Cobb

A Stupid Question To Liberals

How do you get your information about conservatives and conservative ideas?

The best answer I could imagine would be 'Little Green Footballs', because it would be the kind of answer that would justify a liberal, even reactionary liberal stance. That is to say 'stance' because liberal thinking would be something altogether different. 

The problem I see with the sort of liberal I have been is that they think they are being intelligent, not just liberal. But in the global scheme of things, there have been fewer pointedly awesome frameworks than the post I just read this morning over at Belmont. The funny thing was that I used to make fun of 'idiots' who saw secular humanism as the enemy. I thought they were just being paranoid and stupid. In fact, they were merely inarticulate and therefore dismissable. 

What prompts is this non-discussion which gets all the spice in its flavor from the ghost of racism. But what I was really trying to get to was a matter of book knowledge. Given that, I can erect a new barrier to time wastage.

I got my book knowledge of Progressive thought from the post-Nationalist black left whose Talented Tenth airs I was born into. The gods of that pantheon include the redoubtable Cornel West, and a host of critical theorists including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Haki Madhubuti (whom is often despised for being 'homophobic' - hmm maybe he's wised up) and a host of others I guess I've forgotten. I suppose I should add some other classic heads like Andrew Hacker, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Mike Davis and Theodore Cross into that mix. But it was also the air I was breathing. You see it's easy to catch the symptoms of that religion of socialism/communism without catching a full blown case. And that's where I think most liberals are standing, in their b-boy stance, arms folded, head cocked and supremely arrogant. It is a stance I can no longer take at all seriously, given that I am taking the time to read fatter books and I am no longer impressed by politics.

In response to my stupid question, aside from my juvenile exploits, I should be responsive to the same kind of question. The answer is that I'm not looking for the sorts of things that liberals might read to make them good liberals. For example, I listened to Fareed Zakaria's 92nd Street Y lecture. (And yes, I used to dig on the 92nd St Y when I was a boho in Brooklyn. ) But I was not impressed. Not because I think Zakaria is stupid, but because he works for a magazine, and magazine writers who write non-fiction only know what people tell them. So it came as no surprise last week when Zakaria showed his shallow stripes by acting as if he were smarter than the commander of our forces in Afghanistan with regards to the reasonableness of his request to the President. I didn't spend much time picking out loudmouths who made it their business to second-guess General McChrystal, but I did see that there were more than a few who were interested in picking any number than his surge number. But if one is pre-disposed to the b-boy stance, the likes of Zakaria or Juan Cole for that matter (I imagine) are sufficient to put political weight on the left side of any military equation. My point is that I want to shy away from such sources despite that perhaps even more thoughtful liberals can use their intellectual products.  

I'm looking at the kinds of knowledge that appeal to peasants in full-literacy economy rather in the same way I would look at the shiny packages in a Wal-Mart that appeal to shoppers in a full-employment economy. It's all starting to look like product. And in a contest of products, you don't pay attention to consumers, you pay attention to producers, nay the natural resources upon which they build their wares. So I'm looking more towards the underlying philosophies in conflict in this big old literate world. And I'm paying specific attention to the amount of energy they can captivate through their instruments. 

I'm also paying attention in an introspective self-centered regard, as to which sorts of philosophies and ideologies appeal to people smarter than me. I mean there's a real feudal sense going on here. For example, one might ask why Werner von Braun came to the US (or was that after the war?) How about Einstein? Where do people of intellect and conscience go when they have the entire world to choose. Would a man who could become rich under both Sharia and the US Constitution choose Sharia? Why? Why not? I'm looking for the less subtle clues, which is why David P. Goldman remains such a fascinating figure to me. 

Anyway, there is a set of good reasons to avoid American political debate as it has evolved out here in the blogosphere - and the reason is, if you ask me, is that the debate has evolved from the reading of newspapers. And I think that newspapers have been a shallow product to be replaced by equally shallow bloggers. Except that there are great writers on blogs who illuminate the way towards deeper ideas. 

So if you think I'm a liberal or a conservative, I'm not. It's not about stance. It's not about be. It's about do, and the do has to do with looking towards global regimes of truth. I use the term without any deference towards the relativistic connotations. They only apply to the reactionaries.

More Peasant Principles

I have begun to articulate my Peasant Principle in application to life in these United States as I observe the decline of our society. What alerted me to this was my overuse of the metaphor of Sherwood Forest and my attraction to the order of feudalism. But what is a persistent reminder is the failure of the American middle class to hold fast to those things that made it great. I think our leadership has forgotten the use of the public and has failed to keep in place some simple restraints. 

To use a metaphor, think of cops deployed at the Fourth of July night at the beach just before the fireworks start. If you think about the situation for a moment, you realize that there is absolutely no way that 50 cops can control a crowd of 100,000 unless that crowd exhibits some self-discipline. But in any case, the cops have to make a hard nudge in order to keep the tipping point of chaos from being reached. The cops need hegemonic power, which roughly translated means, don't even think about crossing this line. 

Hegemonic power can only be exercised when people see it in their best interest not to get completely bent out of shape. This implies the use of a framework / ruleset / mythology / education. They all serve the same purpose which is to give the people inertia. If enough people exhibit any appreciable amount of groupthink, they become self-limiting. Ideas that might upset things, new ideas, radical ideas, or simply reactions, travel slower through large crowds of like-minded individuals. The purpose of leadership in exercising hegemonic controls is to use the weight of the crowd against it drawing away from that leadership. In other words, find out what the crowd believes and tell it what it wants to hear. 

Now understand that as I describe the use of hegemony, I am being value neutral. I see this as a consequence of information theory. It's flies against the rules of 'information thermodynamics' to think that you can get mass audiences to turn their thinking on a dime. That would require vast amounts of energy. However there is entropy in all systems, including information systems. So there are gradients to be achieved by introducing chaos, or failing to police the crowd. 

If a crowd's enthalpic instinct is toward modesty with its entropy towards immodesty, one can achieve a gradient by failing to reward modesty and rewarding immodesty. You can't turn a nation of women into whores in one generation, but you can give them the Pill and tell them that their need for sexual gratification is the same as a man's and let a Feminist movement do work at the margins for 50 years. You can fail to police and you can let some ideas trickle through. Sooner or later you get to a tipping point, and the immodesty of the crowd has become its defining characteristic. Then of course you have to push for the 'normalization' of the ever increasingly perverse in order to be Progressive, and you have to point to some Nirvana over the horizon. Moo-ve the crowd. Us a prod.

--

Let's consider the fact of average intelligence. I will place an axiom here too, which is that the bourgie consumer is highly suggestible. One who doesn't need to spend a great deal of time using their brains to survive has excess brain space, given average intelligence, and their enthalpic instinct towards mental sophistication will move them towards learning stuff. I make use of the term enthalpic instinct because people generally understand that it takes work to avoid suffering and pain. Nobody gets bed sores on purpose. On the whole we're not that frickin' stupid. So what kind of stuff do you learn when you don't really need to know anything more to live in relative comfort? 

You learn lies.

Why do you learn lies? Because you are a peasant, and you are not responsible for making things happen in the world. Therefore it's not important that you learn the truth. And since learning requires work and teaching requires work, there are economics as well as informational thermodynamics that make your chances of learning the valuable truth much less likely. It's not impossible, of course. I mean it's not like the Library at Stanford University is hidden in some secret underground facility. It's not as if the laws of physics, the rules of mathematics, the syntax of English or the text of the Constitution are not readily available. It's just that you're not hanging with the crowd of people who find that stuff absolutely compelling and pushing their enthalpic survival instincts to the max in absorbing those self-evident truths. You're simply not going to get there. Because you are a peasant.

But that's OK because you are in a whole crowd of uninformed, misinformed, uneducated (or mythologically edumacated) to remain under hegemonic control. Not because hegemony is evil, but because it is efficient. And since you are a member of that crowd, you understand your self-interest in the terms of that crowd's norms. Nobody is particularly compelled to become sociopathically radical against the ideas of their neighbors, and only the cops are trained to shove the right elbows at the right spots to moo-ve the crowd. You feel bad when you sit indoors reading a book instead of laughing with your friends on the beach - just like the kids in that McDonald's commercial on TV. They make having fun look so easy. And check out those dancers on MTV. I'm going to learn how to dance like that, then you'll have to put a ring on it. And we all are supposed to be married right?

