Via Insty, Arnold Kling:

Everyone agrees that the Republicans are just throwing sand in the gears of good government and not offering any ideas. What that means is that they are not offering ideas to enlarge government. Congressman Paul Ryan’s ideas do not count, because those would cut back on government, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

My point here is not to champion Republicans. It is not to champion democracy. My point is that the ones throwing the temper tantrum right now are the Progressives. They think that the 2008 election gave them the right to operate like China’s autocracy, and they are lashing out hysterically at those they perceive as preventing them from doing so. On the one hand, the villains are a small minority in the Senate. Or maybe the villains are the incoherent majority of the people.

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

Kinda OT, perhaps, but speaking of Paul Ryan, and the party that has “no ideas” on how to fix the government that Obama says out one side of his mouth is dysfunctional and broken, but out the other says is the answer to all our problems:

To make the economy — on which all else hinges — hum, Ryan proposes tax reform. Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system. Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard. It would have just two rates: 10 percent on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25 percent on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health-care tax credit (see below).

Today’s tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice: Every wrinkle in the code was put there to benefit this or that interest. Since the 1986 tax simplification, the code has been recomplicated more than 14,000 times — more than once a day.

At the 2004 Republican convention, thunderous applause greeted George W. Bush’s statement that the code is “a complicated mess” and a “drag on our economy” and his promise to “reform and simplify” it. But his next paragraphs proposed more complications to incentivize this and that behavior for the greater good.

Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world’s second-highest, would be replaced by an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive — and more able and eager to hire.

Ace says the whole thing is good, and he’s right. Ryan’s plan would seem to address everything we need to address, and does so in all the right ways (lots more info on the plan here and here).

Ryan is onto something here. The only problem I can see with it — which, were we still anywhere near the kind of country the Founders envisioned, would be a feature, not a bug — is that it doesn’t increase the size and power of the federal government, and empowers individuals by increasing their range of choices. That’ll make it anathema to Democrat Socialists, no matter how well it might actually work. If more people start taking notice, look for them to begin demagoguing the living shit out of it, toot sweet.

No surprise here, either: Left nitwits are OUTRAGEOUSLY OUTRAGED! over the Tebow ad and its blithe inclusion of “violence” against women, wherein he playfully tackles her and she chides him about how tough he is…or ain’t. Omri reminds them of their own sordid, disgusting history on that score:

The Tebow commercial oozes affection and shows Pam Tebow as the opposite of injured. The Palin commercial celebrates rage, showing Palin getting physically battered, slammed to the ground, and verbally assaulted – and that because of her political views. You’d think all those images would be much more troubling to feminists, what with the whole “it’s actual celebration of actual violence with actual misogynist undertones” thing.

But site searches on Marcotte’s home blog don’t show any hits for “terry tate” or for tate palin. Though in fairness the first hit for tebow is a post with the phrase “Tebow ‘women are nothing but vessels for male offspring’ clan.” So there’s that.

As is usual with these über-hypocritical douchebags, it only counts when someone they oppose is doing it. Plus, as with blacks who refuse to humbly accept their proper place on the Donk plantation, Palin isn’t really a woman, see. She’s “inauthentic” because she doesn’t think like they do.

Update! You stay classy, mouthbreathers.

Meaning: the Obama regime is lying. Again.

Funny how liberal idiots complain loud and long about an out-of-control federal government’s illegitimate usurpation of power — particularly the overreach of the executive branch — when Republicans are in charge, but moan and bitch about how America consists mainly of an ungovernable mob of angry, violent, ignorant peasants when they’re the ones seeking to slip the chains of statist servitude around our necks. Or, put another way: WAAAAH! Jay Cost offers a much-needed civics lesson:

Let’s acknowledge that governing the United States of America is an extremely difficult task. Intentionally so. When designing our system, the Founders were faced with a dilemma. How to empower a vigorous government without endangering liberty or true republicanism? On the one hand, George III’s government was effective at satisfying the will of the sovereign, but that will had become tyrannical. On the other hand, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged the rights of the states, but so much so that the federal government was incapable of solving basic problems.

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind – but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.

The President’s two major initiatives – cap-and-trade and health care – have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That’s a good thing.

The country sure looks to be ungovernable, all right — by left-wing extremists like the authoritarians in the Democrat Socialist Party. Which is kinda tough on the left-wing extremists, I guess. But it’s a-okay with the rest of us. Contrary to progressivist thinking, what we need is a lot more of the Founders’ vision for the US, and a lot less of progressivist anti-Constitutionalism.

Update! Snooty, elitist Leftard wonders: is our “living” Constitution too rigid and restrictive to accommodate our wondrous socialist vision?

