“The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.” –Walt Whitman
Tag: liberty
“We live in circumstances our parents did not live in, or our grandparents. We live in a time in which there is no rival model to the American model for how to run a modern industrial commercial society. Socialism is gone. Fascism is gone. Al-Qaeda has no rival model about how to run a modern society. Al-Qaeda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity.
“We began in 1945 an astonishingly clear social experiment: We divided the city of Berlin, the country of Germany, the continent of Europe, indeed the whole world, and we had a test. On one side was the socialist model that says that society is best run by edicts, issued from a coterie of experts from above.
“The American model, on the other hand, called for a maximum dispersal of decision-making and information markets allocating wealth and opportunity. The results are clear: We are here, they are not. The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.”
–George Will, “The Doctrine of Preemption,” from a speech delivered on 23 May 2005, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dallas, Texas (Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College.)
As Mr. Will stated, we had the test of socialism already. It didn’t work. Yet the Left in these United States still insist on socialist policies as means of moving our states and nation forward. What hubris. What do they think they know that will make these policies and institutions work here when they didn’t work elsewhere?
(Don’t bother pointing to Cuba, North Korea, or China, mouth-foamers. The first two aren’t true communist/socialist nations, as they are dependent upon the cult of personality of the leaders. The latter is, well, lucky to have figured out how to ingest just enough capitalism to keep the economy afloat, which further proves that Marxist communism/socialism does not work.)
Patrick Leahy, U.S. Senator from Vermont, on the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:
Is this a nominee who will protect and expand our constitutional rights, or will she neglect and narrow those rights? Learning the answer will be at the core of what the American people and the Senate need to know from the hearings on this nomination.
I call your attention to two words in the first sentence: “and expand“. Since when is the Supreme Court charged by the United States Constitution, Senator Leahy, to “expand” constitutional rights? (Oh, that’s right, ever since FDR stacked the Court with non-constructionists to get his way with the federal bureaucracy. My mistake.)
Expansion of constitutional rights is a duty assigned to the people, through their legislators in Congress and in their state bodies. Congressional rights are “expanded” through constitutional conventions, not through judicial activism. Such ignorance on the part of a majority of the American people is why our elected officials are able to get away with such foolish statements as that uttered above by Senator Leahy. Since basic civics are apparently not getting taught in our public schools any longer, how can we expect our citizens to fully comprehend how their government is supposed to work?
Here’s a little secret about conservatives and Roe v. Wade, just in case you’re wondering: not all conservatives are pro-life. I know this may come as a shock to the mouth-foamers on the Left, and even to those on the Right who like to walk around with blinders on, but it’s true. (Personally speaking, this conservative is pro-life.) Yet these same conservatives who are not pro-life oppose Roe v. Wade. Why? Because it came about in precisely the same way Senator Leahy seeks, based on his statement above: judicial fiat.
You would find far less vocal opposition from the Right if the right to an abortion was in the Constitution as a result of a constitutional convention, passed by the Congress, and two-thirds of the states. We wouldn’t like it, but at least we would know it was there as a result of the process set forth by the Founding Fathers, not arbitrarily created by men in black robes. For the expansion of rights to occur otherwise is to have, as The Federalist Patriot put it, “James Madison is rolling in his grave!”
One of the many negative consequences of America’s defeat in The Vietnam War has been the uncontrolled proliferation of Vietnams since then.
Nicaragua threatened to become another Vietnam. Lebanon nearly became another Vietnam. Had Grenada been only slightly larger than a manhole cover and lasted one more hour, it would have become a Caribbean-Style Vietnam. The invasion of Panama was rapidly degenerating into a Narco-Vietnam, right up until we won. Likewise, the First Gulf War was certainly developing into another Vietnam, but then sadly, it ended quickly and with few casualties.
For people of a certain age or political stripe, Vietnam is like Elvis: it’s everywhere. For example, during a long wait at a Chinese Buffet in Georgetown in 1987, Ted Kennedy was reported to have exclaimed “QUAGMIRE!” and attempted to surrender to a Spanish-speaking busboy.