Are you catching my drift here? You have to desire to be weird and transgressive to have an opportunity to guage the size of your crowd's limits. You have to shove people out of the way in order to get to the edge out where the cattle prods are. You have to look at eye level and see what the cops are doing when everybody else is staring at the fireworks and saying oooh and aaah. 

The point I'm trying to emphasize out of this entire dynamic is yet to come, but I've set you up.  I want you to read this, keeping in mind what I've said about the energy required to change the direction of an inertial crowd. But since you're a peasant and too lazy to read that, I'll just focus in on one key set of bullets, as a quote from Democrat Robert Reich speaking about the inevitables of healthcare reform.

• Younger people should pay more
• Healthier people should pay more
• Older people should just die- they’re “too expensive”
• There should be “less innovation” in medical technology
• You should not expect to live longer than your parents.

These are inevitables. They are the saws to everything you see. They are what totter when you teeter. If something goes up, these are what's going down. They are the left hand side of a thermodynamic equation that is balanced by the right hand of God. And they are the expensive truths that those who are actually responsible to running things in this world are bound to know. 

But you are a peasant, and it is not inevitable that *you* would learn those truths. In fact, politicians in a democracy understand the rules of hegemonic power very well. It suits their purposes to tell you... exactly what you want to hear - something not too far off from what your inertial crowd already believes in its precious little heart of hearts. And the quid pro quo that you demand of your duly elected leader is that HE LIES TO YOU. 

And you cannot change that. Do you want to know why? Do you really want to know why? OK I'll tell you why. Because voting is free. It's free. It's easy. It takes 5 whole minutes. And no matter what you tell yourself, in the economy of information, that's not a lot of energy. Hell, your vote doesn't even have your name on it. Neither does the poll that the politician actually listens to - that is when he's not actually being bought. You do know what a lobbyist is. He's somebody who is 50 times more connected than you, 20 times better paid, and only twice as smart. The lobbyist knows how to change a Congressman's vote, all you know how to do is get mad at Glen Beck or Keith Olbermann and tell your friends on Facebook. That's because you're a peasant. 

Don't get mad at me. I'm a peasant too. But I've been a black nationalist and a black Conservative Republican, and I don't mind spending a little extra energy shoving you out of the way to eyeball the cops on the Fourth of July. At the very least, I'm a writer with six years of blogging and 7400 essays. So that's some enthalpic interest up an information thermocline, even though I don't expect a peasant like you to read it all..

I'm trying to be a free man. I've got nothing against peasants except that, well, you know. They're people and I'm still to Christianly humanist to piss all over them. 

--

Now let me talk about the strength of the American middle class. It's not an exceptional thing except there are exceptional leaders who understand what inertial values work towards the crowd's enthalpic interest in becoming and remaining free men. Those guys aren't around. And even though half the teenaged women in the peasantry are on the Pill halfway to Babylon, there still remain some paragons of purity and parental pride. Surely there are men in that crowd who seek ever to be better men, and those who by talent of discipline move towards clarion truths in spite of the roaring mendacious mumbles of the great unwashed boogedy beat. 

The American middle class, those of us with no responsibility for being in the Slice (no John Geilguds are we to the Dudley Moores of the world) holding up the royal wankers of those who might have us killed for sport or spite, we might be our own owners. We might be free men with our little parcels and our own honest businesses and upright families and righteous neighbors and beloved communities. We might be independent and industrious, moral and cool too. It is not preordained that we roll in the mud of a depraved society with no backbone to sustain our eyes on God. But we move with a crowd ourselves. 

But could we the People be a righteous crowd? Could our own inertia work for us? Might we adopt, dare i say it, Old School Values, and recognize that hegemonic power is being used to prod us in the wrong direction? Of course ideally, we want to trust our cops and know they are not elbowing us towards a deathmarch into the sea. 

It's getting late. You understand what I'm saying. Keep your head up. Those fireworks are beautiful. But remember, you're still not yet free, even though you're middle class. And you ought to remember what lies are being repeated back to you, because that's what you paid for last November. 

Right Thinking

People ask me, no actually they don't. But they imply in a tangible way that they don't get where I'm coming from. It took me a long time to understand people - I only got it from good fiction and history. So now that I've moved from the Progressive Left to the Right, people ask me how and why. But they don't actually.

Somehow I have become tangentially responsible for the mindlessness of Right Thinking, but it's actually Right Behavior they mean. The thinking takes place outside of the behavioral affinities of the Right. But you can't know that unless you find out what the thinkers are saying and understand their value. Thus the following from the Archives:

Download Right Thinking

There's a sweet PDF for you, just in case you store things like I do. Otherwise here's the text.

James Burnham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham

The party dispute led to Shachtman, Burnham, and their supporters resigning from the SWP in 1940, and soon afterwards, Burnham broke with Shachtman and left the Communist movement and worked for the war time Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he called for an aggressive strategy to undermine the Soviet Union's power. During the Cold War, he regularly wrote for the National Review magazine. In 1983, President R.W. Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His ideas were an important influence on the neoconservative and paleoconservative factions of the American Right Wing

Cobb: Dog-Whistle Politics

cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2007/01/dogwhistle_poli.html

I think Petraeus is the right man for the CT job in Iraq, and given all that I've read through Ricks' 'Fiasco' I think that ought to be the operational consensus. I know we're getting on a tangent here, but what I can't stand is the idea that the 20k 'Surge' troops are being given no indication that anything they do will be worthwhile. People who are saying Iraq is a failure are giving no respect to the job that's being done, and that's just wrong.

Posted by: Cobb | January 17, 2007 at 02:39 PM

Introduction

 A friend asked me for publications that would assist her child in presenting a paper supporting the US mission in Iraq. I was more than happy to help, but then I fumbled when it came to naming more than a few. This notebook is a comprehensive list of the primary sources of my knowledge on that and other subjects of political and historical concern.

Update to the Introduction

9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, War on Terror

Terror & Consent - Phillip Bobbitt

The Man Who Warned America - Murray Weiss

The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas PM Barnett

The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright

Fiasco - Thomas Ricks

Cobb: Tuesday's Children
cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2006/08/tuesday_childre.html

Second Fallujah
I've just gotten up to the part of 'Fiasco' which describes the second battle for Fallujah, the one I recall being rather piqued about when it happened. Ricks says it was quite a mission. Still, I believe that I have mischaracterized the insurgency in my politics up to now, so I'll recap Iraq sometime later this week. (I'm also spelling it with an 'h' now, so as to conform with search engines.)

Cobb: Better?
cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2007/10/better.html

It was Fiasco however that told me the most about what I was wanting to know. How was the American army doing on the ground in Iraq and what could we learn? I've continually rejected the Baby Bin Laden Theory and I've continually said that we would get better in CT on the ground. That was because I understood from reading Fiasco that the generals in Iraq, especially Petraeus, would not leave lessons unlearned.

America Alone - Mark Steyn

Cobb: America Alone
cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2007/04/america_alone.html#c...

Mark Steyn isn't a great writer, in fact his book, America Alone isn't a very good book. I think he's way better as a radio commentator and columnist. So this effort seems a bit scattershot for me. But I think it's just the kind of book that someone like me needs to have read. It gives me a handful of double-ought shotgun shells of red hot facts to spew. By 'someone like me' I mean someone with a reason to defend America in the face of all the gibberish that passes as constructive dissent.

Individual Writers of Note

Victor Davis Hanson

 http://victorhanson.com/
Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall courses in military history and classical cultureHe was a full-time farmer before joining CSU Fresno, in 1984 to initiate a classics program. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.

