Romney and His People Are Truly Contemptuous of Social Conservatives
How many more instances like this must we be treated to before those social conservatives who plan to fall into line and vote for Dullard Flip Rino because ... well ... we JUST HAVE to ... wake up to the fact that the GOP has, via the nominee it has chosen, decided you are no longer welcome?
Follow my lead and DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, vote for Mitt Romney. There ARE alternatives. Vote 3rd party. Don't buy into the lesser of two evils spin coming from the major parties.
Vote your conscience. Vote your values. Don't vote for Rockefeller RINOs like Romney.
... But, of course, this is exactly what has been happening in the Republican Party for the past half century. Over these decades, one pattern has been constant: Wingers[ED.: Really? "Wingers"? I thought you were too sophisticated and too "no labels" to engage in such rhetoric. Hypocrite.] fight to take over the party, mainstream Republicans bob and weave to keep their seats.
Republicans on the extreme ferociously attack their fellow party members. Those in the middle backpedal to avoid conflict. Republicans on the extreme are willing to lose elections in order to promote their principles. Those in the mainstream are quick to fudge their principles if it will help them get a short-term win.
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All across the nation, there are mainstream Republicans lamenting how the party has grown more and more insular, more and more rigid. This year, they have an excellent chance to defeat President Obama, yet the wingers have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.[ED.: Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a minute, @$$hole. You were singing Santorum's praises back when Gingrich was challenging your boy and Santorum was considered the "principled alternative" who you were hoping would steal votes away from Gingrich. Now he's "embarrassing and unelectable"? Do you think we're so stupid that we can't remember what you wrote just last month? Talk about "embarrassing", the way you Romneybots have all followed the EXACT SAME template of praising Santorum when you believed he had no real chance of beating Romney to trashing him now that he poses the most serious challenge to Dullard's election hopes, is laughably embarrassing.]
But where have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin[ED.: How about backstabbing her with whisper campaigns and feeding "background info" to fellow traveling columnists like you only too willing to dish dirt, trash reputations, and abandon the candidate YOU supported ALL ALONG going back to the 2000 election just because he picked someone from the "riff-raff" to be his running mate?]and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise?[ED.: The question is: Where were YOU? Wherever it was, it was obviously someplace where you were unable to pay attention to the actual facts of what actually happened. Because it's pretty clear to everyone else that it was the GOP who compromised their principles on the budget and got absolutely NOTHING in return.]They were lying low, hoping the unpleasantness would pass.
The wingers call their Republican opponents RINOs, or Republican In Name Only. But that’s an insult to the rhino, which is a tough, noble beast. If RINOs were like rhinos, they’d stand up to those who seek to destroy them. Actually, what the country needs is some real Rhino Republicans. But the professional Republicans never do that.[ED.: Bullshit. Ask anyone who has dared to pose a challenge to Dullard Flip Rino during this election season whether the "professional Republicans" fight back and fight dirty. Ask the Tea Party candidates who defeated the Establishment-anointed candidates during the 2010 election cycle whether the "professional Republicans" fight back and fight dirty, even showing a willingness to lose elections on principle - just like you accuse the "purists" of doing - rather than be shown up by the upstart riff-raff.] They’re not rhinos. They’re Opossum Republicans. They tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right.[ED. Whatever. Crybaby.]
Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity. Two kinds of candidates emerge from this process: first, those who are forceful but outside the mainstream; second, those who started out mainstream but look weak and unprincipled because they have spent so much time genuflecting before those who despise them.[ED.: Oh the humanity! Dullard Flip Rino has actually had to act like he really gives a rip about conservative principles in order to try to convince REPUBLICAN voters to award him the REPUBLICAN nomination. He should've just been anointed on the basis of ... wait a minute ... I'm sure I can come up with a compelling argument for his nomination if you give me another 7 years of his running for President.]
