It’s not even what’s IN this 2,000 page monstrosity of a healthcare bill that is at issue anymore, it’s what enacting it represents. Remember, it was only a couple hundred years ago that a King’s tyranny and despotism gave birth to a Nation of men and women more willing to die for liberty than live for the whims and fancies of an elite class hell bent on expanding their wealth and power on the backs of those having to live hand to mouth just to survive.

Rasmussen reports today that a meager 38% of us “favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats.” In fact, the article goes on to suggest that 56% actually oppose it. The aristocrats on the Hill, meanwhile, continue to push forward with the most un-American, un-Patriotic legislation presented to the American people…their BOSSES…since the New deal. ANY socialized Government-run system runs counter to everything our Founding Fathers fought and died for, and voting for it runs counter to everything being an “American” is supposed to represent.

We’ve given the ruling class Tea Parties, and they call us Nazis. We’ve had protests and rallies and we’ve crashed their phone systems trying to tell them no, and they’ve thrown the race card in our face. They’ve tried to define “we, the People” along party lines by suggesting the GOP is just the party of “no”, while the Democrats are the party “fulfilling an agenda of progress and change”. [For the record, I'll take "party of no" over "party of death" any day.]

The health care debate is not about health care, it’s not about what race you are, and it’s certainly not about which party you’re affiliated with. The health care debate is about who really runs this country. Is it the American taxpayer, or is it the power-monger on Capitol Hill?

Read More →

Marty Peretz of the New Republic is usually a thoughtful liberal.  I enjoy the New Republic.  That’s why I was rather stunned by this article.

Some parents don’t like the idea of the President beeming his image into every school in the country on Tuesday.  I think a lot of people have gotten carried away with criticizing the president on this, but I’ll admit that I dislike it, too.  I dislike it not because the President’s speech is too political, but because it is not political.  As I note here, the President really has  nothing to say about government policy.  Here’s the speech in a nutshell:  “Welcome back to school.  Stay in school, work hard.”  

My kids don’t need to hear that from the President.  This is a President who once again shows that he has no idea of the proper role of government.  If the President wants to talk about governmental affairs, great.  I’d love for him to stop by our school to do so.  That would be a great experience for the kids.  But I do not want the President trying to raise my children.  When people ask, “how can you object to the President urging kids to stay in school,” I ask them what they’d think if I stopped by their house one night, uninvited, to tell their kids how to behave.

But Marty Peretz takes the cake.  You know what Peretz thinks?  He writes, ”it is almost disloyal to refuse any children the right to hear him.  Disloyal and nutty.”  Well gee, Martin, thanks for the “almost,” at least on the first try.  

Where’s Hillary when you need her?

It is well known that John Adams had imagined that July second would be the day that future generations of Americans would remember as their day of independence from England, the nation’s birthday, if you will. It was, after all, on the second that it was proclaimed “(T)hat these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

But it was two days later that those gathered in defiance to the King declared a “Declaration of Independency” thereby adopting the famed document that carefully delineated the natural rights by which they claimed independence followed by a list of grievances that would explain why they invoked those rights.

So what are we celebrating? Is it our birth as a nation or are we celebrating the document of Independence? Early celebrations were mixed and a bit confused on that point. Additionally, celebrations on July fourth weren’t that common for a time after the Revolution was over. At first, not many felt a need to celebrate something that had happened and was over. It was time to move on from war in many American’s eyes.

Read More →

I was sitting in a local bookstore not long ago and overhead a conversation that seemed emblematic of so much of what is going on in this country today. A young man lamented his choice of a mate but insisted he loved her dearly. But every effusive claim of undying fealty came coupled with a “but” that amounted to how he wanted her to change so she would be even better.

The two young men in their late 20s or early 30s sat sipping latte and talking of their world and I could not help but hear as they sat immediately behind me. One was a perfectly representative slacker type. Baseball cap on backwards, sports jersey, reedy mustache, and the newest sports gym shoes revealed his personae. His friend was a backpack sporting, ponytailed wearing, be-speckled type with sandaled feet poking out of the bottom of his torn jeans. They were both pretty representative of generation now with their talk of video games, their admiration of Obama — though without any factual knowledge from which to justify that admiration — as well as their PDAs, cell phones and laptops computers all glowing with use.

