Ron Paul: “When fascism comes it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross…”
Aside from the fact that Ron Paul just accused Mike Huckabee of being a bearer of fascism, fascism actually has come before, and it did not come with a cross, but demanding worship of the state.
I’m presuming that everyone who tripped over themselves to condemn Mitt Romney’s “Freedom requires religion and vice versa” comment will likewise trip over themselves to condemn Ron Paul for this stupidly ignorant comment. I thought Ron Paul was supposed to be the smart, thoughtful guy, not the nutcase who referred to opponents using historically illiterate references to fascism.
Apollo posted this at 11:34 PM HKT on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Conservatism
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A: You accuse K-Lo of being a secularist.
H/T: Andrew Sullivan
Tom posted this at 9:17 PM HKT on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Faith, Politics
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The trailer for The Dark Knight is out. Go watch it right now.
Its 2/3 badass and 1/3 awesome. Caine is perfect. Bale is great. And most importantly Ledger is absolutely terrifying.
Jamie posted this at 10:33 AM HKT on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 as Nerdom
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Seriously.
MARDAN, Pakistan — The bomb that ravaged Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming processional in October appears to have been rigged to the clothes of a baby who was held up for the former prime minister to embrace, Mrs. Bhutto said.
A man approached her armored truck, Mrs. Bhutto recounted, and was trying to hand across a small child as her motorcade inched through the thronged streets of Karachi. She remembers gesturing for the man to come closer.
“It was about 1 or 2 years old, and I think it was a girl,” Mrs. Bhutto told The Washington Times in her first public remarks about the baby.
“We feel it was a baby, kidnapped, and its clothes were rigged with explosives. He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother, I love babies, but the [streetlights] had already gone out, and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.”
Mrs. Bhutto would have been killed, she said, if she hadn’t stepped back to loosen the shoes on her swollen feet.
I’m a little confused as to how a bomb small enough to be attached to a toddler could do so much damage but — assuming this report is accurate — jeez.
H/T: Right-Thinking
Tom posted this at 9:30 AM HKT on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 as Another Great Victory For Jihad
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It appears that the attack on Nava was a hoax (H/T).
So it looks like the third option in my previous post was right. I wonder if Princeton university will come down on Nava like a ton of bricks. . .
Hubbard posted this at 2:08 PM HKT on Monday, December 17th, 2007 as Amer-I-Can!, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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According to NRO’s Mark Levin, John McCain is a squishy liberal dove:
In sum, John McCain has been weak on homeland security, joining with numerous liberal Democrats to argue for closing Guantanamo Bay, applying the Geneva Conventions to unlawful enemy combatants, extending certain constitutional rights to detainees, limiting tried and true interrogation techniques, and conferring amnesty on illegal aliens.
Rightfully or wrongfully — I’d argue a combination of the two — our policies toward captured terrorists have been a public relations nightmare for the United States. But according to Levin, if you oppose the torture of terrorism suspects, you’re “weak” on security. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of having the US military run a prison camp in Cuba for the sole reason that it allows us to avoid the inconvenience of US law in the one spot of foreign soil our military cannot be legally barred from operating on, you’re “weak” on security. If you think it’s reasonable to offer detainees the ability to challenge their detainment in a war that is likely to last a generation — and in which we openly concede it’s difficult to tell friend from foe — you’re “weak” on security.
Levin continues:
[McCain] organized the Gang of 14, which I contended at the time and still believe effectively killed Republican efforts to kill the Democrat filibustering of judicial nominees.
Hmmm….last time I checked, Sam Alito’s nomination was confirmed, as was Janice Rogers Brown’s, Priscilla Owen’s, and William Pryor’s. And guess what? McCain voted in favor of all four of them (follow the links to view vote tallies for Alito, Brown, Owen, and Pryor). For all the hyperventilating, McCain voted for these conservative nominees.
There are lots of problems with John McCain: there’s more than a little prima donna in him, he was on the wrong side of the immigration debate, there’s McCain-Fiengold, and his apparent buying into the Global Warming Will Destroy The Earth! hoopla is very worrisome. If you think those are the most important issues of the day, don’t vote for John McCain.