The framers worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping point they feared: Maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogeneous population of 310 million. When the Constitution was written and the Senate created, there were around 4 million people in America, or about one senator for every 150,000 people. For Congress to be as representative as it was in 1789, we’d need to elect 2,000 senators and 5,000 House members. And so I wonder, as I watch Senate leaders irresponsibly playing to the noisiest, angriest parts of the peanut gallery, if the current, possibly suicidal spectacle of anti-government “populism” in Washington isn’t connected to our bloated people-to-Congresspeople ratios. As the institution grows ever more unrepresentative, more numerically elite, members of Congress may feel irresistible pressure to act like wild and crazy small-d democrats.

In other words, even the meaningless blather to which our sneaky living-document subterfuge has reduced the Constitution is still too protective of individual rights to grant us the absolute power we desire; the ungovernable rabble needs to wake up and recognize that we nanny-statists know what’s best for them. Or, put another way: WAAAAH!

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Recently, a rather idiotic meme has begun to meander it’s way through the Leftwitosphere: Republicans are nihilists.

Click here for a definition of the word nihilism.

My first reaction to this over at Dennis the Peasant’s place (he reads Andrew Sullivan so you don’t have to!) was hysterical laughter.  This was followed by a pretty blunt statement that once again, as always, the Lefties are projecting.  You know.  Psychologically.  Psychological projection is the act of denying one’s own faults and then attributing those same faults to others.  In this particular case it’s the Left denying their love affair with non-existence followed by their utterly foolish claim that the Right, who bases most of their ideology* on a love of life, is nihilistic.

Think about this for a bit.  The Left, which stubbornly clings to their centuries old vision of Utopia Through Eugenics by supporting abortion at every possible turn, whose hatred for Sarah Palin is based mostly on her choice to have children early and often, who respects life so little they refuse to properly punish those who murderously take it, is claiming that it is their political opponents that are nihilists.

Really?

That’s some 99.9995 fine grade A clear flawless prime cut crazy right there.  If I may be allowed to mix several metaphors and similes up together and club you with them, which I obviously am, aren’t I?  You’re still sitting there reading, aren’t you?

What’s really got me irritated about all this is John Scalzi picking up on the meme and thinking he can get away with repeating it if he just tortures the logic enough.  I wouldn’t be bothered so much by this, but dammitall, an author of all people should be able to at least click a link or three for the proper definition of the word.  There’s no fucking excuse for getting this wrong, at least not for someone in his position.  My position?  Sure.  I’m just some no name hack with posting privileges.  But a published author?  No.

John, if you’re reading this, “Filibuster everything and let the entire mainstream media except Fox News do the rest” was what the Democrats did from ‘94 until ‘06, but try as I might I simply cannot find a single thing on your website about how this made them “goddamned nihilists”.  Perhaps you could clarify the point?

*When the Right can be said to have a unified, coherent ideology, which isn’t very damned often.  Usually it’s the social cons fighting the fiscal cons until the stupid cons take over.  Argh.  With any luck the Tea Party types will be wildly successful at taking over the Republican Party from the bottom up, the way they plan.  I always did prefer the fiscal cons to the rest of the bunch.  Every freedom worth having flows from economic freedom.

SHOULDN’T “SUPERBOWL” BE THE NAME OF THE BOWLING CHAMPIONSHIP?

Rush and the Hutch discuss the game here:

RUSH: Hey, Hutch, what do you think about my idea — in honor of Black History Month next Monday — to serve the staff fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread and watermelon?

HUTCH: I think you got one thing missing.

RUSH: What?

HUTCH: Me.

RUSH: (laughing)

And me, too.

Let’s try our hand at Rush’s old schtick, the Politically-Correct Superbowl Pick.

You’ve got the New Orleans Saints with Drew Brees vs. the Indianapolis Colts and Payton Manning.

“Saints” sounds religious, so that’s one point against them. However, Orleans is in France, the spiritual home of lefties. plus one. But another word for “New” is “Neo”. ’nuff said. minus one.

Drew Brees sounds like what begins when a beautiful butterfly flaps his wings. plus two.

On the other side, you’ve got the Colts. At first blush, you might think a baby horse would elicit sympathy from the Politically-Correct. But horses are non-native species introduced by those horrible Europeans. minus one. Indianapolis, however, sounds like “Indian”, and “polis” is Greek for “Please don’t send Arianna back to Greece–we just got rid of her!” plus 2.

Unfortunately, Payton Manning sounds too testosterone-ish and manly. minus one.

When you add it all up, the teams are tied. So the Politically-Correct pick is… the first tied Superbowl in history:

Team officials from the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts emerged from a tense, 12-hour negotiating session Thursday and told reporters that, while they had yet to reach a settlement that would prevent a massive on-field conflict, the AFC and NFC champions were committed to resolving the Super Bowl through diplomatic channels.

“Playing this Super Bowl is our last resort,” said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who was flanked by the coaches and quarterbacks for the opposing teams. “Yes, there are some difficult issues that need to be hashed out, such as who will be the game’s MVP, the number of total passing yards for each quarterback, and which team will be named Super Bowl champion, but I think we made progress today.”