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Leaders of a party are supposed to educate the party, to police against its worst indulgences, to guard against insular information loops. They’re supposed to define a creed and establish boundaries.[ED.: In other words, the Establishment RINO minority should call the shots, and the conservative majority in the grassroots (i.e. the "riff-raff") should shut up, respect its "elders", send in money, and march in lockstep to the voting booth to do the bidding of our betters in the "educated class".] Republican leaders haven’t done that. Now the old pious cliché applies:
First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me.[ED.: Oh, good grief. Get over yourself!]
(emphasis and editorial commentary added)
My Comments: Leaving aside one of the more pathetic invocations of Godwin's Law that I have ever had the misfortune of reading, I don't know what's more sad: (a) that Brooks actually wrote this whiny piece of drivel; or (b) that the man who voted for Obama in 2008 based, at least in part, on an admiration for Obama's pant crease, actually believes himself to be a "mainstream conservative".
David Brooks’ Sad Elite: David Brooks says extremist “wingers” have taken over the Republican party–because those condemned as RINOs are too timid to “stand up to those who would destroy them.”
(1) It sounds like he’s not really upset with RINOs. He’s upset with primaries.
(2)[...]
(3)[...]
(4) Is this the inverted country club Republican version of the Dems Fight-Back Fallacy? ‘If only those RINOs had some spine and fighting spirit they’d beat those irresponsible wingers.’ No they wouldn’t.
(5) Brooks thinks he’s a “mainstream conservative”? If so, he is an “insular information loop” of one.
LOL! Seriously? Yes, conservatives, if only you could be as open minded as Meghan McCain ... so open-minded that your brain actually falls out.
The response to yet another of Ms. McCain's verbal lapses has not been without an "emoticon" of brutal ridicule:
McCain, known for her, shall we say, “creative” use of language more than her ability to, you know, like, think, immediately took to Twitter to explain herself ...
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Twitter lit up with ridicule. Here are the highlights:
Slate’s Dave Weigeladded, “Meghan McCain reporting that Jack Lew will take over as White House chef.”
Mike Flynn, Editor-In-Chief of BigGovernment, harkened back to another MSNBCer’s greatest his with, “Resist We Much the ‘Emoticon of Privacy’ #MeghanMcCainFail”
Townhall,com columnist Derek Hunter gave props to McCain’s ability to continually top herself by tweeting, “Every time I think @McCainBlogette has found her floor of stupid, she opens her mouth and out comes a shovel.”
Pajamas Media’s Stephen Green (VodkaPundit), added, “I have now watched @McCainBlogette‘s ‘emoticon’ video more times than I’ve watched Godfather I & II combined.”
... Brooks’ apparent impression after that party was that Obama was “a Burkean” — and not a strict ideologue — who understood the “organic nature of change.” Aside from perhaps admiring the crease in Obama’s pants, nearly three years to the date after that party at Will’s house, Brooks admits he had the president completely wrong.
On Thursday’s “The Laura Ingraham Show,” Brooks said he still admired Obama, but conceded the president was more liberal than he originally thought.
“Yeah, I still like him — admire him personally,” Brooks said. “He’s certainly more liberal than I thought he was. And he’s more liberal than he thinks he is. He thinks he is just slightly center-left. But when you got down to his instincts, they’re pretty left...
And yet the simplest of red state rubes (upon whom Brooks showers so much disdain) might not know who Edmund Burke is but could've told you that Barack Obama had absolutely no conservative underpinnings and was as left-wing a candidate as this country has ever seen. The unwashed don't get caught up in such high-falluting nonsense as crisp pant creases, wonky philosophical conversations about Reinhold Niebuhr, and Harvard credentials in determining who is the best fit to lead our nation. But, then, it doesn't take a genius to figure out when someone is a frickin' socialist.