And that was probably the smart thing to do, because the lesson of Vietnam is: it is best to lose quickly, so as to avoid a quagmire.
[…]
If you liked what our quick, casualty-saving withdrawal from Somalia did for us at the Khobar Towers, at our embassies in East Africa, at the waterline of the USS Cole, and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then you’ll love what a quick “casualty-saving” withdrawal from Iraq will do for us for the next twenty years. It’ll finally make you stop worrying about Vietnam.
Read the entire column for Johnson’s thirteen edifying points, and stop saying every geopolitical event the United States gets involved in is going to disintegrate in to a Vietnamesque “quagmire.”
Stephen Moore, in today’s Political Diary:
There’s an old saying that the only Marxists left on the planet are found in the faculty lounges at America’s elite universities. Now the Leadership Institute has helped quantify the leftwing bias at our premier institutions of higher learning.
Its new report, “Deep Blue Campuses,” raked through Federal Election Commission records of political donations in 2004 by university faculty and found — surprise, surprise — that the vast preponderance of these donated dollars went to John Kerry for President. This is a free country, and donating to political candidates is, or at least should be, a protected expression of free speech. But this report blows through the facade that the political views of university faculty are in anyway representative of the general community.
For every dollar that the professors at the top 20 elite universities gave to George Bush, they gave $10 to John Kerry. The ratio at Princeton was $302 to Kerry for every dollar given to Bush. The ratio for Harvard was 25 to 1. At Yale and Penn, the ratio was greater than 20 to 1. At Dartmouth there wasn’t a single recorded donation to Bush.
These are more lopsided results than one finds in the phony elections in Castro’s Cuba and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Universities have become fanatically committed to the idea of “diversity” as an overriding objective on campus — diversity on the basis of income, religion, disability, race, gender, sexual orientation. But political diversity? When it comes to the kind of diversity that would seem to matter most for promoting debate, intellectual curiosity and free speech, there is apparently little tolerance for differing views. What is demanded is conformity. And our top universities suffer greatly as a result.
His latest book, The West’s Last Chance, is coming true before our very lives.
Don Feder:
A committee appointed by the British government, composed of Muslims, wants the nation to scrap its Holocaust Memorial Day, in the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity. No word yet on whether they also want to eliminate Passover – said to be insensitive to Egyptians.
The committee recommends replacing the observance (started in 2001 and held annually on January 27) with a Genocide (a.k.a., Victimhood) Day, which would recognize the alleged mass murder of Muslims in “Palestine,” Chechnya, Bosnia, and wherever else followers of the Religion of Peace have come into conflict with the accursed infidel.
In making its case for inclusiveness, the committee somehow neglected to mention the many victims of Muslim mayhem – Armenians, Sudanese Christians, Kosovar Serbs (ethnically cleansed in the wake of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia), and Hindus – to name but a few. If an Arab stubbed his toe on the boot of a Christian knight sometime in the 11th century, it’s a crime against humanity that must be memorialized throughout the ages, according to the imams. On the other hand, the slaughter of infidels is seen as the will of Allah, and worthy of a Heavenly reward.
The committee maintains that Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day fuels feelings of isolation and alienation among Muslim youth. And, well, to have a special commemoration of the systematic slaughter of one in every three Jews on earth (in an effort to annihilate an entire people), is grossly unfair, the committee suggests.
This is one of numerous matters that goes to the heart of the “clash of civilizations,” the premise of Blankley’s book. Muslims are not interested in assimilating, as has every other ethnicity or religion in the West. They are not interested in tolerating others who are, in the case of the Jews, non-Arab, or, in the case of everyone else, non-Muslim. The people of the West need to wake up to these facts, and quickly.
Surely, you say, not all Muslims feel this way. Surely this is simply those radical extremists the likes of bin Laden, right? Then why is there nothing but silence from the majority of supposedly peace-loving, tolerant, assimilated Muslims in the West?