“The Colts and the Saints are unwavering in their commitment to avoid any violence and wish to resolve the Super Bowl peacefully, without a single football being thrown,” Goodell added.

I WILL IF YOU WILL

George Will:

In 2013, when President Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor, is counting his blessings, at the top of his list will be the name of his vice president: Paul Ryan. …

To make the economy — on which all else hinges — hum, Ryan proposes tax reform. Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system. Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard. It would have just two rates: 10 percent on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25 percent on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health-care tax credit .

Today’s tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice: Every wrinkle in the code was put there to benefit this or that interest. Since the 1986 tax simplification, the code has been recomplicated more than 14,000 times — more than once a day.

At the 2004 Republican convention, thunderous applause greeted George W. Bush’s statement that the code is “a complicated mess” and a “drag on our economy” and his promise to “reform and simplify” it. But his next paragraphs proposed more complications to incentivize this and that behavior for the greater good.

Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world’s second-highest, would be replaced by an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive — and more able and eager to hire.

Medicare and Social Security would be preserved for those currently receiving benefits or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today). Both programs would be made permanently solvent.

Universal access to affordable health care would be guaranteed by refundable tax credits ($2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families) for purchasing portable coverage in any state.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. PRESIDENT

Paul Kengor notes that Republicans around the nation have spontaneously begun celebrating Reagan Day dinners, and he tells this story:

… A state visit by England’s Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip was upcoming, and protocol demanded that the White House provide gifts. Clark, Reagan, and a few others brainstormed following a morning briefing. For Philip, Clark suggested a “Western belt.” He had one in mind, made by Si Jenkins, a Santa Barbara friend of both Clark and the president. (Reagan, too, was a California rancher.)

“Well, what does it look like?” asked Reagan. Clark noted he had a model in the car: Joe, who was wearing the belt. “Send him up,” ordered the president. They called for Joe, who entered via the door of Reagan’s secretary.

Joe had worked for the federal government for half a century, but had never been within 50 yards of the Oval Office. He walked in. He saw Clark, Vice President Bush, the senior aides, and the president of the United States. He was in awe, overcome. Suddenly, this tough six-foot-four man began weeping: He had come so far since Jim Crow and the Great Depression. He was choked up.

No one in the room was prepared for that reaction. They were dead silent, uncomfortable, unable to respond — except for Ronald Reagan. The president rose, walked over to the driver, extended his hand, breathed in, and said matter-of-factly, “Mr. Bullock, I understand you have a belt to show me?”

It was an “everyman” touch. And it put old Joe immediately at ease. Business-like, Joe showed the belt, and then he and Reagan began swapping stories, chatting away like old friends. …

No, this anecdote is nothing dramatic. It’s not like challenging Gorbachev to tear down the wall. It’s simply another of many small stories I hear constantly about Ronald Reagan. This was a good president and a good man. The White House needs more of them.

Indeed, it does.

Imagine for a moment that we had a president that selflessly served the nation in war and peace for his entire life.
A diplomat par excellence.
A champion of transparent government, education, commerce and the Bill of Rights.
A giant in national greatness and in national security.
A economic powerhouse, spreading wealth in his path.
A president so beloved by all, that he could, like a Washington, win re-election unopposed.

Well, we already had such a president–and no, it’s not Reagan.

It was James Monroe. That’s right.

Go here and you can read the First Pages of Harlow Giles Unger’s “The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness”.

You’ll learn how Monroe fought with Washington at Valley Forge, saved Tom Paine and Lafayette, secured the Louisiana Purchase, added so much wealth to the People that both deficits and personal taxes were abolished, just as his “Era of Good Feelings” abolished party politics. Then he capped his career with the Monroe Doctrine, effectively ending foreign threats to America for a century.

Only a few other presidents are in that league, and Reagan is one of them.

Here’s some more history from Sissy Willis, history for kids:

Music video as history lesson: Tim Alden Grant’s “Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration” with lead singer Thomas Jefferson.

A must view. Rousing music, sublime production values and compelling performances blend 18th- and 21st-century perspectives into the perfect historically-aware antidote to the “ideas” of clueless North Carolina education “leaders” who are proposing to revamp the state’s 11th-grade curriculum by skipping the Revolution and Civil War and covering U.S. history “only from 1877 onward”…

If that’s the false choice, we’d do better to teach them only from 1877 backward.

As the late Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin put it:

“Trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.”

It’s quite a compelling video–sort of a Marilyn Manson meets Madison & Hamilton, with vocals by the Adams cousins; John Adams, Sam Adams and Adam Ant. I liked Jefferson’s electric fiddle solo myself. You’ll laugh, trust me.

I think Reagan would certainly approve. After all, he loved the Founders. And as a child, he would attend Fourth of July parades to watch the veterans march–Civil War veterans!

And as a man, he said this:

“I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table [even in Massachusetts--ed.]. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ‘em know and nail ‘em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.”

You would know, Mr. President, you would know.

Click here and be repulsed.