And so, with the advantage of hindsight, our intellectual betters in the establishment "smart set" can finally see what so many of us yokels and hicks and rednecks and bitter clingers could see so clearly 4 years ago. Turns out a plumber's assistant from Toledo really does have better political insights and is a better judge of political character than the house conservative at "the newspaper of record".
... so-called GOP "insiders" believe that, in this center-right country (that is actually more "right" than these GOP "insiders" would care to admit), an inexperienced hard-core leftist with an Arabic name can be elected President a mere 7 years after 9/11, but the experienced, longest-serving Governor of the 2nd-largest state with a record of economic growth and job creation can't get elected against a weak, hard-left President responsible for the worst economy since the Great Depression and the biggest deficits in history?
Yeah, right. Methinks the GOP "insiders" are full-of-shit Romneybots.
[Laughs good-naturedly in response to question]Well, I may not have served in the Obama Administration or appeared in the pages of Vogue magazine, but I don't think those are necessarily valid measures of "sophistication" or "intelligence", either.[Looks gravely into the camera]Look, it's not a matter of "believes" or "doesn't believe" in a scientific theory that, quite honestly, a whole lot of people are skeptical about, and rightly so, given the fact that the earth has heated and cooled all on its own - without any help from humans - for millenia. What this is about is that, in one of the worst economies in our nation's history, with millions of folks unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, it just doesn't make sense to implement the sort of policy schemes supported by Ambassador Huntsman and President Obama that will devastate our already fragile economy, throw even more people out of work, and raise the costs of heating and cooling our homes and driving our cars beyond what people can afford.
So, the question is not whether I quote/unquote "believe" in science the way some folks around here seem to treat it like some sort of religion, but rather why Ambassador Huntsman and President Obama and those like them, who seek to impose their catastrophic tax and cap regulatory schemes that will only further devastate our economy, seem so unconcerned about the working families of this country on whom their policies will most heavily fall. I'm for putting America BACK to work, not breaking our backs economically to futher some environmentalist dogma.
In order to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, Nashua’s new 20,000-square foot liquor store, which is owned and operated by the state, was “built with solar panels, geo-thermal heating and cooling systems, local building materials and recycled products.”
The problem? It was also designed with reserved parking spaces right in front of the door. Not for the handicapped, though—they had those, too, but they were further down. Who got the primo spots? Low emission and hybrid cars, of course!
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See, I frequently get accused of hating the environment in a most un-christian way, but this is not fair. I actually love the natural world, and my family’s lifestyle is amazingly green. No, really all I hate is professional environmentalists, because of the way they are jerks.
The sheer moronitude of the environmental planning board’s decision boggles the mind. First, how did they not realize how much outrage it would generate? It’s a policy just begging for inflammatory headlines. I’m imagining the environmentalists putting their heads together, realizing that ideas like forced sterilizations make them kind of unpopular. “I know!” says one stringy fellow in hemp biking shorts. “We need a new message, to make our ideas more palatable. How does this strike you:’Nyah, nyah, cripples—we got here first!’ ”
... While he was away on a cruise to Rhodes, Mykonos and other Greek islands, Mr. Gingrich said that he wrote two policy speeches.
“I don’t know how other people work,”[ED.: While you're off galavanting around the Greek Isles. .. errrr ... I mean ... "working", there are a LOT of people who aren't working at all. And the vast majority of the rest don't have the luxury of "working" the way you define it. So, no, the one thing you said that is quite accurate is that you "don't know how other people work."]Mr. Gingrich said in an interview on Wednesday. “To have a major breakthrough in policy[ED.: Yay, Newt, what would we do with out your superior intellect and oversized ego when it comes to top-down thinking about how to achieve "major breakthroughs in policy" implemented by our betters in Washington to make our lives oh so much more livable?], you have to be able to stop and think.”[ED.: Yes, because you're just so overwhelmed with responsibilities right now. And from the way things are going, thinking on your feet isn't your strong suit. But the remedy for that isn't for you to "stop and think". The remedy is for you to just stop.]