Michael Yon

 http://www.michaelyon-online.com/

Michael J. Totten

 http://www.michaeltotten.com/

Ed Morrissey

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

Gerard Van Der Lewen

 http://americandigest.org/

Geopolitical Blogs

The Belmont Club

 http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/

Tigerhawk

 http://www.tigerhawk.blogspot.com/

In From The Cold

 http://formerspook.blogspot.com/

Counter Terrorism Blog

 http://counterterrorismblog.org/

Conservative Thought & Policy

Michael Oakeshott

The Kirk Center - Biography of Russell Kirk
www.kirkcenter.org/kirkbio.html

For more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”

Edmund Burke

 Manhattan Institute

 http://www.manhattan-institute.org/

American Enterprise Institute

 http://www.aei.org/

Hoover Institution

 http://www.hoover.org/

Imprimus

 http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

Heritage Foundation

 http://www.heritage.org/

Cato Institute

 http://www.cato.org/

General Conservative Publications

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

Front Page Magazine

Escape

If you like pina coladas,
Getting caught in the rain...
- The Escape Song

The thing that has changed my view of the world has to do with equilibrium and power. More specifically why it is that when 36 million people are absolutely convinced of the truth of something which defies the status quo, the status quo doesn't change. It has to do with the willingness of people to wage war against the willingness of people to accept discomfort.

But there comes a time when discomfort is a bit too much but still not anything worth dying and killing for. In that direction we plot escape.

Just last night I was comparing road trips with a colleague who runs marathons. He said that from Ohio to Denver is a 24 hour drive, but even after all that, you're only halfway to San Diego. Anyone who has driven across Texas knows that there is plenty of space for plenty of people. And yet we mostly live in crowded cities with people who, more often than not, make us very very uncomfortable. It seems to me that I could escape in the US. And every time I fly over flyover country, especially when I see long straight highways, I wonder who owns all that property down there, and how could I get a eyeball full.

An eyeball full of real estate at 36,000 feet is about as large as a decent sized county if you're looking straight down. I don't know how many counties there are in America, but they're all named after someone. Might as well be one named after me. But I know that I'll not likely have the time to learn what it takes to look after several paltry square miles. The very idea of shaping an acre to grow enough ingredients to fill a Big Mac is daunting. So I'm stuck with my pathetic urban skills. I'm not likely to do much better on a desert island. As it stands, I can't even decide which 10 DVDs to take to the exclusion of all others.

Nope. I need fellows. This place I would escape to must have people. But it's not about just being with people but doing things with people. There are things that I would like to accomplish - tinkering with the tools of my trade like the mechanics who build a monster truck in their spare time. It's a uniquely Western passion I think - this romance with gear. I've got the bug. I can satiate that through online channels.  But my fellows in escape, we need to share something in the lore of the land. I need to be in a place that makes me wear different clothes and communicate with people over distance that takes some doing. So I am drawn to islands and places with interesting geological features that make them less accessible to the world, and binding of those that are there.

Hilton Head Island has these ingredients. Martha's Vineyard has these ingredients. I've thought about retiring both places. Once when I was still under the thrall of Stanford University, Menlo Park had that magical quality to it. I very much enjoyed living in the enclave of South Pasadena for the time that I did. I thought it to be the greatest little city in the world. But South Pasadena and Menlo Park are still too much under the influence of their larger communities. To be there is more like hiding, not escaping. These are not destinations of destiny, rather they are convenient hollows still adjacent to all the bustle. Bustle means dependency. Escape leaves one independent in an organic spot. Hilton Head and Martha's Vineyard are just unique enough by their very nature that they draw people through them. Santa Fe, NM has the same quality I think, although it is not so magical to me - magic for me requires aquatic access.

So I contemplate a final living place for myself. My final home. My last place on earth. That if I make millions or if I make none, I can come back to that place from wherever I travel and feel that it is my best corner of the planet. Where the food and the language is mine. Where the attitude and the community is right. Where my fellows have that same need to be at arms distance from the foolish endeavors of the masses and the concurrent desire for elevated company.

--

Carlin speaks inspired from Pat Buchanan's ruminations about the disunity of American society. He suggests that we might be fortunate one day to live up to the doctrine of the Tenth Amendment. And I have my own hopes of that as well. States rights. Private property. I want to be someplace American where common Americans require some education of a sort to access and remain. The kind of education that makes you respect liberty. The easiest way to say so is money. You can't just walk into a penthouse at the Beresford on Central Park West. Then again, money alone is not enough there. That's the point. There is something unique about what we have evolved to be the places where America might be considered to be at its best. You escape to those places.

Everyone's idea of escape isn't the same. Riffing off Carlin, what say Hawaii becomes the Marijuana State, that Vermont becomes the Gay State? Sure, why not? In fact, we can only hope that becomes the case. Every man has a destiny. Heaven forbid it be the Mainstream.

The New Feudalism

Every time I watch a video by Bill Whittle, I am reminded that there are people out there like me who, if things go to shit, I will be perfectly comfortable betting my survival on.

I just finished Five Thrillers, a sci-fi by Robert Reed. It's the serial about a character by the name of Joseph Carroway, a man with two extraordinary talents. He has an innate ability to read people's motivations, size them up, and figure them out. And, he has a sociopathic ability to do whatever it takes to save human lives. The combination make him, ultimately a sort of philosopher king, but he goes through life as an assassin. You've all heard of the moral exercise of 'The Lifeboat'. You're shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean and you have six people but room for only five. Who lives, who dies? Joe Carroway is the one man who can make that decision better than any human, but his logic is extraordinarily precise, and correct. Hearing it out makes you realize that more often than not, we make choices that are comfortably dismissive of the value of human life - that we have ways of thinking that make high minded appeals to sacrifice, when in fact the situation calls for heroism or justice.

To give away some of the ending of 'Five Thrillers', Carroway makes a statement about the necessity for cannibalism in anticipation of an extraordinary global calamity. Cannibalism a year so that one generation can survive to be 10 generations. Brutal selfishness and paranoic distrust for 10 generations so that those generations can survive for 50 generations, until a world is reborn where the possibility of liberty can be actualized. Else, extinction.

--

Today Roger Simon pinged the idea that the end of the American Dream is at hand. And I wonder about that. Without having read anything below that soundbite, I figured he was talking about the probability that banks will no longer fund 30 year mortgages for the American middle class and that in some not too distant future, the only Americans who will own property are those who already do. I've long been aware of this paradox when I noted in my bohemian days the sleeping habits of the homeless in NYC. You see NYC being a winter city, banks often enclosed their outdoor ATMs in heated glass enclosures, some the size of a good sized bedroom. You use your ATM card to unlock the security door and use the ATM, unless there was some bum sitting there in a huddle. Why should they be allowed to sleep on bank-owned property, I thought. Well, how many of us do sleep in bank-owned property? You may call yourself a homeowner, but have you had a mortgage burning party lately?

Why not assume the worse? What if America goes feudal, and we're all just peasants who will never get the benefit of a general heartless corporation that offers money at a reasonable percentage so you can pretend to be the king of your own castle for 30 years? Imagine you have to work for a person, not an institution. Imagine you have to be a name and not a number. Imagine that everything had to go through your boss's boss's boss. That there were no credit scores, no SATs, no demographic abstracts about your qualities - that it all hung on the word of that man. Yeah man. The Man. Imagine that there were never any telephone agents or customer service jagoffs for you to complain to - no middle management, no flunkies or flacks. Everything goes to The Man. That's the kind of feudalism I'm talking about. No corporate institutions. No United Nations, no Safeco Field, no Organizations for the Whatever of Whatever. Just The Man whose kingdom extends as far as you've ever walked in your life from the place you were born.

Do you have it within your power today to find such a man? Can you ever imagine such a powerful figure to be just? I can. 

That's what I've been thinking about these past few years. If I have the God given right to make life and death decisions, well then I want to be The Man. It is why I read Shakespeare's tragedies. It is why I read Plato. It is why I study politics and culture and philosophy and theology and history. It is why I game. It is why I write. Because I know there's a Man behind all of this, and when the institutions rot to the ground, those men will still be around. And how will you find them? And how will they know you? And what will you do if society's institutions all go bankrupt? Since Enron I've been thinking this. And immediately since learning of Stalin's atrocities, I've been thinking this. Do you know how, do you know why?

