It is commonplace for liberals to sneer at “slippery slope” arguments – the fear that some infringement upon liberty will lead to further loss of freedom down the road. (For some reason, there seems to be little fear that “slippery slopes” can lead in the other direction.) Talk about the assault weapons ban leading to more stringent gun control, for example, and gun-control zealots will | Read More »
Without a strong central values system guiding a society, it becomes focused on the individual, which thrusts individuals into competition with one another and deprives them of any larger identity, purpose or context. The result is a society composed of people acting for personal pleasure, which leads them to neglect others and their own families, and abuse each other out of aggressive competition for social | Read More »
I don’t imagine Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner ever expected to end up as the philosophical poster-child of The New American Left. The Left is famous for raising taxes. Geithner may or may not even bother to pay his in any given year. Yet it happened during a light moment he experienced while testifying up on Capitol Hill. His statement to Congressman Ryan could accurately describe | Read More »
I will admit up-front that I am far from an unbiased observer when it comes to Jonah Goldberg. I am a fan. And I have been lucky enough to get to know him some over the years and consider him a friend. So feel free to factor that in to what follows. But even with that caveat, there is a small part of me that | Read More »
The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own. (HT: Yahoo News) I’m thinking President Obama regrets two of his decisions right about now. He wishes he wasn’t about to hold the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC and he’d rather have Opus The Penguin as a Veep right now | Read More »
I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace.…I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort | Read More »
If this weekend has taught us anything politically, it’s that the left is not interested in facts. Once a template has been established, no amount of evidence is going to usurp their idea of how and why certain events have transpired. After the Discovery Channel hostage situation, Media Matters grabbed the mantle of leadership and advised against jumping to conclusions: Today they have some more | Read More »
The origins of the American Civil Liberties Union are deeply entangled with Communism. Not the idealistic “liberals in a hurry” stuff of fellow-travelling fairy tale, but the bloody-minded sedition and revolutionary terror of hard historical reality. [ACLU founder Roger] Baldwin’s radicalism caught the eye of the FBI, which quoted him in a 1924 report as having said: “The right to advocate a violent revolution, assassination, | Read More »
Several of my colleagues at What’s Wrong with the World have begun a hard-hitting series of posts entitled “Disinviting Islam.” Why “disinviting”? Because our country, having already rashly invited Islam, now faces a grueling challenge: will we or will we not allow the Jihadist faction to consolidate and expand within growing sphere of Islamic influence? Even under the supposedly hawkish anti-terror warmongers of the Bush | Read More »
The plain pulverizing fact is that our war is religious war. It matters not one lick how much our modern mind recoils from this; it matters not one lick that Liberalism barely even has the vocabulary to talk about it, and will react with blind fury against most anyone who does want to talk about it. Looking over the modern world and all its proliferating | Read More »
Michelle Obama received a lot of criticism a few years ago when she said “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” She said it was not just because Barack Obama was winning, but because ‘people are hungry for change.’ It was a stunning admission – an acknowledgment that she could not ‘really’ be proud of her country | Read More »
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, the German newspaper editor Josef Joffe contributes an intriguing if somewhat ungainly little essay; its subject is the mosque in Hamburg where Mohamed Atta and other September 11th conspirators plotted their treachery. German authorities recently shut it down. One of its jihadist preachers was finally tried and imprisoned. “This is where Imam Muhammad al-Fazazi used to preach venom and murder | Read More »
Mind you, Matt Welch is not surprised that it has; otherwise, his fairly comprehensive evisceration of this Salon article whining about the maturity level of libertarianism would have been a good deal more, ah, exercised. I imagine that being editor-in-chief for Reason generally means that one gets used fairly quickly to the pander-then-minimize cycle that libertarians get from both Democrats and Republicans – I say | Read More »
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