The So-Called "Professional Conservative Smart Set" ...
... can kiss my @$$.
Add George Will to my $h!+ list. Actually, he's been on there for quite a while with his elitist anti-Palin schtick, but this is just beyond the pale. Someone ought to remind George that it's baseball season, and that he should STFU and take in a game.
And Ross Douthat should really tell his buddy Marc Ambinder that he does Ross no favors by describing him in these terms: "... the professional conservative smart set (like The New York Times’s Ross Douthat)".
... "In the fall of 2010, nobody needs Comeback and nobody needs Grand New Party," says Frum.
Rush and his listeners couldn't have planned it better. They argued then, and argue now, that people like Frum, Salam, Douthat, Sam Tanenhaus, and others care more about the fabled "Georgetown cocktail circuit" than they care about conservative principles. And they may have a point that a conservative apostate gets more media attention, and more Diet Coke in the green rooms, than a standard-issue true believer.
But that's not why the Frums of the world wrung their hands and wrote their manifestos. Yes, they were written with the assumption that the GOP was going to serve more time in detention—and that detention was actually necessary. If the GOP came roaring back by going further to the right, their theory went, that would prove that they didn't understand why they governed so poorly in the first place. They would think that all they needed to do was bang on about tax cuts and the Constitution, and that would not only win the election but make them govern more intelligently.
Of course, to the horror of the smart set, this is exactly what is happening. The conservative base looked at any attempt to answer the Democrats on policy as a cave-in to socialism. When they're making the case for their research, Douthat and Salam acknowledge that reality. But they argue that Republicans have been using their key insights anyway and that the hot rhetoric of the GOP obscures what actually happened.
"I think the way a lot of Republicans are campaigning now—as resolute foes of big government who are also going to save Medicare from the Democrats—suggests that they understand the point of Grand New Party pretty well," says Douthat. They're just taking our insight, that even many conservative voters like the welfare state, and running with it in a cynical rather than a constructive direction."
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It's an ingenious argument: We're not wrong. We're just not yet right. After the election, says Frum, after the GOP has recovered in record time, either it's going to have to move away from its campaign rhetoric or it's going to be unable to govern. "What happens in January," Frum says, "when the GOP majority arrives and the Bush tax cuts expire, the U.S. economy has deflationary shock, we don't have a program for pulling the economy out of inflation, and we don't have permission from party supporters or permission from voters to compromise? You have people arriving in office with highly apocalyptic vision of a president but programs they don't know how to execute on their own. It's a formula for crisis."
And crises, of course, often require just the kind of smart thinking that only the smart set can provide. Wherever there's a Tea Party candidate who won by promising to roll back the Progressive Era, there will be the conservative critics they ignored, ready to bail them out.
My Comments: Yes, only our elitist Ivy League-educated betters in "the smart set" can provide us with the kind of "smart thinking" we need. The kind of "smart thinking" that makes the readers of the The New York Times go all tingly as the latest house "conservative" validates their views of the conservative riff-raff.
Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone could possibly think that someone sitting on their inside-the-beltway perch at some D.C. public-interest job might not be in touch with the rank-and-file voter in the hinterlands.
TIME to President Obama: Avoid "Piety Trap" of Church Attendance
At least TIME Magazine is an equal opportunity offender. Not only is the publication anti-semitic, but it is anti-Christian, as well:
Time executive editor Nancy Gibbs, the writer of many ridiculously gooey leg-thrill sentences about Democratic politicians, is now begging President Obama to avoid going to church -- it's "The Piety Trap." Her headline continues: "Sure, we want to know what a president believes in...but that doesn't always mean he should tell us." Obama is much more likely to end up in a sand trap than a piety trap on Sundays, but Gibbs doesn't want him to go to church anyway:
Many a pundit has predicted that we are sure to see the Obamas attending some nice, safe church one day soon, the girls in their Sunday best, Obama with a big Bill Clinton Bible under his arm or explaining what Glenn Beck calls Obama's "version of Christianity." I devoutly hope the President resists this advice or, if he feels the call to worship, that he finds a way to do it that meets his private needs rather than his political ones.