However, if you think that building on our recent gains in Iraq, cutting the crap out of the Federal Budget, and making sure we replace John Paul Stevens with another John Roberts are bigger reasons, you do yourself a disservice to overlook him.
Tom posted this at 12:04 PM HKT on Monday, December 17th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Global War on Terror
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Francisco Nava, a conservative at Princeton who had received threatening e-mails, got clobbered off campus (H/T). The university’s response:
A spokeswoman for Princeton, Cass Cliatt, said the university does not comment on situations involving students when they are off campus. “This is the township’s investigation,” she wrote in an e-mail.
If Mr. Nava had been gay or black, I suspect that the university administration would be doing an investigation.
According to Nava, here’s what happened:
A politics major from Texas who is a junior, Francisco Nava, was assaulted about two miles from campus in Princeton Township by two black-clad men who pinned him against a wall and repeatedly bashed his head against the bricks, he told the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, in an interview.
Mr. Nava told the student paper that the two men told him to shut up. The assailants did not steal his wallet, credit cards, or cell phone, he said.
No suspects had been identified yesterday, and the Princeton Township Police Department said it would not comment on the pending investigation.
The attack came two days after Mr. Nava, a leader of the Anscombe Society, a morally conservative student group that speaks out against same-sex marriage and pre-marital sex, received death threats via e-mail. Three other Anscombe leaders and a conservative professor also received the threats.
A Princeton senior who received the e-mail death threats, Sherif Girgis, said initially it didn’t concern him. “I thought this threat would go the way 99.9% of them go — which is not beyond e-mail,” he said. The text of the e-mail included an expletive, addressed every recipient by his first name, and threatened to “destroy” them. One e-mail used the word “kill.”
Odd. I see a couple basic possibilities here:
- Nava and other conservatives are being threatened. There are liberal thugs at large at Princeton.
- Nava was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also creepy, but less worrisome than the above scenario.
- Nava has faked the crime. Distasteful, but we’ve seen this before in Kerri Dunn.
I’d guess there’s a couple of other permutations that could happen in this case, but I think I’ve covered the basic probable scenarios. Whatever the case, I agree with Harvey Mansfield’s suggestion:
A conservative professor at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield, said he is outraged. “I hope Princeton comes down on them like a ton of bricks, and by Princeton I mean either the university or the township or both,” Mr. Mansfield said. “It should be easy for liberals to identify a case of intolerance; they’re good at that.”
I suspect that the only scenario that would prompt the “ton of bricks” response is the faked crime one. Nonetheless, Princeton University should be investigating this.
UPDATE: It was a hoax; more here.
Hubbard posted this at 8:42 AM HKT on Monday, December 17th, 2007 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Walking the Cat Backwards
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Jeffrey Bell has a good but problematic piece up about social conservatism. Much of what he says, tracing the roots of what he calls “cultural Marxism” back to Rousseau, is accurate. But he slides a whopper of an assertion in there as well:
Most social conservatives believe that the central principle asserted in the Declaration of Independence is true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” While almost all Americans respect these words at least as a sentiment or metaphor, it is a fact that most—not all—social conservatives believe them to be literally true, while most—not all—opponents of social conservatism do not believe them to be literally true.
Huh? I think just about every American supports that three part proposition. For that matter, the Declaration came from Thomas Jefferson, himself an admirer of Bell’s nemesis, Rousseau. Indeed, the “pursuit of Happiness” echoes Rousseau’s thoughts in the discourses—which is precisely why many liberal Americans love that clause.