Hat tip Rodger the Real King of France, who really needs to get his eyes checked.

IT’S GREEK TO ME

…but then, it’s Greek to the Greeks, too!

Mark Steynophonopolous:

When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece’s future when even the Greeks have figured out you can’t make it add up. … Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life.

“Comfortable”?

The Greco-roamin’ Victor Davis Hanson:

I lived in Greece for more than two years, and one of my best memories is of a small hotelier at a seaside resort. He checked you in; he cooked; he did the landscaping at night; he did all the maintenance during the day. I asked him why he didn’t hire more help, since his hotel wasn’t all that small and he seemed to be going 24/7. What followed was a harangue about the cost of hiring a permanent worker in Greece, the difficulty of ever firing him if he proved worthless, and why he preferred to do everything himself rather than fill out all sorts of forms and hire unmotivated but tenured employees. Besides, he said, almost everyone was on some sort of pension, disability, or government benefit, and was unwilling to work, so his choices were either illegal immigrants or broke foreign students. Then he launched into a blast against socialism, and explained how he was forced to become an expert tax dodger, how he would barter for all the transactions he could, and why he hated the government.

Damned Thermopylaean Tea-baggers!

Wasn’t it the noted moral philosopher Joe Walsh who once said “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks”? No, it wasn’t. It was Henley and Frey with Buffett on background vocals. I just wanted to be the first person in the history of the world to use the phrase “the noted moral philosopher Joe Walsh”.

The Greeks indeed want no freaks–with the obvious exception of Zsa Zsa Huffington, who attracts freaks like Arnold Ziffel draws flies. Fresh Air!

Mike already covered the “Unsustainable” spending (as sung by Miss Natalie Cole), but there’s another intriguing word floating around out there:

“Unexpectedly”.

As in

“The unemployment rate was unexpectedly worse this month, said economists. Just like last month. And the month before. And the month before that. And…”

When something does the same thing every month for a year, why is that “unexpected”? Sure, you hope it will get better–unless you’re a Cloward-Pivenist–but why the surprise if it doesn’t?

There’s a new wrinkle in Obama’s Grecian Economic Formula this month: the unemployment numbers were “unexpectedly” better–because thousands simply dropped out of the job search effort!

Perversely, if 5 million more Americans did that, the unemployment numbers would look really, really good.

Hit it, Nat:

“Unexpectedly

That’s what you are

Unexpectedly

Can’t count that far

“Saved or Created” is so risible

Your job growth, it is invisible

I think you’ll be unemployed

Unexpectedly too-ooo!”

World-class macro-economist Joe Walsh couldn’t have said it any better.

Saturday Steyn, on the Malignant Narcissist in Chief and his merry, thieving Emirs of Kleptocristan:

The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah: “Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when theeconomic downturn began, the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Obama lecturing anybody on fiscal responsibility is like Traci Lords — bless her little heart — opining on the evils of promiscuity. Useful, maybe, if approached as a cautionary tale of the horror lurking in the belly of the beast, from someone who has learned from bitter experience and turned aside to take another path. But for King Dipshit, there is no horror in his stunning economic profligacy, and his approach is (as usual) a smarmy, disingenuous, self-serving political one; by his low-wattage left-wing lights, things are going swimmingly, and proceeding exactly according to plan. Anybody who thinks the craptastic creep actually wants to keep capitalism shipshape and humming efficiently along, rather than “stimulating” it into a spectacular crash and burn from whose ashes the Almighty State can rise like a screeching carrion-bird, is kidding themselves.

Ok, the title’s a tease.  I certainly don’t have the chops of Mr. Swift.  But I do have a proposal.

I love this show.  Love it.  HD DVR type love.  Religiously watch every episode, and I don’t even care to watch most (well over 99.95%) of television type love.

While watching the latest episode I realized that the attraction was the demonstration of the amazing ingenuity of the people who build on human knowledge to refine current products and invent new ones.  It’s damned humbling.  What have I invented?  Zero, zip, nada.  In what material way has my fellow man benefit from my ingenuity?  Ditto.  Why, I realized quite painfully, I am no better than a politician!  Very humbling indeed.

And so, since humility is in such short supply amongst our ruling class, I propose that we ratify a Constitutional Amendment requiring every politician in the land to attentively watch, doing nothing else and under armed guard, at least 1 hour of How It’s Made every day of their term.  After each hour, a short essay test will be administered.  Failure to pass the test will result in watching the episode and taking the test again.  Any three failures in a 30 day period will result in automatic recall and a special election to fill their post.

Maybe, just maybe, such a requirement will result in more humility and fewer urges to poke their noses in where they are simply not needed.  If not, well, there’s always tar and feathers.

Gillespie’s been ripping it up of late with his post titles: “Liberals Wouldn’t Have to be So Condescending if The People Who Disagreed With Them Weren’t Such Idiots” and “Outgoing Dem. Senator Finishing Ted Kennedy’s Term Laments End of Single-Party Rule, Asks That Oppo Party Gets The Message That They Should Do Whatever Dems Ask,” for starters. Of course, the posts themselves are always worth a look, too.