This is a funny passage coming from Gibbs, who found some poetic equivalence two years ago between the birth of Jesus Christ and the birth of hopes for Obama after the election: "Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope." It won our "Obamagasm Award" as the gushiest pro-Obama quote of the election year.
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Gibbs clearly doesn't like her presidents to be overtly religious. She declared "We've seen what happens when it serves a president's interest to flaunt his faith -- which is almost inevitably does, since every poll affirms that Americans want their leader to submit to some higher power." So what happens? She never elaborated. She lamented "Religious tests, a constitutional taboo, are a political tradition."
Her liberal hero, naturally, is John F. Kennedy, who declared in 1960 that he came to Protestant pastors to talk about "now what kind of church I believe in , for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of America I believe in." She insisted "That was an America where church and state were absolutely separate and priests and preachers did not tell parishioners how to vote."
Clearly, Gibbs doesn't really mean that progressive Reverends like Jesse Jackson (or even Reverend Wright) can't tell their parishioners how to vote. She simply doesn't like it when priests and preachers tell parishioners not to vote straight-ticket Democrat, like most well-coached Time magazine staffers.
... I thought President Obama struck the wrong note in answer to a question about the rally from Brian Williams of NBC News.
The president started off okay, acknowledging that “Mr. Beck and the rest of those folks were exercising their rights under our Constitution exactly as they should.”
But then he fell back on an abstract analysis eerily reminiscent of his notorious “cling to guns or religion” riff from campaign 2008:
I -- I do think that it's important for us to recognize that right now, the country's going through a very difficult time, as a consequence of years of neglect in a whole range of areas. Our schools not working the way they need to, so we've slipped in terms of the number of college graduates, you know?
A financial system that was not, you know, operating in a way that maintained integrity and assured that the people who were investing or who were buying a home or were using a credit card weren't getting in some way cheated. We had a health-care system that was broken and that was bankrupting families and businesses. All those issues are big, tough, difficult issues. And those are just our domestic issues. That's before we get to policy issues in two wars. And a continuing battle against terrorists who want to do us harm. So, given all those anxieties -- and given the fact that, you know, in none of these situations are you going to be fix things overnight. It's not surprising that somebody like a Mr. Beck is able to stir up a certain portion of the country. That's been true throughout our history.
That’s a pretty confident analysis from someone who admitted that he did not even watch the rally on TV. I’m not sure exactly how I would feel if the president labeled me an anxious member of a “certain” subculture manipulated -- “stirred up” -- by “somebody like a Mr. Beck.” But I am sure I wouldn’t feel respected.
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This was such a silly political unforced error that I have to assume Obama committed it out of sincere belief...
Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."
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Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.
What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card.
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It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
... Know what stuck out about that to me? The self-satisfied, misguided "above it all" tone of the piece. Yes, Brooks is correct that, "very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate." However, I can't help but notice that he seems to be exempting himself and other people who think like he does from that criticism. Yet, David Brooks in his own mentally flabby way, is every bit as rigid in his thinking as the hardcore activists he scorns. The little tribe that Brooks belongs to, Team RINO, has its own "tribal purity tests" and its own weaknesses in thinking that are habitually brushed aside as easily as those on the Left and Right.
So, here's the question: When do people like David Brooks start asking themselves some tough questions? When do they engage in some self-criticism? When do they consider the possibility that maybe the principled people with the fire in their bellies have it right? When do they consider the possibility that their smug attitudes, upturned noses, and lukewarm politics represent exactly the sort of epistemic closure that they like to complain about?
If Brooks genuinely considered questions like those in print, it might lead to his first worthwhile column in years.
