Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Playing Dirty
Obama and the Dems apparently want to play dirty. How dirty? Well, according to Victor Davis Hanson, about as dirty as any election campaign ever. And that just might prove to be their undoing.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Good Question
CNN's Wolf Blitzer recently asked conservative commentator Bill Bennett what "one question" he would like to ask Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama. Bennett said he would ask the junior Illinois senator:
"Why are you to the left of NARAL, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein when it comes to abortion? Are you really there? I've got to question the guy's moral judgment who doesn't see a problem with killing a baby after it's been born. What is the answer to that question?"
Bennett was of course referring to Obama's fierce public opposition to Illinois' Born Alive Infants Protection Act. The legislation would have declared all live babies legal persons, which would guarantee them the protection of appropriate medical care--even if they were abortion survivors.
Former Gore campaign manager, Donna Brazile, impatiently interrupted the conversation between Blitzer and Bennett quipping: "Bill, you want to have a conversation about narrow issues … but the American people want to talk about gas prices."
Oh really? Thanks for setting our priorities straight, Donna!
"Why are you to the left of NARAL, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein when it comes to abortion? Are you really there? I've got to question the guy's moral judgment who doesn't see a problem with killing a baby after it's been born. What is the answer to that question?"
Bennett was of course referring to Obama's fierce public opposition to Illinois' Born Alive Infants Protection Act. The legislation would have declared all live babies legal persons, which would guarantee them the protection of appropriate medical care--even if they were abortion survivors.
Former Gore campaign manager, Donna Brazile, impatiently interrupted the conversation between Blitzer and Bennett quipping: "Bill, you want to have a conversation about narrow issues … but the American people want to talk about gas prices."
Oh really? Thanks for setting our priorities straight, Donna!
Monday, September 15, 2008
The End of the Matter
Recently, I was reading through Thomas Carlyle’s brilliant biographical notes on the life and work of Oliver Cromwell when I stumbled across a refreshing insight. According to Carlyle, most serious attempts at social, political, or theological analysis in the modern era are dreary and repetitive affairs of ill-informed “shot-rubbish” and “dry-as-dust” inanities. Instead of throwing the light of understanding on an issue, they are little more than:
“Confusion piled on confusion to the utmost horizon’s edge: obscure, in the lurid twilight as of the shadow of death; trackless without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant pedants, dilettantes, and doleful creatures by phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire. There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some unbelieving generations, does the truth lie hidden from us.”
In other words, most works of modern analysis are merely the restatement of the obvious, the scandalous, or the insidious. They are negative and mundane simply because tomes of criticism are far easier to churn out than quartos of positive prediction or of constructive hope.
Carlyle’s telling indictment of such “droning melancholy skepticisms” and “dismal torpedo narratives” reminded me that perhaps the most important thing that I could ever say about Planned Parenthood was actually as yet unsaid. It struck me that there was little need for another rehearsal of pro-abortion woes or even another anthem of pro-life resolves. Instead, it seemed to me that the need of the moment is for a clear-eyed pronouncement of ultimate outcomes.
Though I had already come to the end of the matter, I had hardly come to what matters in the end.
The fact is, bad ideas don’t last. Though they seem to regularly torment the human experience across the span of history, their tenure at any one given time is actually quite short-lived. That may be the most important fact for us to grasp about Planned Parenthood—or any of the other modern malignancies that blithely distress this poor fallen world in which we live. But it is a fact that is all too easy to forget in the heat of controversy.
“Confusion piled on confusion to the utmost horizon’s edge: obscure, in the lurid twilight as of the shadow of death; trackless without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant pedants, dilettantes, and doleful creatures by phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire. There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some unbelieving generations, does the truth lie hidden from us.”
In other words, most works of modern analysis are merely the restatement of the obvious, the scandalous, or the insidious. They are negative and mundane simply because tomes of criticism are far easier to churn out than quartos of positive prediction or of constructive hope.
Carlyle’s telling indictment of such “droning melancholy skepticisms” and “dismal torpedo narratives” reminded me that perhaps the most important thing that I could ever say about Planned Parenthood was actually as yet unsaid. It struck me that there was little need for another rehearsal of pro-abortion woes or even another anthem of pro-life resolves. Instead, it seemed to me that the need of the moment is for a clear-eyed pronouncement of ultimate outcomes.