WELL, MAYBE NOT QUITE…

“Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?”–Ronald Reagan

Mike Rosen:

“Throw the bums out!” That’s the message of a fiery call to action circulating on the Internet. In essence, it urges “we the people” to “take this country back” by voting every incumbent in the U.S. Congress out of office in November 2010. …

This throw-the-bums-out call for action concedes that a few members of Congress are trustworthy but screams that “as a group they are absolutely the most corrupt bunch ever to disgrace our nation,” so they all must go. The objective is to start over with people with no experience, owing no political favors, who will “understand that they work for us.”

This is childishly naïve. It imagines that all Americans are angry and frustrated about the same things. There is no collective “us.” The right is angry about Obamacare’s march toward socialized medicine, and the left is angry that it’s not socialistic enough. The right wants a bigger troop surge in Afghanistan; the left wants us to pull out entirely. And so-called moderates, as usual, aren’t sure what they want but would like everyone to get along.

Democrats don’t think their congressional majority is corrupt; they’re just doing God’s work and making the deals necessary to bring it about. (Sharks don’t think they’re engaged in a feeding frenzy; they’re just having lunch.) Republicans are playing the role of the loyal opposition, desperately holding back the socialist tide. Why would a rational Republican or a conservative independent in Colorado want to vote against Rep. Mike Coffman, former state treasurer, legislator, Marine veteran of the Iraq war and, now, first-term congressman? What’s he done wrong? Rep. Raul Ryan is a bright, articulate, reasonable, up-and-coming conservative Republican congressman from Wisconsin. He’s an emerging leader of the party. Why dump him?

Since conservatives are the only ones who would respond to this call, the result would be to throw out all our guys only. You first, liberals.

No, the place to do this is in the primaries. The Republican primaries, where you can actually have a disproportionate voice if you make the effort to get involved. Myself, I only support third parties when Repubs lose the plot, such as the Doug Hoffman race. I generally agree with Reagan, Limbaugh and Palin about third parties–although the Tea Party movement is not a political party per se.

* Jim Hoft is liveblogging the Tea Party gathering. Breitbart and Palin are there.

* Others question whether this–or any–particular organizer has the right to claim the Tea Party “brand” for himself.

* Dan Riehl says Tancredo is stupidish to repeat the Glenn Beck riff, ‘Better that McCain lost.’ That’s not just a yes-or-no question; it’s a yes-and-no deal. But Riehl is right, I think.

I’m concerned that conservatives not split their votes, thus electing more liberals. But if going to the Tea Parties makes you a Tea Partier, then “Ich bin ein Lipton-er,” too. Or as old Sam Adams put it:

“Go on, then, in your generous enterprise, with gratitude to heaven, for past success, and confidence of it in the future. For my own part, I ask no greater blessing than to share with you the common danger and common glory. If I have a wish dearer to my soul, than that my ashes may be mingled with those of a Warren and Montgomery – it is – that these American States may never cease to be free and independent!”

Welcome to my tea party, baby!

UPDATE: Prof. Hanson says it well:

It won’t be enough for conservatives to say they are not Obama, and not ready to become a socialist Belgium. They need far more — a systematic agenda that outlines exactly how Americans are to become fiscally solvent, what and how much should be cut, a vow to end the congressional culture of corruption and become Spartan in our congressional habits, a confident energy policy that encourages nuclear, natural gas, and oil drilling to tide us over to new sources of energies, and a new resolve to enforce our borders, and end the naïve posturing of treating our war against Islamic jihadism as some sort of interesting legal debate that bounces around the philosophy department lounge. … With such stakes, it is a great time to be alive in the arena. And each according to his station should be excited that he can, must rise to the occasion to ward off this latest challenge to the old notion of a republic of free and independent citizens — who aren’t quite yet willing to surrender what the great generations of the past suffered so much to pass on to us.

UPPITY UPDATE: Angela McGlowan and Joseph Farah address the Tea Party on C-SPAN, even though C-SPAN is chock full of those health care negotiations.

Additional radio coverage available at WND.

Fox coverage here.

From Steyn:

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government.  What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California became the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time.

There’s a lesson in all this, to be sure:

Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few Nato members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of expenditure on defense fell from 24 per cent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 per cent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford? Cut back on nanny-state lollipops? Or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise – see the Franco-Prussian, the Austro-Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars and many others. But those were the days when traditional great power rivalry was resolved on the battled. Today we have post-modern post-great power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

 And that’s the optimistic scenario – because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is because America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Oh, not to worry; Obama and the rest of his like-dimwitted cohorts will be perfectly comfortable living as a Chinese protectorate…or satrapy. After all, it’s what we deserve as a comeuppance for our sixty years of “hegemony.” Naturally, Steyn addresses that eventuality too, saying, essentially, that it ain’t gonna happen; his prognosis is a lot bleaker. Read it all.