MATTHEWS: You, you sir, strike me, as I hate to use the word [ED.: No you don't, liar, or else you wouldn't constantly bring it up], as someone who's well-educated. I know you went to UVA Law School [ED.: Join the club]. Is that hurting you? Is - no I'm dead serious about this. Do you get hurt in the Republican Party now for having had a fine education? Do people think, look askance at you and say, "Oh he's an egghead, he's got a good degree from UVA" Is that a problem now, it's better to be a yahoo? Well I mean to be really uneducated like Palin, to really be proud of the fact you don't know anything?
INGLIS: There, there is a sense out there that ignorance is strength. But you know ignorance really is not strength...
My Comments: I, too, went to UVA Law School, and NEVER ... NOT ONCE ... have I EVER been made by Republicans or conservatives to feel like an "egghead" (seriously, we're talking about dime-a-dozen lawyers here, not nuclear physicists) or that I was too "intellectual" with my "fine education" and "good degree from UVA".
My law school classmate, Todd Zywicki, now he's really smart. A highly published law school professor, in fact. Maybe he qualifies as an "egghead" with his "fine education" (he also has an A.B. with high honors from Dartmouth College - but never mind the M.A. he got from that land grant school, Clemson) and "good degree from UVA". But I'd be willing to bet that he has never been made to feel that he is "too smart" by any of the Republicans of his acquaintance.
And what about Laura Ingraham? She was a couple of years ahead of us at UVA Law (and, like Todd, she also has a degree from Dartmouth College). Yeah, those Republicans just can't stand Laura, can they? She's too smart for 'em. They think she's an overeducated egghead, and none of them EVER listen to her radio show or watch her on FOXNews.
Matthews is clearly grasping here, pretending that a UVA Law degree bestows some sort of intellectual superiority. Again, it's a frickin' law degree, not a PhD from MIT. He so wants to show that the conservative movement is anti-intellectual that he tries to paint frickin' Bob Inglis as some sort of heavyweight thinker, who was therefore rejected by the GOP, because he got a law degree from one of the liberal-approved law schools (after all, it's where Chrissy's heroes Bobby and Teddy got their law degrees).
But more than that, Matthews is projecting his own bigotry on those who he is attacking. He's so convinced that anyone who doesn't follow his lead by getting wood for The One MUST be so deficient in their intelligence and in their outright disdain for education that they would reject someone for the mere crime of having a law degree from UVA. The rubes are not only "yahoos", according to Matthews, but they celebrate their uneducated status by throwing overboard anyone with the slightest hint of a higher degree from a "fine" school (yet, somehow, W's degrees from BOTH Yale AND Harvard didn't hurt him among the "yahoos"; those two Ivy League degrees don't seem to measure up in Chrissy's mind to Inglis' law degree from UVA). It's Matthews who is bigoted in his views of those with whom he disagrees, not the other way around. Yet Matthews continues to project on a daily basis, spewing this garbage about conservatives being hostile to education.
And Bob Inglis, still smarting from his throw-the-bums-outa-office asswhooping he took in the South Carolina Primary, glibly plays along, tying to milk his 15 minutes of lefty love now that he has trashed as "racists" the constituents who kicked him to the curb. Thank God the voters of his district voted this petulant jerk an early retirement.
UPDATE (16 July 2010) Chris Matthews couldn't have had worse timing in bringing up a UVA Law degree as evidence of "someone who is well educated".
And it's not like this is Jackson-Lee's first or even most egregious gaffe. Yet Chrissy Matthews would assure us that - on the basis of her Yale and UVA degrees - Jackson-Lee is among the nation's elite, unlike that "yahoo" Sarah Palin.