Because one day I walked into a bank in Texas and tried to deposit a check for $7500 that I earned and it took me half the damned day to get my cash. I saw the failure of the institution, but I still remember the man named Buck who got me the job that sent me to South Texas that paid me the check from Buck's bank in North Texas. All these peasants were standing between Buck and me. And they called themselves 'working', but they were just sleeping on bank-owned property and getting between me and my money.

--

I know what it's like, relatively speaking, to be The Man. And I know what it's like to be despised in that position - to have all of your honor called into question by some bureaucratic formalism. You do too. That's why you hate talking to those drones on the phone all the way over in India who ask you your security question - that is, when their computers are functioning. Because they have no idea of your value as a human being. They have no way of assessing your character, of judging your honor, of knowing what kind of person you are, of sizing you up and putting some understanding into the equation. They just know how to process this corporate transaction. Or this government transaction. Whatever. You're just a number, and they're just doing their job. Surely you must understand, you have that kind of job too, don't you?

--

The problem with social collapse is that there are pockets of plenty, of private, well-managed business, that gets drowned with the rising tide of failure. We're all interconnected, after all. That is no longer in question. I don't want to see the end of the American dream. I kinda like the anonymity of being a number. But if we go feudal instead of corporate, I think I'll have some advantage because I was never the one asking my government to do more. I was never the one surprised by institutional corruption and mendacity. I was never the one begging for bureaucracies to expand and deliver more of their transactions to more of the middle class and the deserving poor. I was the one looking for The Man. I was the one trying to be The Man for me and my people.

Individual liberty is not incompatible with feudalism. It depends on the man. Try getting that institution to defend your individual liberty.

Effective Resonance Redux

Six years ago I was actively fighting racism through my blogging. I came up with all the answers and I satisfied myself in many ways that racism in America was clear and present, but by and large not a danger. Along the way I found that most people, in fact the overwhelming majority, wanted racism to be beat, but they had no idea how to go about that politically. Personally, I think most people don't have a problem figuring it out.

These days, the old political punching bag is taking its hits as people from all directions call fouls and punch the racism bag in somebody else's direction. But the bag never goes away and nobody steps around it to actually punch the other person. 

I am perturbed to a certain extent. On the one hand, like most people, I want to see racism defeated. Not more than I want a million dollars, but a lot. I also would like to see Americans have a single clear and comprehensive understanding of what racism is, and what to do about it. But I know that's pretty much impossible. Therefore I plink targets and do my small part within the context of the more or less perfect framework I have established over the decades.

Today my target is the people who 'play the race card'. If you understand the phrase then you understand that such people are corrosive of both civil society and true anti-racism. I accuse them of a lack of perspective, they are people who are apoplectic for inadequate reason. They are exactly like cops who arrest without probable cause, they are fanatic and misguided. But most importantly, they are a key component of the constituency that rightly wants to fight racism. They therefore need not to be defeated, but redirected and corrected.

There is only one way to be wrong and that is to be ignorant. The race carders, or 'Carders' as I will term them, along with Birthers and Truthers a swelling class of fanatics within suffering America, have history on their side. That is to say they mis-categorize current instances of racial bigotry alongside a long history of American racism which all folks understand to be heinous. So if their charges of racism are denied, they accuse the deniers of being blind not only to the present but on the wrong side of history. As I said at American Digest:

The thing to recognize about people who play the race card is that it is part of a narrative that stretches back 400 years. The cycle of accusation and denial is self-perpetuating and only strenghtens the convictions of the accusers who are convinced there is an impenetrable 'white wall' of racists and that American thought itself is its foundation.

The only way to combat this strategy is through judo - by using its own energy against it. Reason and evidence may be on the side of the Sheriff, that doesn't take bullets out of the bad guy's guns.

Therefore let us look at Effective Resonance once again which was my way of assaying what was two, four or Six Pounds of Racism. My intent, as always is to have the punishment fit the crime and rid ourselves of fanatic excess.

Class Three - Background Noise
This will include all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda, being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.

Class Two - Political Intransigence
Class Two racism involves denials of public accommodation or private standing which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would include imposition of glass ceilings, racial profiling, white flight, medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of incitement.

Class One - Crime
Theft, criminal defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to repair.

Now my own cynical point of American repair of racist crime notwithstanding, it is quite simple to look at everything that has been called racist in this 'post-racial' era and see that very little of it, including the Gates fiasco, rises to the level of Class Two.

The point, my friends, is not to tell the Carders that there is no racism going on, but to explain to them that it is not their grandfather's racism. They'll have to agree, although what is plausibly deniable gets foggy. After all, even the Carders will deny that they themselves are not making stereotypical judgments.

The Virtue of the Essential Human

The experiment of America, as an aristocracy of merit, challenges us all. To take the idea of citizenship seriously is to approach the best understanding of individuality and the rights of man. I think that requires of us a great deal. There is only so far the offices of government should go in recognizing us as we necessarily think ourselves to be.

Many years ago, I held the somewhat common notion that the Declaration of Independence might have listed complaints against the deprivations of racial offense and become the basis of an anti-racist Constitution. The fact that it didn't suggested to me some original flaw in the founding of the nation, which a proper evolution of thought would correct. But I did all that for the purposes of the anti-racist promise, without much regard for the substance of the original complaint.

So I believe this is a common error of any class of people who regard themselves as so separate as to not identify in common with the pains suffered by those with more to lose. Or more plainly said, what would I care about the King quartering his troops on my property if I have no property? Shouldn't the Declaration talk about *my* peeves?

It is this kind of error that I believe is at fault in the mischaracterization of contemporary political complaints as matters of rights. And the popularity of this sort of overproduction ultimately dilutes the polity's ability to preserve and defend those self-evident rights the Founders had in mind. And so we have lost focus as a nation and wasted our political energies on frivolous matters thinking them to be literally righteous.

How can we come to believe that America is incapable of defending the dignity of a 13 year old girl from improper search and seizure? It must be because we believe people like Ginsburg must strident instruct people unlike Ginsburg in such basic matters of human dignity.

How can we come to believe that some certain people must in their struggles to achieve freedom act from a playbook of radical reinterpretations of human history? It must be because we believe people like Fanon must stridently instruct people unlike Fanon in such basic matters of human freedom.

And so each group has their unique message to the world and each must find, independently, their own separate path to dignity and freedom. Well, whats' the difference between that idea and any of Hitler's ideas? Nothing.

I find it difficult to presume to lead some fraction of the people or to defend some fraction of humanity as a worthy political aim. I am greatly convinced that the human animal does not vary so much that he can be served well by a wide variety of principles. There are a simple few and the paths towards attaining and defending them are few. But having found those paths, we must find our human center of gravity, each individual conforming at their core, and place that center on those paths. Instead we have put our sex lives and skin colors as our cores and we have made mountains of the discomforts such fetishes have brought us. And in our every personality trait, thinking moderation and conformity itself a sin, we have expanded our appetite for taking our every difference as deep and fundamental. We have monetized the long tail of arcane whim and now ply it as political currency. We passionately attend the details of vegetarianism as if they were matters of war and peace and we run our state treasuries into ruin for the sake of propping up a million subsidies of such trivial import. All such foolishness is done at the peril of our common good because we have determined that our diversity is the most important feature we possess.

This is the evidence of a crisis in confidence in our underlying principle. We Americans are invested in a globalist, multicultural hedge against the sort of common sense Thomas Paine had. We pretend that we are of a different strain than he and that our expanse and our eclectic humanity, our advanced sensitivities to the great variety of human experience makes us wiser. The great variety of human experience can all be cruelly ended with a pike through the heart, and the heart in every human lies in the same place. It doesn't matter how much we value what our tongues have tasted or where our feet have trod, our heart remains our core.