Their unhealthy hatred for Mr. Bush dates back to the 2000 election, which they — irrationally again — believe he stole from Mr. Gore. The fact is, Mr. Gore was trying to steal the election himself and almost succeeded, through one of the most egregious perversions of the rule of law in our nation’s history, by the Florida Supreme Court.
But the real source of their animus is even more basic. They resent him because he represents their expulsion from power over the executive branch, which the Clinton eight-year heyday should have ensured them in perpetuity.
You’ll recall that their “entitlement” to the legislative branch was stolen from them in 1994, which is one of the reasons they consider Newt Gingrich another personification of evil. Adding insult to cumulative injury, they’ve also lost their monopoly on the media over the last 15 years.
John Stossel, on pork in the wake of Katrina:
The government’s responsibility, though, dwarfs anything done by criminals. To start, the federal government invited disaster by offering cheap insurance. That encourages people to build on the coasts. I’m embarrassed to admit I once built a house on a beach in Westhampton, N.Y., because government insurance guaranteed I couldn’t lose. When a storm washed my house away, government paid me for my loss. It would have covered me again and again had I rebuilt. (I sold the land.) Government insurance is truly an insane policy.
Then came the bureaucratic obstacles. While New Orleans hospitals had no electricity, the U.S.S. Bataan sat just off the coast, equipped with six unused operating rooms and hundreds of hospital beds. Its commander said she could do nothing because she hadn’t received a signed authorization. It’s reasonable to worry about getting the armed forces involved in law enforcement, but where’s the threat to the Constitution if, in the middle of a disaster, a Navy doctor saves your life?
[…]
The deadliest government mistake was made by Congress. The Army Corps of Engineers had said it wanted $27 million to strengthen the levees protecting New Orleans. Congress said no, though our can’t-spend-your-money-fast-enough representatives did appropriate more than that for an indoor rain forest in Iowa.
Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, blamed the president. “The president could have funded it,” she said.
Someday, she should read the Constitution. Only Congress can appropriate federal money.
[…]
It’s a reason Americans shouldn’t filter so much money through Washington. Louisianans don’t need Iowa rain forests, and Iowans don’t need levees in Louisiana. Maybe the people who want to live in New Orleans should have to pay (through private enterprise or local taxes) the special costs of its exposed location — or live elsewhere. If all local projects, essential and whimsical, were paid for with local taxes, competition among states and cities would force them to become more efficient.
No, mouth-foamers, I am not referring to the muppet.
President Grover Cleveland:
“I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and the duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit…
The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.”
No, they don’t have anything better to do.
The Federalist Patriot, 05-38 Digest:
To those in the know, this Saturday is “S24” (i.e., 24 September), when over one thousand leftwing groups will descend on Washington for a “war protest.” (Is it just us, or are these self-indulgent Angry Left minions being somewhat overshadowed by events in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast?)
A cameraman filming the first arriving buses caught something he’d missed before: He’d seen many of the protestors at hundreds of previous protests. “They’re professional protesters!” he surmised.
Indeed these events are well-scripted productions rather than the spontaneous uprisings, CBS reports. “S24” is being produced by United for Peace and Justice (UPJ) and International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER). ANSWER has close ties to the Marxist Workers World Party, Free Palestine Alliance, U.S.-Mexico Solidarity Foundation, Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada, Code Pink, and, of course, MoveOn.
Other “notables” at the protest include Punks for Peace, Queer to the Left, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Historians Against the War.
Scholar John J. Tierney declares the nucleus of the protesters is “ideologically very hard-core left;… anti-West, anti-capitalism and anti-American political culture. [They] cover a whole host of revolutionary causes, literally everywhere.”
Enterprising bus drivers should have turned south, and delivered these senseless mouth-foamers to the Gulf coast. Then again, not knowing how to do anything other than blather utter falsehoods and mindless propaganda, the protesters likely aren’t any good for helping with relief efforts.