Summer once again tiptoes in on crepe soles to the eastern extremities of Long Island; affording, as is its wont, fresh opportunities to enjoy the providence of nature and the financial acumen of one's forebears. Despite the looming spectre of global climate change the lawn is verdant and lush, and my gardener Hideo informs me the hibiscuses are in especially fine fettle. Much to the relief of his mother (if not the household staff) young T. Coddington VIII has returned from Quonsocket Prep and Rehabilitation Center. I am pleased to announce he has made significant strides in overcoming the acute arson disability that so plagued his sophomore academic marks, and thus his matriculation as a member of Harvard '15 is all but assured. And, if you will forgive a note of personal triumph, I also find myself in the midst of a career renaissance as the leading conservative thinker on the scourge and embarrassment of conservative extremism.
This solstitial season should then, by all rights, occasion in a conservative centrist like myself a deep sense of satisfaction -- if not outright contemptuous pity for the jejune editorial boobs of The National Topsider who some 18 months ago unceremoniously dismissed my services following my prescient endorsement of Barack Obama. Thanks to the good conservative breeding instilled in me by my late father, swashbuckling Topsider founder T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI, I am happily above such base emotions. Living well, as they say, is the best revenge; particularly when underwritten by royalty checks from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the other top-tier periodicals unintimidated by trenchant critiques of the soi-dissant 'Tea Party' idiots. Rather than basking in the deserved status of a conservative man in full, however, I instead find this the summer of my discontent. Each day seems to introduce some new crisis on the world scene with hints of more to come, and one is left to wonder if even our elegant young President's oratorical and tonsorial gifts are equal to the challenges ahead.
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I and my guests were momentarily stunned, this being the first time any of us had heard an ill word spoken about Mr. Obama by a European of impeccable intellect with the Hermes ascot to match. This was followed, understandably, by muffled sobs. It was left to me to gamely break the lachrymose silence. "Perhaps Kloonkie is right," I said. "Perhaps the President has not quite turned out to be the Reagan reincarnation we all expected, and in some ways I am beginning to believe this Obama fellow is unequal to the task. As the intellectual conscience of the conservative movement, and whatever our previous enthusiasm for the chap, we ought have the courage to point out those rare instances where his performance has been found wanting. Such as foreign and domestic policy. The important thing is that we not end up implicated in his shortcomings."
[...]
"Clearly, this isn't the Barack Obama any of us swooned for during the election," offered Peggy Noonan. "As a candidate he was fresh, intellectual, and serious. Instead, as president, he has proven to be naive, detached and aloof. Nostradamus himself could not have predicted such an astonishing 180 degree transformation."
"Indeed, how could anyone?" added Brooks. "The fellow was a success at everything he had ever attempted -- being ethnically interesting, going to Harvard, getting elected, or writing autobiographies about being ethnically interesting and going to Harvard. It was simply inconceivable that there was a task he could actually fail at. I am forced to conclude his Harvard credentials may be a sham."
The world is becoming so overpopulated that nature will one day wreak its revenge, claims Jeremy Irons, the actor.
Launching himself as a green campaigner, Irons has revealed plans to make a documentary about sustainability and waste disposal, likening himself to Michael Moore, the controversial film maker, although “not as silly”.
The increasing global population would put an intolerable strain on the world’s resources, Irons said, and the gulf between developing countries and westerners living a bountiful “pie-in-the-sky” existence must be addressed.
“One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable,”[ED.: "One" does, huh?]he said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “I think we have to find ways where we’re not having to scrap our effluent junk and are a really sustainable planet.”
[...]
In a film on the website 1billionhungry.org, Irons declares: “People around the world suffer hunger — 1 billion. Now that’s bad, worse than bad, that’s crazy! We’ve got to get mad. I want you to get mad. I want you to get up right now, stick your head out of the window and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell’.”
Irons, who owns seven houses, including a pink castle in Co Cork, Ireland, believes a new economic vision is needed in the wake of the global financial crisis. “We are facing an economic revolution,” he said. “I don’t think things can ever be the same again. The next generation will have to think laterally and find ways to cope with this.”