So we must resolve to understand and hue to what is essential to our individual humanity and to reassert its common core. We must recognize the minimal yet essential role of government's defense of simple liberty and not attempt to gainsay it by attempting to guarantee too much. We can only be a nation with liberty and justice for all if all are for the nation correctly focused on its principles and not our own differences. When we seek to be too many things as a people we lose sight of the common purpose of nationhood, and we belabor our citizenship with freight it cannot bear; we turn our politics into a fleamarket and dilute society with a million complaints.

The most important things in life are as they ever were, and no greater ideas will be invented than liberty. So let that be our focus on this day.

Western Civ Ready Reference

Brooks, Black Engineers & Epistemological Modesty

Not long ago, I lamented the fact that although I've been following David Brooks since 'Patio Man', I had never heard him mention Oakeshott and like conservative thinkers. Today as he speaks of those and others, I remember something about my own journey that puts me in the conservative camp.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

When I met the man who would be one of my closest friends we clashed almost immediately. The year was 1983 and I was a sophomore at State. I was a fairly newly minted leader in NSBE, the National Society of Black Engineers, a hugely successful undergraduate organization. The occasion was the annual Camping Conference at which we would perform a kind of drop squad maneuver on a couple hundred inner city youth. That year I had been elected to be Head Counselor and I was holding a meeting to discuss themes and agendas. My idea over which I and 'Moleman' collided was 'Engineers of Black Society'. Moleman looked at me like I was some alien species dropped on his lap, oddly fascinated but truly disgusted. I compromised.

But I did not compromise my belief that we were indeed working out those things that all us Talented Tenth had been put on this earth to do, which was to lead the masses of underprivileged blacks out of the ghetto and into the Promised Land. And of course there was no controversy in the aim at all, but the ethics of the situation demanded that we didn't just blurt it out so obviously. Nobody expected that black ghetto kids would amount to anything if other ex-black ghetto kids didn't lavish so much attention and other people's money on them. This was why it was and is so easy to get such funding that mere undergraduates can do community service on a part-time basis and get props. I was a community organizer, you were a community organizer - we all were community organizers, except I was alien and disgusting enough, as a college sophomore to call it the engineering of black society. I do have that ability to be blunt.

As most Cobb readers recognize, all of this energy and motivation came to a screeching halt as I recognized in microcosm that there was no black orthodoxy. My soul bled out as it was metaphorically pierced by Mishima's own sword at the failure of my culture to save itself through the ministrations of such neo-nationalist organizations as NSBE. I found peace finally in defying the practice of black unity in 1986 and true solace in even abandoning the concept of black leadership in 1992 and now approach the bliss & responsibility of rejecting blackness altogether. All of these revelations are related to a sane and sensible epistemological modesty, and so Brooks' words bear repeating as I join the company of his leading lights in concept..

We are strangers to ourselves and American black society is an immeasurably complex organism. Therefore we should tend to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize American black society from the top down.

There is an implication by default that there might be some reorganization from the bottom up. I am even more dubious of that. As well there will be no spiritual, humanist planning for American blacks either. There's just no herding those cats, except for the lame ones who lack the energy and spirit to escape the corrals of stereotypes.

So I bear witness to a certain deflation of myself, of thousands of hours spent in the faithful rendition and interpretation of a lost civilization, like some old cloistered fanatic scribbling out sentences and wrangling out rap couplets. But the echoes and ghosts of that Struggle are still with us and people still find ways to attribute their condition to shackles of old arguments and disproven identities. We live in the past's future, ignorant of our own presence. Strangers to ourselves.

Nothing To Brag About

I'm likely to give Barack Obama's presidency six months before I trash him. 100 days is meaningless, and the first 30 has been so full of barrel fish it doesn't even seem fair.

However, this is how I see all the scandals. Firstly, if you're going to get new blood into the capitol, some of this nonsense comes with the territory. The fact of the matter is that Joe Sixpack has no clue about how powerful and wealthy people actually live. The idea that some people might get $100,000 worth of free perks probably does seem incredibly scandalous, as does the idea that somebody might have forgotten to pay $20,000 in back taxes that they just happen to have lying around.

However Barack Obama has fanned the populist flames that boil this pot by castigating rich people in general and CEOs in particular.

It's been might quiet around Obamaland. The reason is clear. They have nothing to brag about. There are a dozen ways to snipe at this guy, and I think its fair that he and all of his fatuous admirers be taken down a peg. I could, but I'm not going to right now.

See the way I see it is this. There's only one lesson to learn from the mistakes that Obama is inevitably going to make, and it's the big lesson. It's an old lesson too. In fact, the best way I've seen it described (popularly) is in the following video.

Hitting You Where You Live

Akindele Akinyemi has been a member of the Conservative Brotherhood for some time now. I'm going to post his end of the year message in its entirety. He is increasingly strident on a fairly strong plank of what I'm calling the Urban Conservative Agenda, this is his manifesto. Another of my commentors and a guy I've seen around the web, Constructive Feedback has this on his mind, as does D Burt the Afronerd. These are activists who have answers for those who ask what are Republicans going to do for the ghetto. More importantly they are on point to ask the very profound question about Democrat and Liberal black leadership - has their monopoly over the past 30 years produced results you can believe in?

I think these folks represent a trend that's going to have a great deal more influence in 2009 as the glow fades off the novelty of the election of Obama and Americans faced with the same problems are going to recognize that change is slow to come for those who wait for it. They have the upper hand when it comes to change, because the black meccas of America have yet to choose Republican leadership.

There are those who would suggest that we now live in an era where 'liberal' and 'conservative' have no meaning. Of course this is wishful thinking. There aren't startling new ideas, there are old proven ones that are discovered late. The Urban Conservative Agenda is a new name for old time religion that was good enough for our great grandparents. Hear Akindele out. He sounds in his message so much like Booker T. Washington that the resemblance is uncanny. The attitude is fierce, uncompromising and confident. The language is clear and to the point using terms that have floated around for a long time. Listen up.

The Next Great Republican

The next great Republican will have to be someone we know but haven't seen. I'm imagining that person today.

The thing that the next great Republican will need to know, that quality that will distinguish him most has everything to do with his ability to draw a strong line between the role of morality in life and the use of moral power by the government. It is because this line has been blurred that Republicans have failed the Conservative movement. It is because this line has been blurred that Republicans are making mortal enemies of the center. It is because of this failure that the GOP is currently tearing itself apart.

What Conservative leaders seem to have failed to grasp is the extent to which they draw upon Christian themes and personal morality enables and empowers multiculturalism and the politicization of everyday life. When Conservatives insist that one's personal demeanor is integral to the effective morality of any office, they have breached a wall of modernity. They have broken a rule that is evident but unwritten. A man who swears and drinks may be a fine father, so long as he confines his salty personal behavior to appropriate times and places. But to accept and expect that the strengths of character attach to efficacy of leadership or respect for standards destroys in both directions.

We live in a time of cynicism - we are searching for heroes. This is a consequence of the fact that we have been betrayed. Reagan betrayed us by trading arms for hostages, and Oliver North betrayed us by running rogue operations in Central America. The slack we were willing to give these men because of their otherwise fine public character is exactly what gave them license to do dirt. William Casey's polluted ethos of plausible deniability showed its ultimate limits. What compartmentalization works for spies does not work for public figures. So there is a fine edge that cuts both ways. Too little comparmentalizations makes the personal political and give us license to behave as though a black man cannot know what a white woman knows. Too much compartmentalization gives rise to imbuing too much stake in appearances.

The successful party must seek to inform its constituency better on the proper conduct of the business of government. It is in this regard that the GOP has the advantage, but that advantage has been squantered by its opportunism once in office. Strongarm tactics used for party advantage rather than in fulfillment of a pledge to public service has tarnished whatever reputation the GOP might have had gained from its Contract With America, matters of term limits and its fresh approach to 'throwing the bums out'. That sentiment lies firmly with the Democrats, not because they have shown any brighter, bolder or more innovative ways and means to run government and get it to respond to the needs of the people, but because in the ways that ultimately mattered more, the Democrats appeared to be on the side of transparency whereas the Bush Administration seemed to cover up. In fact, both parties conduct their business in plain view of the public, but the one who can outwit the press and put the attention on dealings that can be roundly condemned will have the upper hand.