I think Bell would have been on firmer ground if he argued instead that conservatives focus on the primacy of Life and Liberty, while liberals focus on the pursuit of Happiness. Today’s social conservatives have borrowed heavily from Catholic Social Teachings, and (ironically enough) Rudy Giuliani has explained what liberty means to social conservatives:
Giuliani was exposed to a specifically Catholic (as opposed to Protestant-individualist) view of the relationship between authority and liberty—one that dates from Aquinas’s Christian Aristotelianism, was spelled out in Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical on the Nature of Human Liberty, and still enjoys currency today, even in the wake of Vatican II. Catholic thinkers do not see liberty as an end in itself, but as a means—a “natural endowment”—by which to achieve the common good. For that to happen, individuals have to be encouraged to use their liberty well; and that is where authority comes into play. Authority, embodied by law and the state, encourages—at times, forces—free individuals to contribute to the common good. Or, to put it in Aristotelian terms: Authority—by creating a just order—encourages liberty over license.
Of course, Giuliani made his career as a prosecutor rather than a philosopher, and there are certainly Catholic teachings he has repudiated or ignored. In 1989, wanting the New York Liberal Party’s endorsement for his GOP mayoral bid, Giuliani renounced his past opposition to abortion and Roe v. Wade. But his exposure to Catholic and classical political thought clearly had a lasting impact on him. At a forum on crime in March 1994, sponsored by the New York Post, Giuliani voiced views on liberty and authority that seemed to flow from these teachings. He criticized liberals for seeing only “the oppressive side of authority.” “What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be,” he said. “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” Asked in the question period to explain what he meant, Giuliani said, “Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy.” Norman Siegel, the then-executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was “floored” by Giuliani’s definition of liberty and authority. But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani’s words.
It’s a bit surprising that Jeffrey Bell, a noted Catholic conservative, didn’t explain things nearly so well in the conservative Weekly Standard as John Judis, author of the above piece, did in the liberal New Republic.
Hubbard posted this at 6:20 PM HKT on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Philosophy
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I’m watching Russert interview Romney. I don’t really like Romney, but Russert makes me like Romney more. Russert’s schtick is asking, “You once said x, now you say y… OOOOOWWWW!” It particularly fails against Romney, who openly admits to changing his mind on some issues. Russert just finished “grilling” him about how much his position’s changed since 1994, and Romney pointed out that most rational people are going to change their mind from time to time. It made Russert look quite petty.
And then I realized what’s wrong with Russert. This was all about inconsistencies, not whether one position is right or wrong. At then end of an hour-long interview, I was no better informed about whether Mitt Romney would be a good president. How you conduct an interview that long, seeming so combative, without providing any useful information, is beyond me.
Well, actually, I did learn that Romney favored the “assault weapons” ban and still supports it. Though since there was no inconsistency, Russert kept moving right along. Perhaps a good question would have been, “Why do you support legislation that restricts a Constitutional right based mostly on how menacing the gun looks?” Of course, that wouldn’t have looked like a “neutral” question, so Russert didn’t ask it.
Apollo posted this at 12:08 PM HKT on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Journalism
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Back when I had cable and watched Brit Hume’s show, I sorta liked Juan Williams. He seemed a reasonably intelligent liberal. Now that I only get the free channels, I only see him on Sunday mornings, and he seems a little unhinged. A couple of months ago, the week the news came out that there more American combat deaths than in this year than in any other year, but also the week that the media starting noticing that the surge was working, Williams insisted not only that we were winning, but that there was not improvement. This morning, he just said that Giuliani wasn’t a good mayor. All of the other panelists politely ignored his point.
Apollo posted this at 10:57 AM HKT on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 as Journalism
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The Washington Post’s ombudsman has a column (dated tomorrow, so I hope I’m not violating the Temporal Prime Directive) that shows off everything I despise about journalism. In discussing her response to her newspaper’s libelous treatment of Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” comments, she displays typical media egotism, refusal to put things in their proper context, and inability to properly admit mistakes.
Let’s start with egotism:
I procrastinated on this one because I saw it as a tempest in a $4.2 million teapot, and bombastic radio and TV talk show hosts aren’t my cup of tea. When I called Limbaugh’s public relations staff, I felt rudely treated. Two recent calls and two e-mails were not answered.