Update! More from Steyn, and when you think about it, not exactly unrelated:

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you?

I wonder what else is in that Nobel Peace Prize-winning report for no other reason than “we thought we should put it in.” Don’t forget, the IPCC’s sole source was the cuddly panda crowd over at the World Wildlife Fund. Donna Laframboise, a colleague of mine from the glory days at the National Post, did a simple search of the online version of the IPCC report and discovered dozens of citations of the WWF. It’s the sole source cited for doomsday predictions of glacier melt not only in the Himalayas but also the Andes and the Alps, as well as for a multitude of other topics, from coral reefs to avalanches. This would appear to be in breach of the IPCC’s own guidelines. The WWF is a pressure group. They’re not scientists. They’re not even numerate: one of their more startling glacier-melt claims derives entirely from an arithmetical miscalculation arising from a typing error.

Go back to that Berkeley professor mooning over the loss of that “magnificent landform” he once thought “immutable, eternal.” From his prose style, one might easily assume Orville Schell was a professor of creative writing or some such. In fact, he’s the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism. Yet, for all the limpid fragrance of his poignant obsequies, professor Schell would seem to lack the one indispensable quality of a journalist: basic curiosity—the same curiosity that led Miss Laframboise to see just how much of the “science” in the IPCC report rested on the assertions of the panda-cuddlers. So instead, professor Schell bid a teary farewell to his beloved landform, even though the glaciers of the western Himalayas are, in fact, increasing.

“Climate change” is not a story of climate change, which has been a fact of life throughout our planet’s history. It is a far more contemporary story about the corruption of science and “peer review” by hucksters, opportunists and global-government control-freaks.

Yep. And they’re damned sure doing their part to help lead the Western charge into the dismal gutter of decline.

CLARENCE THOMAS v. “CITIZENS SEGREGATED”, OBAMA, HOLDER, DURBIN, TILLMAN, et al.

“Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests…”–Pres. Barack Taney Hussein

Sister Mary Katherine:

Thomas then offers context for federal regulation of corporate speech, which pricks the notion that it’s always a well-intentioned action on behalf of the little guy:

He added that the history of Congressional regulation of corporate involvement in politics had a dark side, pointing to the Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal candidates in 1907.

“Go back and read why Tillman introduced that legislation,” Justice Thomas said, referring to Senator Benjamin Tillman. “Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.”

It is thus a mistake, the justice said, to applaud the regulation of corporate speech as “some sort of beatific action.”

Indeed, Sen. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman is an unfortunate man to be a father of the campaign-finance reform movement. A proud racist who wanted to keep blacks from voting (at best) and “exterminate” them (at worst), he’s also the father of Jim Crow laws in South Carolina.

In hopes of intimdating the justices and establishing “Equal Justice Under the Chicago Way”, Obama brought Democrats to their feet by demagoging the issue…on behalf of a Jim Crow-era free speech-suppression measure!

Way to go, O! What’s in the next speech? A stirring defense of Plessy v. Ferguson?

In reality, the ‘Citizen’s United’ movie-ban decision struck down only part of an 8 year-old law that blended John McCain’s worst “Shuddup!”-impulses with Russ Feingold’s and the Democrats’ efforts to once again suppress political speech they don’t like. Some things never change.

Justice Thomas explains why free speech is free speech is free speech:

“I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company. These are corporations. If ten of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association. If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association. But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?”

Justice Thomas is arguably the best judge in America. In addition to being a Constitutional giant and a patriot of the first order, he’s a soft-spoken, humble Christian gentlemen as well. So much so, he would strongly disapprove of me saying that the crowd currently in power are unfit to hold his jurisprudential jockstrap.

But it’s true nonetheless.

UPDATE: The Anchoress:

Watch him about 48 minutes into it, after declaring (in a completely heartfelt way) how he loves spending time with his clerks and with students -how they energize him- Thomas really gets into why he would rather spend time talking to students than hang out with the DC social scene.

“I’m not a member of any country club; this is what I like; it may have something to do with the fact that I wanted to be a priest, and this is apart of it. . . when I was a student I remember dignitaries coming to the school and bypassing the students; they were too important. They would talk at us, and leave. And I remember as a student, saying “I will never do that; I will go to the kids first.”

Then he and a student have a good laugh.

Apparently, anyway, since the most brilliant, articulate genius ever spawned repeatedly mentioned a Navy “corpseman.” Which ought to be no surprise at all coming from a military-hating community rabble-rouser who’s never held a real job in his life; who doesn’t know the first goddamned thing about any matter whatsoever involving the military, and doesn’t care; and who’s turned the term “Commander in Chief” into an absurd, sorry joke. No word on how this abominable schmuck feels about co-low-nels, sir-ghee-ants, or lye-oo-tenants.

Somebody ought to send this bumbling national disgrace a Hooked On Phonics DVD or something.