Most importantly, the Republicans need to take the Culture Wars in a new direction. At the moment, there is no way they cannot do so without putting a visible minority front and center. That is because the GOP needs the assistance of the major media in putting such issues in front of the people. Only by bringing issues of race, class and gender onto the front burner can Republicans overcome those stereotypes placed at their feet. The inevitable contradictions that will surface, whether they be obvious or of disengenuous faint praise, the boulder will begin rolling downhill. This augments the momentum initiated by what remains its own movement, the energy around Sarah Palin.

The Republican Party itself, in its various leadership councils needs to energize its various constituencies and establish an e pluribus unum around center-right priorities. Whenever the Republican Party can be stereotyped when it is convenient, the Left can rule the soundbites. When Ralph Reed ran the Christian Coalition, his role within the Big Tent was clear and had to be dealt with separately. These days, the coalitions have become ill-defined for their general support of the Bush agenda in various ways. So all Republicans had to be vaguely supportive of Bush, of the War, of pro-Life issues, of Second Amendment rights, against illegal immigration etc. The Republican Party needs individuals out front on each of these issues which appeal broadly to the Right without everyone being responsible for everything. This makes a robust Republican party which handles its own differences better and provides a variety of intelligent dissents which cannot be stereotyped.

That's what I see.

See also Posner.

...In the Republican Party these fall into three main groups: believers in (1) free markets, low taxes, and small government; (2) believers in tough criminal laws and a strong foreign policy; and (3) social (mainly religious) conservatives, who are hostile to abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and gun control. Groups (2) and (3) converge on hostility to illegal immigrants. Groups (1) and (2) are in some tension because a national security state requires big government and therefore high taxes. Group (1) is in tension with (3) because (1) is libertarian and (3) is regulatory.

In Search of Conservative Intelligence

Something I believe goes without saying is that there are particular advantages to be had by myself and all Progressives who seek to understand the principled conflicts between themselves and Conservatives. To the extent that I care much about the particulars of black people, which is possibly all sentimental and chauvinistic, I think there is a good opportunity for African Americans to avail themselves to sound Conservative logic. It also goes without saying that this is a controversial assertion for a black man, but I think much of that controversy is misplaced in a sort of dissonance.

When I was a performance poet in the early 90s moving to New York, it was an article of faith, especially in the wake of Rodney King and the LA Riot, that news anchors and reporters would seek out uneducated angry black people for a representative opinion. This has become such a cliche that when the reverse happens, as it did famously with an Obama supporter YouTubed in Hollywood, it is seen as quite an unusual phenomenon. It is therefore a bit ironic but then again entirely predictable that when Progressives and liberals choose to find a representative of those people they know nothing about, they tend to find those who most resemble their preconcieved stereotypes. It is with that kind of foolishness I wish to dispatch.

This of course, forces me to do likewise. Fortunately, that's not difficult considering that when I first began blogging I was more Progressive than I am now, and linked to a more liberal set of bloggers. I've gotten rid of that blogroll altogether. Hmm. But since the election of Obama I have started re-reading Yglesias, Drum, Kelley and DeLong. I didn't realize that Kevin Drum left the Washington Monthly and landed at Mother Jones of all places, so I've since dropped him - but that's my prejudice. Still, I've never made much of a point of arguing against Kos, for example. If I had my druthers, and since it's my blog I'll state them, I would have Progressives quoting from The New Republic and Leftists from The Nation. I'd thusly be quite happy quoting from The National Review. What irks me is that I keep hearing about Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and George Will - people I don't take seriously.

Be all that as it may, it's clear that from my own perspective, I am sufficiently grounded in the basics of Conservatism to take my own study up a notch and will continue to heed David Brooks, Victor Davis Hanson, Richard John Neuhaus, Greg Mankiw, Richard Fernandez and Ross Douthat. I'll spend more time hearing out the Powerline guys from the Claremont Center and other Straussians of their ilk. But pointedly, I will be paying stricter attention to those Conservative intellectual writers, historians, economists, and attorneys whose grasp of the finer details is without question.

Since November 4th, I haven't read one thing about Sarah Palin but I did finally come to understand that it was Tina Fey (star of 'Mean Girls', duh) who most famously said in a skit as Palin that she can see Russia from her house. Haha very funny, now I get the joke. But I don't watch Saturday Night Live, and haven't since Eddie Murphy left. I realize that there are all sorts of millions of Americans who inform their political views from parody and satire but you won't find me quoting Stephen Colbert around here.

On talk radio, I still like Hewitt's form of lawyerly gotcha, but it wears thin after a while. Instead I prefer Dennis Miller and Dennis Prager. Miller because he doesn't have an overweening desire to be taken so damned seriously yet remains hilarious and an incredibly prescient judge of character. Prager because in the end, he's probably the most even-handed and philosophical on Right Radio. I probably would listen to Bill Bennett if he weren't on a 3-6AM. I will listen to Rush Limbaugh because he is right on top of the talking points of the day, often establishing them, but I won't hear him out. He's a naked and brilliant propagandist - there to keep the hoi full of it's own polloi. I never ask Limbaugh "why" and nobody ever should, and in that regard he's only useful to spark up a topic.

I've got Chesterton and C.S. Lewis in my back pocket, but I'd probably do well to seek out Oakeshott and other theorists like Edmund Burke, because I'm rather determined through the education I've just gotten from Jonah Goldberg to find out the finer points on the differences between Classic Liberals, Modern Conservatives like Hayek and Libertarians. I'd also like to be able to understand how Christianity in general connect through the Enlightenment and energizes an appreciable amount of morality in Conservative ideology without becoming the parody portrayed in redneck Evangelism. I've broadly placed conservative Christianity in the sole province of Catholicism, but it cannot soley reside there.

All in all, I am satisfied that I won't have to talk about elections for some time and that I'll spend less time defending policies on principles than speaking more directly about those principles.

Liberal Fascism: Halfway Mark

I am about halfway through Jonah Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism', and it's truly a fascinating set of ideas. Goldberg has given me quite a bit to think about considering what I did and did not know about American history. But in many ways this is exactly the book I have been needing to know.

As I mentioned before, or probably never said it this way before, the most difficult think about being a black conservative is that you haven't inherited it. Which means, like any bounder on the ascent, you know very well what you don't like but you're not sure exactly if getting what you do like gets you into. We are all aware of the rhetorical catfights that certain conservatives like to get into and there is a great risk of falling into blatant demogoguery. It is difficult to unlearn progressivism without being slavish.

What is not said often enough is that blackfolks who bother to do battle as conservative specifically with progressive blackfolks are often motivated by the same premises as progressives - that some intellectual vanguard pointing in the proper direction is going to lift all boats. I think that in divesting myself of the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth, that I have avoided that trap - but it does consequently leave me wondering why I talk to or about blackfolks at all.

These are some of the interesting consequences of transcribing my journey as I get through towards more contemporary histories in Goldberg, especially with regard to the role of the Black Panthers and the Black Power Movement. You see in assigning the dichotomy necessary to make his point clear, there is no question but that black politics in significant components lie directly in the scheme of fascism. For what it's worth, a great deal of American politics does, but I suppose that I will have some responsibility to deal with the black part. In some ways that will be quite easy as my record on the Fifty Page Book Men and the Coalition of the Damned is fairly clear. But the premises of unity and collectivism, very deeply imbedded in Progressivism and in black identity itself - well, smacking that with a stick is going to be costly in terms of the noise I will have to suffer for doing so.

Be all that as it may, this book is the antidote to Howard Zinn. It is absolute required reading for anyone who cares to understand what conservatives are NOT. That is because it makes for the first honest accounting of how exactly to view that period in world history when the context of the evil of the 20th century can be explained in American terms.

