“Make Mine Freedom” is a cartoon documentary produced by Harding College in 1948. Word for word, the warnings contained are as timely today as they were in the 1940s. Clearly, many Americans are still terminally susceptible to the Utopian promises of the latest snakeoil salesmen who would be our masters.
The left’s brilliant lie
Liberals want to take away your light bulbs, pickup trucks and family sedans, but they aren’t honest enough to admit it. On the House floor last week, Democrats insisted regulations prohibiting the sale of cheap sources of illumination beginning in January are about increasing consumer choice. Likewise, the Obama administration’s forthcoming 56-mile-per-gallon fuel-efficiency mandate for automakers is supposedly a boon for consumers.
“I continue to hear my colleagues promote the fantasy that government has banned the incandescent light bulb,” said Rep. Jason Altmire, Pennsylvania Democrat. “They think if they say it over and over again that it will be true. But it’s not true.” Proponents of the bulb ban also claim misleading efficiency increases. There’s a good reason to be skeptical; legislative acts don’t create engineering breakthroughs. The sole purpose of the law signed by President George W. Bush was to eliminate the sale of 25-cent light bulbs because the greens want to force everyone to switch to fluorescent lighting.
Leftism, the Religion
Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend. This confusion is all the greater now that President Obama has humiliated the Israeli prime minister and created the tensest moment in U.S.-Israel relations in memory.
Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.
Are Jews Permitted to Doubt The New York Times?
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Courage comes in many forms. But the rarest form of courage, it seems to me, is for a true addict to give up his (or her) New York Times. That seems to go double or triple for the NYT’s Jewish readers, who cling to its daily prophetic utterances with truly Biblical fervor: “absolute truth.”
My sample is biased, obviously, since I hang around with conservatives and such (yech!), but I can think of only one Jewish friend who has ever confessed to dumping All the News You Are Fit to Read.
The Chosen One
In our time, asking how a young man of scarce achievement got into position to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president courts the contemporary synonyms for “impious”: “birther,” “conspiracy theorist,” and, of course, “racist.” Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii’s most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones. No wonder some of Barack Obama’s supporters treat him as if he were anointed by an extraterrestrial power.
A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria
At a time when the push is on to subject humanity to more crazy, shortsighted progressive environmental programs (read carbon regulations) to “save the earth” from its human population, a brief look at progressive airy predictions of the past is in order.
Enlightenment from the campus teach-ins of the 1960s and early 1970s slowly invaded conventional college classrooms so that the hippie-generation mentality of the time eventually became the hip academic norm. But, excitement over such topics as the planet’s imminent collapse from too many people and too much ice quickly waned when population increases yielded no global food fights and Mother Earth began to melt her once-advancing ice caps.
Editorial: Greece’s Only Cure Is The Free Market
Debt Crises: What a sorry spectacle to watch Greeks rioting in the streets in reaction to austerity measures. As if tantrums can change reality. It’s Exhibit A of how socialism infantilizes citizens. The only cure is free markets.
As Greece’s legislature heads for a vote Wednesday to cut the size of its government by $40 billion in exchange for the last $17 billion of a $156 billion International Monetary Fund bailout on July 3, the world’s television screens are flooded with images of young “indignantes” calling a riotous 48 hour-strike in Athens.
Weiners, Wusses and Wonks
What hath Anthony Weiner wrought? Clarity.
It is now crystal clear that our elites — the ruling class, the insiders who tell us where, when, and how to live our lives–are nothing more than a collection of Wieners, Wusses and Wonks. And as surely as the words of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse (“What hath God wrought”) signaled the beginning of the modern mass communication era and the transformation of the United States for the 20th century, so will this Democrat leader’s grotesque digital dissemination of his private parts bring about the transformation needed by this century — the realization that our political and media elites are among the worst this nation has to offer.
As we go over the cliff, just who is in the driver’s seat?
A few months ago, I asked the question, “How did we get here?”
If you have to ask where “here” is, then you may as well not read this column. But if you, too, believe that “here” is the end of the road for Western civilization, then you may as well read it and weep.
If you have to ask where “here” is, then you may as well not read this column. But if you, too, believe that “here” is the end of the road for Western civilization, then you may as well read it and weep.
I have explored a few possibilities already to explain the collapse of American values and American traditions in the past 50 years (which roughly correspond to my own life span up till now). Most of them seem to be linked to the phony Marxist philosophy of “redistribution of wealth,” whether in the guise of the New Deal, the Great Society, social justice or “the myth of permanent plenty.”