Read More →

One thing we know about the last Great Depression is that it unleashed some of the most awful political ideas ever known to man. Economic dislocation and crisis often have that effect: provoking and liberating that which is most base and wicked in the politics of man. Here, for instance, we have a comment on the faithlessness set loose upon the world in the 1930s, from a great scientist of despair and treason whose penance for his own was his long perseverance in a cause he thought doomed, Whittaker Chambers:

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors — men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, man banded together by millions, in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

The horror of treason is its sin against the spirit. And for him who violates this truth there rises inevitably Bukarin’s “absolutely black vacuity,” which is in reality a circle of absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution. For this loneliness is a penalty inflicted by a justice that transcends the merely summary justice of men. It is the retributive meaning of treason because it is also one of the meanings of Hell.

Read More →

In one of Redstate’s previous iterations, several years back, some of us maintained a running debate on the meaning of patriotism. The old archive site does not lend itself to facile searching, so I fear that much of what follows will be both repetitive and inadequate; but this was always (for me at least) a fruitful conversation, despite its many difficulties and frustrations, and I see no reason why it should not continue.

The parties to this debate are many, their individual nuances and complexities abundant, but the main lines of argument cluster around a series of questions. (1) How much of the content of patriotism is ideological, that is, how much does the love of one’s patria depend upon the political ideas associated with the patria? (2) What is the role of pre-rational passion or affection or veneration in the formation and maintenance of patriotism? (3) How do the reasoning and feeling aspects of man bear upon his love for his native land?

Each of these questions presents us with some presuppositions and some implications. Question (3), for instance, presupposes that man is a dualistic creature; that reasoning and feeling mean different things, but are each part of what it means to be man. Question (1), meanwhile, implies a disputation not merely over what political ideas should be included in patriotism, but even over whether political ideas, of any kind, should be included at all.

Let us briefly consider a single political idea, or at least a single category of political idea, in its relation to patriotism: democracy. The word means rule by the many, which in practice translates to some kind of majoritarian, plebiscitary, or representative rule. Democracy also strongly implies political equality as a driving principle. This brings it into some tension with another common political idea, namely freedom, because freedom, in order to have any meaning, must allow for possibility of unequal outcomes. Democracy, especially when it is preached as a universal ideal, also comes into tension with particular loyalties. Strictly speaking, the natural family is an offense against equality: its internal arrangements are hierarchical and particular, especially with respect to those outside it. And from the universal perspective, favoring one’s own nation or people is certainly an offensive against equality.

Read More →

I am tired of many things going on today, things that seem designed to undermine and destroy our great country. Certainly, we all have the right to express our opinions and, naturally, every American holding any particular ideology will see things that do not correspond to his idea of the “real America” at any given time. It is right and good that we, as citizens, should seek to make the changes we think necessary to make our country strong. We can all agree that people of intelligence and integrity might agree to disagree, but there are some things about a country that, when abandoned or abruptly changed, creates a place markedly different than what it was previously.

These sorts of seminal changes in the fabric of a nation should only be undertaken when that fabric is rotten even to its core. There have been bad spots of America that had to be surgically removed, we all know. But the core of this nation, despite its blemishes, is not now and never has been rotten.

And so I am tired of the many people who are native to this country that want to destroy what it is to make it into what it isn’t, never was, and cannot be. If we wish this country to be as great into the future as it has been in the past this self-destructive behavior must be stopped.

Read More →

We know for a fact that it is a patriotic act for Americans to pay taxes, especially if one is a rich American. The Vice President of the United States said so when he was campaigning for the office. Not only did Joe Biden make such a remark, but he would later angrily defend his statement after it caused something of a stir, as Biden’s remarks often do. The former Senator told an audience of labor union members that it was about values:

“I tell you, Democrats,” Biden said, gritting his teeth. “Don’t you step down from anybody telling you that we don’t value, we don’t have American values. - I want this debate about values! I want this debate about American values.”

Make no mistake - paying taxes is patriotic. The wealthier you are, the more taxes you should pay. It’s your patriotic duty. Democrats believe that paying taxes should be like voting. It is something to be done early and often. So let it be written. So let it be done.

Read More →