Goldberg does a damning good job, but perhaps not as persuasive as possible (yet the first time I've heard it) accounting for the intellectual tenor of the 20th century with regard to the reconception of government. Although his book is complete with a fairly robust accounting of the intellectual leaders and concepts of the century, he decides rather to concentrate his focus on the great men. That is the single weakness of the book aside from some variously scattershot factoids that are often thrown in for effect. (For example, Malcolm X is only mentioned once for 'by any means necessary') which he paints as nihilist, and then left alone. I suspect that as he loads down his book with such references it becomes overwrought with nitpicky and debatable talking points rather than tracing a smooth inevitable arc and consequences of the philosophical ends of Progressivism. The difficulty is thus with justifications of cramming everything under fascism which is not the sum of all evils that in my view totalitarianism actually is.  The question I think would be better answered is how to rescue the world from dictatorship through the application of classic liberalism and the separation of powers inherent in the American system. But maybe that's just me.

But what remains the unquestionable strength of the book is how Goldberg illustrates what the Left has done to spin treachery of its own design onto the shoulders of the Right. He demonstrates case after case of how liberalisms of the 'third way' are drawn to fascistic themes.

It should be instructive to understand the very basics of fascism which have basically everything to do with the origin of the word from the Roman fasces in which a set of slim, individually weak sticks, are bound tightly together to form a weapon. The premises of fascism always subordinate the individual towards a nationalist scheme of group identity and meaning. Goldberg sees fascism as essentially an organizing methodology with consistent themes in Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Wilson's warsocialist America. He then traces these themes through FDR's New Deal, and Progressives on the Left from Dewey to current thinkers and politicians on the Left from Hillary Clinton to Michael Lerner. 

The book is an armory of ammo showing the excesses of the Left and their efforts to conceal their errors, and it essentially breaks the stranglehold liberals claim to the moral high ground. Extraordinary book.

The Average Black Conservative

I've been discussing the progress of the state of political advocacy and communications in the Right section of the black blogosphere. I recognize that most of us in the Conservative Brotherhood are un-ordinary. You can't be out here representing all this political stuff without being able to dish it and take it. But what about the average Joe?

I think everybody knows that Denzel is Republican, and it's easy for the extraordinary guy. I've always been a big fan, and there's that part of me that really finds it difficult to understand how it is that DW doesn't catch the flack that we do. I think the answer is that we have seen him do all sorts of things in his roles, but we don't see average black conservatives.

I've been thinking about some of the veterans and pros like Joe Hicks, Shannon Reeves, Bob Parks, Herman Cain and Michael King. These are people that have a tight network, know each other and know operatives in the Republican Party. They've been around and surely have their war stories. But it's not about them. Then I think there are folks like me and other black conservative bloggers who have been around a relatively short period of time - less than 7 years on the scene. We are starting to be influential in the public. But it still requires a little bit of an extraordinary initiative. That initiative has the appearance of being offset by the particular rarity of Republicans who happen to be black, and it is rather true what Spence says:

In an election like this there are no black independents. There are blacks who are predisposed to vote for McCain/Palin either for ideological reasons or because the GOP line is much shorter–blacks in the DNC are a dime a dozen, while blacks in the GOP are as rare as….well did you watch the Republican National Convention?

But most of us are not operatives on a mission to deliver pork back to the home base, nor lobbyists with legislative axes to grind, nor opportunists trying to make a buck or get some airtime for our own aggrandizement. Most black conservatives are merely center-right to right wing, but not interested in doing much more than speaking our minds and voting without being hounded into submission by accusations of self-hatred and worse.

I'm not going to pretend to be an average black conservative. I am a sucker for political philosophy and I can talk about it forever, even when I know it makes me appear much stranger than I actually am. But why is it that a black man cannot be a political philosopher without appearing strange? But more importantly, why is free thinking considered inimical to the black political agenda. Perhaps it is the very term 'black political agenda' that we've made a great deal of assumptions about and it's time for those assumptions to be unpacked. That's part of what I, and others, have been trying to accomplish all these years online.

It goes without saying that being a black conservative and consistently voting as an ideological Republican requires some independent thinking. After all, the great success of our forbears' political activism resulted in great changes in both parties and the national political landscape. The beneficiary of that has been the Democrats, by far. Nevertheless it often doesn't occur to people to think of Malcolm X as a religious conservative who wanted to pay no taxes, believed very strongly in the sanctity of marriage and held a high burden of proof for the Government. These are attributes largely associated with Republicans today. I happen to think this congruence is not ironic nor coincidental. They come from the same place in the souls of people. When you are fiercely independent and don't trust bureacracies to have your best interests at heart...well let me not go on. My point is that there are plenty of people who easily identify with Malcolm X as a strong black man who should have no problem identifying with Denzel, those professionals like Michael King and bloggers like me.

In the end, I say it should not be a matter of controversy at all

Walter Lippmann - First Note

Walter Lippmann - From Wikipedia

Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as "intelligence work." Within this role, journalists are a link between policymakers and the public. A journalist seeks facts from policymakers which he then transmits to citizens who form a public opinion. In this model, the information may be used to hold policymakers accountable to citizens. This theory was spawned by the industrial era and some critics argue the model needs rethinking in post-industrial societies.

Though a journalist himself, he held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” A journalist’s version of the truth is subjective and limited to how he constructs his reality. The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”

The Legal Difference

I heard on Dennis Miller last evening that a group of homosexual activists spit in the face of an 80 year old grandmother for defying their crusade. I think she was a Mormon, but it hardly matters. This radicalism has gone too far.

It is surprising how useful reading Jonah Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism' has been in understanding matters of conflict between Left and Right. Following his example I am going to reduce political complexity that I have previously used from three schools to two. I had previously talked about Liberals, Progressives and Conservatives. I will now talk only about Progressives and Conservatives. Primarily this is about who has the upper hand in the intellectual direction of the parties. Progressives, encompassing Pragmatists, the followers of William James are the leaders of the Left. Barack Obama is squarely there. Conservatives took over the Right with Ronald Reagan in 1980 who branched off from Goldwater. The Rockefeller Republicans are essentially dead.

I will also however talk more about Classic Liberalism as the home of Conservatism whose values we may all be trying to get back to - depending.

At any rate, I have suffered through a great deal of bickering about who's a bigot in all of this noise about Proposition Eight, which is rather odd considering that California merely joins the other 41 states in outrightly banning gay marriage. What nobody has done in any of these flamewars is detail any of the 'rights' that are supposedly being denied gay couples. It has, in the most logical case, boiled down to 'the right to call themselves married', with no reference to what exactly being married gives straights other than social recognition. I think that the social recognition is an important part of the cast that advocates for gay marriage should emphasize, but that they should not pursue this matter in the scortched earth manner they have done, and thus they are destroying their own case by claiming all of their opponents are bigots. Here is the applicable case law that nobody has been referring to. Actually very easy to find if anyone cared.

An honest evaluation of all of the differences will recognize that 99% of these differences are benefits not rights, and a case that any of these benefits are Constitutional rights is easily debatable. This is the distinction I make for inheritance of property - however I don't see how any gay partner's unwillingness or inability to execute a proper will is a responsibility of the state. Probate can be ugly for anyone.

A second look at the substantial list of benefits would show that almost none of them existed before the New Deal.

It is to be expected that Progressives will expand upon Rousseau's concept of the General Will as the proper driver of state activity. Similarly we can expect Progressives to demonize their opposition, especially conservatives who wish to limit the scope and influence of state granted status and definitions of social institutions.

This is a sterling example of my tried and true definition of the difference between left and right. The left wants to use the power of the state to make up for the dysfunctions of their families. The right wants to use the strength of their families to protect against the excess and abuses of the state. In that regard it makes perfect sense that advocates for gay marriage cannot and do not expect the benefits of gay and lesbian relationships to meaningful or fulfilling without the assistance and support of the all encompassing nanny state.

Everything in the State. Nothing outside of the State. Nothing against the State. Establish the General Will through the apparatus of the State.

That's Mussolini by the way.

Black Republicans: Doing vs Being

It has been suggested without much subtlety that now that Barack Obama has won the Presidency, that the 'white masters' of the Republican Party will cast off black conservatives from their ranks. Following this assumption to its implications, it follows that black conservatives were nothing more than suckups to the party in power and that their duty was to keep, by increasing minority membership in GOP, the Republicans a steamrolling majority party.