Awww…poor baby. The man puts on 3 hours of talk radio a day, speaking in very clear and uncomplicated English. If there’s one possible thing everyone can agree on about Rush, it’s that you cannot listen to his program and not know where he stands on an issue. After this stupid thing erupted, he spent days on his program discussing it. In the week when Harry Reid was doing his thing, this was topic number one on Rush. He probably spent seven or eight hours that week talking about it. Millions of people nationwide know precisely Rush’s position on the matter. Every day he makes transcripts of his show available on his website for free, and for a small price you can have several weeks worth of transcripts available. Why on earth she would need to talk to “Limbaugh’s public relations staff” on this matter is beyond me. He is his own public relations staff. And if she felt rudely treated, boo-effing-hoo. Rush did not slander her, the Post libeled him; it is up to the Post to correct that mistake, not for Rush to hire people to coddle the Post’s ombudsman who can’t do her own damned research or be bothered to listen to the frickin show.
Let’s move on to a refusal to put things in perspective:
Limbaugh said he was referring to Macbeth and others who have falsely claimed Iraq experience when he said “phony soldiers.” He also came back to the subject of MacBeth shortly after the “phony soldiers” comment on the same show. But Reid did not buy that explanation.
Rush has been on the air, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, since well before the invasion of Iraq. He has spoken quite a bit about the war and its critics. The phenomenon of soldiers returning from Iraq and criticizing the war has been going on since the war began. If he wanted to insult these soldiers, he’s had thousands of broadcast hours of radio to do it, and he never has. Sometimes critical soldiers call in, and he thanks them for their service. I’ve heard this happen on numerous occasions, and I’m not a daily listener. To take a handful of words from a single broadcast and give them a meaning that is completely at odds with everything else Rush has said is dishonest.
In this ombudsman’s piece, you’d think Rush was a radio caller, with only a few words in the public record, instead of a man who has said millions of words about the war in Iraq. An objective piece would have focused on Harry Reid taking a few of Rush’s words out of context and making a big deal about it, not stating objectively, “[Rush] had recently criticized U.S. troops who were against the war in Iraq. ‘Phony soldiers,’ blasted Limbaugh.” The story should have focused on why Reid wrote a threatening letter (how else would you describe a letter by the senate majority and 40 other senators from the party that controls Congress to a businessman whose industry is heavily regulated, and operates entirely through government license?) based on a few words that Rush said, giving them a meaning that is at odds with everything else Rush has said or done on the matter. Instead, in response to that libelous story, we get…
An inability to properly admit mistakes. Read the piece. This is nearly two months after the dishonest piece came out in the Post. The minor concession she makes (”The Post should have noted Limbaugh’s explanation in the story.”–duh! Is there any sort of controversy a journalist covers where they shouldn’t print one side of the story?) comes hundreds of words into the story, and only follows an “All that aside…” that makes it seem sorta beside the point.
So let’s review. Left-wing loonies Media Matters took Rush’s words out of context and gave them a meaning any listener of his show knows he did not intend. The Majority Leader of the Senate denounced Rush on the Senate floor and sent a leader to the CEO of the company that produces Rush’s show (for a business that only operates through government license). Rush discussed this at length on his show for over a week, explaining how Media Matters and Reid were wrong. Then the Washington Post ran a story that reprinted as fact Media Matters’s misrepresentation. Rush continued to discuss the matter. 8 weeks later, without an actual correction running in the paper, the Post’s ombudsman says, ” All that aside, The Post should have noted Limbaugh’s explanation in the story.”
If you’re like me and would like journalists to print the truth, there’s at least one major consolation here. The Post’s daily circulation is down to 635,087, and it’s and Sunday circulation is down to 894,428. Only a fraction of whom actually read the story in question. Rush speaks to an audience of between 13,500,000 and 20,000,000 weekly. There is no doubt that every single one of them has heard his side of this story. The Post’s libel, and its Ombudsman’s half-assed response, are meaningless compared to what Rush says. Which makes it all the dumber that they don’t care about getting it right. If they had, he would have mentioned it on the air, which might have boosted their sagging readership.