EXCEPT…

Jack Bauer would never leave you bleeding in the middle of the street with a broken leg. He would stop the vehicle, carefully assist you to the sidewalk…and then put a bullet in the other kneecap. Like a true gentleman.

Jim Treacher (real name: Samuel Clemens):

I was right across the street from the CVS, and I waited for the crosswalk light to tell me to go before I crossed. I had plenty of time left, according to the countdown clock. I was more than halfway there when a black SUV made an illegal left turn and hit me head-on. I absolutely had the right of way. I yelled something like, “Are you really doing this?” as it hit me before I could move. I landed on my face on the street and smashed my glasses and scraped my hand and immediately I knew something was wrong with my left knee. I lay there screaming and cursing for I don’t know how long, and a crowd of people gathered and told me to hold still. I was sprawled out right next to the yellow line as traffic went by. I gave one guy standing over me the number to the Daily Caller offices and he told them what happened. There’s a firehouse right across the street, so the paramedics were there in just a couple of minutes. They took me to Georgetown Hospital, where I was soon joined by my friends and co-workers Moira Bagley, Tucker Carlson, Neil Patel, and Laura Baños. All of whom I love. Unironically.

Via Hot Air, a Tucker Carlson update:

At the hospital, DC police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a “special agent.” He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.

Curiously, the ticket says that Medlock was struck at an intersection four blocks from where the accident actually took place. And it claims that Medlock was walking diagonally across the intersection at the time. In one of his strikingly short conversations with the Daily Caller, agent Mike McGuinn acknowledged that Medlock was not jaywalking at all, but walking “outside the crosswalk when the incident occurred.”

The question is: Did the federal agent driving the SUV, faced with potential liabilities from the accident, encourage local police to issue some sort – any sort – of citation to Medlock, to establish his culpability?

That’s not a jay-walking ticket–it’s a false police report.

As a conservative, I tend to cut law enforcement some slack–but not to act Above the Law. It’s bad enough that the right to hit-and-run is treated as a federal job perk–but to then fine your victims for the patriotic privilege of being flattened by a government vehicle, too?

Yeah–let’s put them in charge of health care.

Get well soon, Jim.

UPDATE: I see that the recuperating Jules Crittenden is pressing his claim to glamorous and exciting “associate victim status” as a fellow super-friend member of the League Of Extraordinarily Lame Bloggers. Best wishes for a speedy recovery to Jules as well.

I, of course, was Lame-Blogging long before either of these guys…and I walk fine!

Everything you’ll ever need to know about Islam, in their own vile, twisted words. It is; it truly is. Remarkably comprehensive, very nicely organized. Bookmark it for handy future reference, since we’ll be needing to bone up for as long as our spineless “leaders” refuse to acknowledge the ugly truth.

(Via Trencherbone)

Click here and see if it doesn’t make you want to send some academic types to the work camps your own self. The only words I have for this are the sort of words I’m trying to avoid using. At least, here on the front page. Dennis the Peasant found out my filters aren’t quite so strong in the comment section.

Hat tips to Dennis the Peasant and Ace.

For those who are not aware, it came out that Rahm Emanual called a number of Democrat Party supporters ‘fuckin’ retards’ over a plan to target moderate Democrat office holders.  Rahm is the Chief of Staff for President Obama and is one verbal tough-guy.  Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin called him out on that, using her facebook page.  She called for his resignation for insulting those who have mental problems and mental challenges.

Rahm apologized, but had a bit of work to get his apology to be accepted.  Rush Limbaugh used this on his show and used the word ‘retarded’ several times.  Mrs. Palin has said that this is also ‘crude and demeaning’.  (There goes the hypocrisy charge – she also called out Rush.  Who will likely apologize, because he knows it will keep the issue up for one more day.)

For someone who is an ignorant chillbilly, a resigned failure, and utterly irrelevant (as I have read elsewhere), Mrs. Palin has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of other politicians, to make them react to her.  She has thrown the Obama Administration of its stride before through facebook; she has now made Rahm Emanual apologize, at least twice, for the same thing.  She is inside their OODA loop.  I do not often make predictions, but I am going to guess that the White House is going to place her in their considerations when they make pronouncements or propose policy.

Not bad at all; not bad at all.  Someone ought to let Katie Couric know that it seems Mrs. Palin has done some readings that are politically relevant.

Hey, Galvin: we won, jerk.

TRYIN’ TO MAKE A LIVIN’ AS A SUICIDE BOMBER MAN

“We the People of the United States, in Order to…provide for the common defence…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”–the Pre-Ramble to the Constitution

The Undie-Bomber is singing like an American Idol contestant being chased by mob loansharks. Allegedly.

Which is odd; we were told he had already provided every scrap of information that could possibly be of use. Byron York:

Robert Gibbs said that “FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him.” When host Chris Wallace asked, “All they could?” Gibbs answered, “Yeah.”

