emphasis of the neocons, I can't declare them discredited completely, as some other conservatives do -- although I think they are wrong far more often than the paleos, and wrong more often than they are right.

In the end, I confess I am not comfortable with the conspiracy theories which portray Jews as all-powerful; it really reduces us, the majority, to being helpless pawns and victims, and to think of ourselves as victims and pawns is not a healthy state of being. Our forefathers would not have brooked that kind of thinking.

I do accept as reasonable that most minority groups who have experienced persecution, or who believe themselves to have experienced it (as with Irish-Americans) there is a kind of self-protective us-against-them mentality, a sense of grievance which leads to intense ethnocentrism and often a desire to promote one's ethnic group at the expense of the feared majority. Groups do act in self-interested ways; there is no denying that, and minority groups especially so, perhaps defensively at times.

But I prefer to keep discussion here on a higher plane if possible. Most of my commenters do so; I'm generally well-impressed with the quality of most of the comments I get here.

However we are adults here, and if a comment is made that you disagree with or find objectionable, refute it if possible; show where the facts are wrong, the reasoning is flawed, or the conclusions unfounded. Most of my commenters are good debaters and can do that with ease. I WILL step in and delete and ban where warranted , although our respective judgments on just what is acceptable and what is not may differ. It's much better to refute a falsehood than to merely silence it, but granted, sometimes feelings run high and the debate becomes heated.

I will put the question to my readers, or those who are still with me, anyway: should I ban certain topics or questions or issues here? If so, which ones? Or do I make a blanket ban on all ethnic generalizations? If so, then do I then become the people I've decried so often, such as the 'anti-illegal immigration' fighters who ban people for saying 'wetback' or who banish people for criticizing Hispanic culture? What topics and questions are forbidden?

I honestly hope that I will not lose readers over this issue, but truth is paramount here. I do pledge to try to be fair and honest and to keep the discussion civilized.

I realize I probably won't please everybody here; that's not always possible. But I hope that those who have added so much to the discussion on this blog will continue to visit and comment.