Twice in recent years pleasant social events have been shattered by rage-filled outbursts when liberal men of a certain age learned that I disagreed with their views. In each case the rage with which perfectly polite disagreement was expressed suggested to me that more than political differences were involved. As time has passed, I have come to believe that the reactions I received represented a rage at the dying of all that which these men had embraced in the absolute certainty of the righteousness and soundness of their views, and their right to have them automatically accepted as the approved model for all right thinking people.
The President Who Wasn’t There
We have a president named “Obama.” If you believe your media — (hah!) — he is a kind of Űbermensch, a more-than-human giant intellect. Or, as one addled dork said two years ago, Obama must be A Light Bringer. That’s why the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee got the hots for him so bad that they had to give him the big prize before he did anything. Like Algore’s Peace Prize, it was awarded for postmodern (Po-Mo) — that is, completely fictional — good intentions. No actual achievements were wanted or needed.
Since Marxist college professors are not going to do this job for us, I will now perform a postmodern “deconstruction” of the so-called “president” of the “United States.” (Those sneer quotes are Po-Mo sniggers for things that are obviously fictional except that normal people think they are real. Like “money” and “freedom.”)
PolarBearGate
A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.
Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”
“Make Mine Freedom”(1948)-Prophetic Cartoon
“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.
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.
Britain would be a better place if families looked after their own
The welfare state, as conceived by the great social reformer Sir William Beveridge and implemented by the Attlee government after the Second World War, was a sublime idea. It rescued millions of British citizens from the degradation of poverty and lifted the fear of illness. It guaranteed employment or, if jobs were not available, universal benefits. It offered security in old age.
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.