Though I had already come to the end of the matter, I had hardly come to what matters in the end.
The fact is, bad ideas don’t last. Though they seem to regularly torment the human experience across the span of history, their tenure at any one given time is actually quite short-lived. That may be the most important fact for us to grasp about Planned Parenthood—or any of the other modern malignancies that blithely distress this poor fallen world in which we live. But it is a fact that is all too easy to forget in the heat of controversy.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Small Things
The character of John McCain and Sarah Palin can best be seen in the small things rather than in the big policies--as this amazing Rush Limbaugh Transcript demonstrates only too well.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Sarah's Shake-Up
Some pundits have claimed that Sarah Palin has already changed the face of American politics. New evidence of that has emerged in one of the most unlikely places—in the studios of NBC News.
When Palin lamented media bias during her acceptance speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.” Yesterday, NBC responded by demoting MSNBC co-anchors, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Instead, NBC News correspondent David Gregory will anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. The stridently left-leaning Olbermann and the combative liberal Matthews will remain, but only as analysts during the coverage.
Apparently, the move came after months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network. But, the open acrimony and last-place ratings during the Republican convention, ultimately did in the pro-abort, anti-war, red-diaper duo.
When Palin lamented media bias during her acceptance speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.” Yesterday, NBC responded by demoting MSNBC co-anchors, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. Instead, NBC News correspondent David Gregory will anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. The stridently left-leaning Olbermann and the combative liberal Matthews will remain, but only as analysts during the coverage.
Apparently, the move came after months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network. But, the open acrimony and last-place ratings during the Republican convention, ultimately did in the pro-abort, anti-war, red-diaper duo.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Noonan Takes Aim
Peggy Noonan is always brilliant, insightful, and trenchant. Her editorial in today's Wall Street Journal is a case in point. In it, she offers vital counsel to John McCain and Sarah Palen on the eve of the most important speeches either of them has ever made. I sure hope and pray they reads it.
At one point, Noonan writes:
"I do not understand the absence of humor, that powerful weapon, that rhetorical cannon, in this year's campaign. There are a lot of things to say here but let me tell you the first I think of. America is a huge and lonely country. We are vast, stretch coast to coast, live in self-sufficient pods; modern culture tends us toward the atomic, the fractured and broken up. When two people meet, as they come to know each other as neighbors or colleagues, one of the great easers, one of the great ways of making a simple small human connection is: shared laughter. We are a political nation. We talk politics. So fill that area with humor: sly humor, teasing humor, humor that speaks a great truth or makes a sharp point."
And then, this:
"Because Sarah Palin jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale-Gender-Studies sense but the How-Do-I-Reload-This-Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract-Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing--who is really one of them and who is not--and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy. She could become a transformative political presence. So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick. And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there. There are only two questions. 1. Can she take it? Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself? 2. And while she's taking it, rolling with it and sailing through, can she put herself forward convincingly as serious enough, grounded enough, weighty enough that the American people can imagine her as vice president of the United States? I suppose every candidate for vice president faces these questions to some degree, but because Palin is new, unknown, and a woman, it's all much more so."
Amen and amen. Hear and heed, McCain and Palen.
At one point, Noonan writes:
"I do not understand the absence of humor, that powerful weapon, that rhetorical cannon, in this year's campaign. There are a lot of things to say here but let me tell you the first I think of. America is a huge and lonely country. We are vast, stretch coast to coast, live in self-sufficient pods; modern culture tends us toward the atomic, the fractured and broken up. When two people meet, as they come to know each other as neighbors or colleagues, one of the great easers, one of the great ways of making a simple small human connection is: shared laughter. We are a political nation. We talk politics. So fill that area with humor: sly humor, teasing humor, humor that speaks a great truth or makes a sharp point."
And then, this:
"Because Sarah Palin jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale-Gender-Studies sense but the How-Do-I-Reload-This-Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract-Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing--who is really one of them and who is not--and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy. She could become a transformative political presence. So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick. And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there. There are only two questions. 1. Can she take it? Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself? 2. And while she's taking it, rolling with it and sailing through, can she put herself forward convincingly as serious enough, grounded enough, weighty enough that the American people can imagine her as vice president of the United States? I suppose every candidate for vice president faces these questions to some degree, but because Palin is new, unknown, and a woman, it's all much more so."
Amen and amen. Hear and heed, McCain and Palen.
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