Apollo posted this at 3:37 PM HKT on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 as Journalism
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Even if I had a TV, I doubt that I’d watch much news shows: too much shouting and screaming. The platonic ideal of a program would be something like C-SPAN’s Booknotes—one interviewer, one interviewee, one hour, no major interruptions, all civility.
Andy Ferguson traces the devolution of news programs from John McLaughlin. Naturally, the best writer at The Weekly Standard has a great anecdote about his 24 hours working with the man:
The McLaughlin legend, I quickly discovered, had shortchanged the McLaughlin reality. When I opened the door to his production company’s suite, the first words I heard came roaring up in the famous Rhode Island drawl: “This is s***! Unadulterated s***!” From the shadows of a darkened office, behind a desk as vast as the deck of an aircraft carrier, McLaughlin would bellow at his staff through an intercom. His voice ricocheted down hallways, and the epithets burst like ack-ack above the dim cubicles where his assistants cowered and trembled. The abuse was astonishing, unpredictable, and, in several instances, cruel. A single tirade could last for an hour.
He didn’t scream at me, though. Part-timers generally, and men in particular, were usually exempt from his outbursts. That didn’t mean our newborn relationship was normal. For my first task he told me to work up a lead-in to a segment on some bit of legislative sausage grinding its way through Congress. “Cokie Roberts had an excellent report on the bill on NPR this morning,” he said. “I taped it to make it easiah on you. It’s all the background resuch you’ll need.”
I went back to another office carrying Dr. McLaughlin’s handheld recorder. He had evidently propped it against his radio speaker to record the tape that morning. “Considerate of the old bastard,” I thought, pressing the play button. I heard Cokie’s swampy voice explaining the doings on the Hill. And then I heard water rushing, and a clatter of ceramic, and a mysterious release of air, and I realized that the doctor had made the tape in the bathroom. I was hearing his morning ablutions: the gush of faucets running and the honk-honk of nasal passages clearing and the rumble of phlegm rising and . . . much worse. Scraps of show tunes hummed off-key competed against every noise the human organism is capable of producing at that hour of the day, and together they threatened to drown out Cokie’s report: “The prognosis, critics say, is still a matter of PHLOOOTH!“
Ah, television—definitely a matter of phloooth!
Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM HKT on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 as Amer-I-Can!, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
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I disagree with Ramesh Ponnuru often, but he’s right about New Jersey and the death penalty:
New Jersey is on track to become the first state to abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court allowed it in 1976.
I think New Jersey legislators did the right thing, in the right way. If the state can protect citizens from a murderer without killing him, that’s what it ought to do. And since New Jersey doesn’t execute people anyway—the last execution was in 1963—having a formal, but practically meaningless, death penalty was an expensive charade.
I’m glad that it was the legislators who voted to abolish the death penalty and not the judges. On an issue where neither the federal nor the state constitution clearly sets a policy, it should be up to the people and their elected representatives to decide. I hope that other states will follow New Jersey’s lead—but not under judicial duress.
From his lips to God’s ears.
Hubbard posted this at 9:47 AM HKT on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 as Grace, Philosophy, Politics
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Kim Fabricius takes on Richard Dawkins in 10 propositions, beginning with:
1. Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists do not like Christians. They like Muslims even less. We are like people who believe in leprechauns, only worse, because people who believe in leprechauns, while ignoramuses, are not warmongers and terrorists (unless they also happen to be Irish Catholics or Presbyterians). So the New Atheists are our enemies. But remember, Jesus said that we should love our enemies, forgive them, and pray for them. Besides, nothing will piss them off more.
Read and enjoy.
Hubbard posted this at 9:50 PM HKT on Friday, December 14th, 2007 as Faith, Humor
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Another in the series of “Fred Thompson, Badass.” posts. The candidates were recently asked what their favorite “keepsake” is.
Fred’s response:
“Trophy wife.”
How can you NOT love this guy?
Jamie posted this at 6:30 PM HKT on Friday, December 14th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype
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