On January 31, top White House adviser David Axelrod told Meet the Press that Abdulmutallab “has given very valuable information to the government about activities in Yemen and some of his experiences there.” To emphasize the point, Axelrod said, “We have not lost anything as a result of how his case has been handled.”

So just a few days ago the Obama administration claimed that Abdulmutallab had given up everything he knows. Now, they claim he is giving them fresh, useful intelligence.

Obviously his father cares for him, trying to prevent his suicide terrorism. So someone got the bright idea to bring his family here and have them convince him to co-operate. Good work–but it doesn’t change the fact that he should not have been Mirandized to begin with.

Allahpundit:

Remember when Cheney first started coming after The One last year on national security and 60 Minutes asked him to respond? March 23, 2009:

“Well, there is no doubt that we [i.e. "Bush"] have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we’ve got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up.”

The few detainees who were pure little Innocents Abroad, “swept up” by the vacuous vaccum of the Bush/Cheney/Hoover junta were released long ago. This is pure liberal hug-a-thug-ism.

“The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists. I fundamentally disagree with that.”

You fundamentally disagree with your own strawman argument? Good.

“Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not,” Obama said.”

Sounds like you’ve been disagreeing with yourself.

Obama will say anything to win an argument, but in their heart of hearts, he and his bomber-coddling terror pals believe the Constitution was written to extend rights to foreign enemies.

However, the plain words of the Preamble tell us we wrote the Constitution to protect our lives and our rights.

All men brothers? Maybe–but they’re not all Americans.

UPDATE: The state doesn’t owe you a remedial civics lesson just because you were daydreaming about Suzy Jenkin’s pigtails in Mr. Owen’s American Government class. As a Constitutionalist, I don’t believe even Americans are entitled to Miranda Warnings, let alone foreign illegal enemy combatants.

Regardless, we shouldn’t even know about this, because if we know, the enemy also knows. It helps our enemies. Abdulmutallab’s cooperation has been leaked to provide political cover for Obama even though it helps Osama. Pathetic.

“The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”–G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Jonah Goldberg:

“I am not an ideologue,” President Obama insisted at his truly refreshing confab with the Republican caucus in Baltimore last Friday. When he heard some incredulous murmurs and chuckles from the audience in response to the idea that the most sincerely ideological president in a generation is no ideologue, he added a somewhat plaintive, “I’m not.”

“But Bill Ayers is. He’s the bomb-thrower. And Wright. Me, I’m right here in the middle.”

Of course Obama is an ideologue. The important question is whether he is sufficiently self-aware to recognize the truth.

I for one would be horrified to learn that the president is working from the assumption that ideological biases are something only other people have. That is the surest route to hubris and groupthink (which might explain Obama’s political predicament).

Obama routinely insinuates that all of the facts are on his side. He invokes a confabulated consensus of experts to suggest that there is no legitimate reason for anyone to disagree with his agenda. After all, with the eggheads and “facts” in his corner, only the other side’s ideological blinders — or stupidity — could account for any dissent. …

What I really don’t understand is what’s so great about allegedly value-free pragmatism and so bad about supposedly unthinking ideology? The truth is that the vast majority of the time, pragmatism isn’t value-free and ideology isn’t unthinking. …

The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1909 that if everyone becomes a pragmatist, then “ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.” Russell’s point was that there’s nothing within pragmatism to delineate the proper and just limits of pragmatism. We must look outside pragmatism for that.

Our values, customs, traditions and principles provide the insulation against the corrosive acid of undiluted pragmatism. When you bundle these things together, it’s often called an ideology, and there’s no reason to apologize for having one.

Here’s how You-Know-Who put it (even though we’re told by pragmatic “experts” that his ideas are hopelessly dated, irrelevant and have nothing to teach us today):

I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press and the television evening news it is treated as a call for “ideological purity.” Whatever ideology may mean — and it seems to mean a variety of things, depending upon who is using it — it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country “ideology” is a scare word. And for good reason. Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.

I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in this world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American conservatism.

When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.

When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom he is not theorizing — he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain.

When a conservative says that busing does not work, he is not appealing to some theory of education — he is merely reporting what he has seen down at the local school.

When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire.

Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way — this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.

The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations — found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.

One thing that must be made clear in post-Watergate is this: The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say: “Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.” That is not “ideological purity.” It is simply what built this country and kept it great.

Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right — those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.

Our first job is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles. If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops without correcting this error we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. Wherever and whenever we can, we should gently but firmly correct our political and media friends who have been perpetuating the myth of conservatism as a narrow ideology. Whatever the word may have meant in the past, today conservatism means principles evolving from experience and a belief in change when necessary, but not just for the sake of change.

Hawkins on the button:

2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we’re good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, “Why do they hate us?” The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don’t even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we’re nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can’t be reasoned with.

Good, astute stuff here, and you’re gonna want to read all of it.

And yeah, I did go pretty far out of my way to get that half-assed Star Trek cop in the title in, didn’t I?