He dismissed the idea that a recovery in consumption would help Britain out of recession: “You walk down the high street and it’s just clothes, clothes, clothes. How many clothes do people need?[ED.: Asks the guy with 7 houses and a pink castle. "One" might very well ask: "How many houses do self-important, bloviating, pseudo-sophisticate actors need?]We’re on a hiding to nothing with that.
“We’ve always known the City was a bubble. We can’t continue to divide the world between people who live a pie-in-the-sky life[ED.: You mean, for instance, like some guy owning 7 mansions and a pink castle?] and people who are starving.”
Irons, who says he runs “very old motor cars” including a 13-year-old Range Rover, also launched an attack on today’s throwaway society. “Why does it make sense for us all to be buying a lot of motor cars[ED.: or houses?], selling our old ones and scrapping them?[ED.: Ah, I get it. You're not selling or scrapping your houses; you're accumulating on to them.] Why don’t we make cars that last for 40 years? We could,” he said.
A convert to the Catholic Church who became Catholic because of a belief in and devotion to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. * A graduate of Baylor University and the University of Virginia School of Law. * Former Mayor of the Town of Columbia, Virginia. * Married with four children: two boys and two girls. * Primary interests include the Catholic Church, family, Early American History, and law/politics * Primary purpose of this blog is fostering enlightened discussion about the roles played by the institutions of religion, family, and state in our daily lives. * Under the protection of St. Thomas More, martyr, and patron of lawyers, judges, civil servants, politicians, statesmen, and large families (not to mention troubled marriages).
O Glorious St. Thomas More, Patron of Statesmen, Politicians, Judges and Lawyers, your life of prayer and penance and your zeal for justice, integrity and firm principle in public and family life led you to the path of martyrdom and sainthood. Intercede for our Statesmen, Politicians, Judges and Lawyers, that they may be courageous and effective in their defense and promotion of the sanctity of human life - the foundation of all other human rights. We ask this through Christ our Lord. AMEN.
Pray that, for the glory of God and in the pursuit of His justice, I may be able in argument, accurate in analysis, keen in study, correct in conclusion, loyal to clients, honest with all, courteous to adversaries, trustworthy with confidences, courageous in court. Sit with me at my desk and listen with me to my clients' tales. Read with me in my library and stand always beside me so that today I shall not, to win a point, lose my soul.
Pray that my family may find in me what yours found in you: friendship and courage, cheerfulness and charity, diligence in duties, counsel in adversity, patience in pain -- their good servant, and God's first. AMEN.
Dear Scholar and Martyr, it was not the King of England but you who were the true Defender of the Faith. Like Christ unjustly condemned, neither promises nor threats could make you accept a civil ruler as head of the Christian Church.
Perfect in your honesty and love of truth, grant that lawyers and judges may imitate you and achieve true justice for all people. AMEN.
"Give me the Grace Good Lord, to set the world at naught; to set my mind fast upon Thee and not to hang upon the blast of men's mouths. To be content to be solitary. Not to long for worldly company but utterly to cast off the world and rid my mind of the business thereof."
"The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest."
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"What does it avail to know that there is a God, which you not only believe by Faith, but also know by Reason: what does it avail that you know Him if you think little of Him?"
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"The things that we pray for, good Lord, give us grace to labour for."
Give me, good Lord, a full faith and a fervent charity, a love of you, good Lord, incomparable above the love of myself; and that I love nothing to your displeasure but everything in an order to you.
Take from me, good Lord, this lukewarm fashion, or rather cold manner of meditation and this dullness in praying to you. And give me warmth, delight and life in thinking about you.
And give me your grace to long for your holy sacraments and specially to rejoice in the presence of your blessed body, sweet Saviour Christ, in the holy sacrament of the altar, and duly to thank you for your gracious coming. AMEN.
"It is necessary to go back to seeing the family as the sanctuary of life... In the face of the so-called culture of death, the family is the heart of the culture of life" (Centesimus Annus, #39).
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