It's a rather crude analysis based on the continuing misunderstanding of the value of conservatism itself. Allow me to make a correction.

At bottom the question is what is the advantage of being a Black Republican. The answer is found in looking at the alternative. What indeed is the value of being a Black Democrat? The value, for the overwhelming majority who would 'be' is found in the act of voting, a momentary exercise. But behind the act of voting, if this momentary exercise is to be taken as something other than random, is the discipline of thinking. Thoughtful blackfolks who vote Democrat do so because they have accumulated a set of useful ideas and they expect their candidates to express and run with those ideas. So it is not so much what one does in the voting booth that lends credibility to the democratic process but the legitimacy and value of the ideas in play.

Thoughtful blackfolks do not get their cues on the usefulness of ideas through some shallow idolization of political candidates. It's not about JFK or FDR or LBJ so much as it is with the ideas behind them. Blackfolks rightly look to intellectuals like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T Washington and WEB DuBois to understand their worldview and ideas. In that constellation of thought and ideas, they find what is useful and true and agitate for their political candidates to act upon the principles of those ideas and conform to those worldviews. It is during the campaigns that voters determine the fidelity of candidates to ideas and solutions. The doing is about the time taken in service of understanding the value and usefulness of those ideas and their implications in policy. The being is the momentary act walking under a banner of like-minded people.

There is difficulty of course, with the only recently liberated African American in accessing ideas other than those preoccupied with immediate liberation. But there certainly are a set of African Americans so fully liberated that they might expand their consumption of ideas and worldviews to those beyond those aimed at the slave, the pauper, the servant, the underclass.

And so it is only natural to see some thoughtful blackfolks take their intellectual cues from intellectuals like Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott and Milton Friedman. It is entirely reasonable to consider their worldviews and their ideas. In that constellation of ideas, blackfolks would choose those they find useful and encourage politicians to apply and run with those ideas. The doing is about the time taken in service of understand the value and usefulness of those ideas and their implications in policy. The being is the momentary acto fo walking under a banner of like-minded people.

So what's the advantage of 'being' a Black Republican? There isn't much outside except having the company of like-minded people. But that's just a simple social benefit, rather like being a fan of a football team. If this is as deep as the analysis goes - merely to the 'being' it does a great deal of disrespect to those who discipline themselves to the task of comprehending great ideas and finding the usefulness of them in their lives. It seems to me that this is the great attraction of politics to thoughtful people in the first place.

We happen to live in a society, which like all societies is full of people with various capacities and desires to apply themselves intellectually over any meaningful period of time. That does not mean, under our Constitution, that they should suffer any disenfranchisement. Everybody gets a vote no matter how serious or shallow they are. So there are, of course, people who find their entire political raison d'etre in the social benefit of being a fan of a winning team. This is part and parcel of populism and identity politics with which all thoughtful people are aware.

The advantage of conservatism to African Americans is a greater understanding and perspective on a greater set of ideas than those which we have traditionally applied our consideration. To know more is its own benefit. To understand those ideas against which one has been opposed through ignorance is to gain a greater grasp of the political system and all of the interests in it. This is a capacity that more African Americans must develop if they are to advance in this society and in the world.

Lest anyone doubt. I do not mean to imply or suggest that there is only one direction in which the thoughtful African American might mature their political sensibilities. There are not simply Conservative, but Libertarian, Anarchic, Marxist and other categories of thinkers and ideas in Western Traditions and many schools of thought within any and all of those branches. If anyone cares to take a very simple axiom 'By any means necessary' seriously, then one cannot be so simple-minded as to do nothing more than follow the same intellectual and political path without any further investigation.

Spence's List, Isolationism & The Softness of New Jacks

At my daughter's elementary school, I once had to complain to a teacher that they were not teaching sentence diagramming. I then made a brief effort to find any grammar book that did. My search was not rewarded. I haven't been as peckish as I should, but now I am starting to recognize the failure now several years out. One of the things that has brought this up is a large paper Scholar has to produce on Maya Angelou's atrocious multicultural abstract Inaugural Poem. Aside from the fact that everyone has had to live down the preposterous notion of Bill Clinton as a black president and the poison aspects of maintain a color-coded taxonomy of suffering, it's just a bad poem. They should be teaching about the caged bird. There's a lot of things 'they' should be teaching.

So I've been thinking about learning things the good old-fashioned way and the mortarboards of hard knocks, the pedagogy of Catholic catechism and the indelible lessons of bloodied noses, boxed ears, slapped wrists and swatted behinds. I say so particularly noting how out of touch the reality of a slapped wrist is with its metaphor. If any schoolteacher in this country were to actually slap the wrist of a child, she'd be up on charges. Instead we live in a nation of metrosexual passive aggressives (with their patron saint Obama) who have only suffered the metaphors of black eyes. The only thing they strain is credulity. It is only a matter of time until that subculture of our nation collapses into a sobbing heap. It's already in over its head.

While I didn't intend this message to focus on the character of our two candidates for President, it would be irresponsible for me to pass without noting the startling difference between the two. One is a warrior, the other an attorney. I love Arnold's parody of Obama's skinny legs and scrawny arms. It is perfectly apt.

Spence, my dear friend, has put together a list of 40 or so things that he believes should be the focus of the Executive. I take them to task as a whole for what they leave out. Consider the first ten and my comment in the context of the legacies of liberal politics:

1. Free college tuition. 2. Low interest loans to businesses/homes for energy improvements. 3. Promote micro-loans. 4. Universal preschool. 5. Green public transit. 6. Fund vertical gardens. 7. Fund the Algebra Project. 8. Promote wellness. 9. Create green-collar jobs. 10. Explore Free Government.

I can't help but think of Star Trek's holodeck or better yet, The Construct of The Matrix in which the imagined becomes the realized. Plug an electronic shishkebab into the back of your head, and there's your Algebra Project. You're eyes flutter for a moment, and then you wake up with Newtonian clarity. "I know algebra!" All the physicists at the Pentagon are wasting their time if they're not working to these ends according to the vision of Spence's philosophy. What I say of black politics, I say equally of Progressive politics, it is all about what to do about the marginalized person whose position is the legacy of some oppression. Let's just extend the metaphor a bit to say that the progressive endgame is the 'promised land'. That promised land is squarely in middle class America. There's nothing further - all the I have a dreaming, and we shall overcoming lands Americans in the material world of the American middle class, period. Beyond that, it has nothing to say. Everybody gets free headstart, free college, free algebra competency, jobs that are pollution free, free public transportation, and as close as we can get to free money - low interest loans, surely guaranteed by the government just in case you decide your skinny legs can't bear the burden. They want to turn the middle class of America from a grunting gutteral circus of blood, sweat and tears into a walled garden of polite dancing including a dark corner for the wild thang, just in case people get bored.

But nobody in such a world gets bitchslapped. Nobody gets abused, nobody hits any glass ceilings. All the real oppression is boxed out of the system. You simply register your gripe into the taxonomy of the Angelou Code and are admitted into the new protected class, brought to you by those biters, kickers, screamers, bullies and barbarians who make more than 250k (no wait, 200k) dollars per annum. Welcome to the pain-free zone, all you need is your psychic damage as baggage and your material world is cushioned in the downy softness of Progress. Such is the life charter of those dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the achievement of ever inflating welfare. People don't die of cancer around here. That's *preventable*. We can stop people from smoking. We can stop people from drinking. We can stop people from risking their lives and the lives of other. Hear me y'all. ITS ALL PREVENTABLE. People don't get their wrists slapped around here. We know what that leads to...

What color is authority? And who is bold enough to wear such a color today in America? The cadres of the people for a better future wear the color of Matthew 25:40.

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

It is for a reason I picked the New International Version of the Holy Bible. The new internationalists will start in America and they will continue their experiment all the way down. If you're living on 100 dollars a year, your day is coming soon, as soon as America is convinced that its wild west competitive days are coming to a well-managed end. Tame this beast and the rest of the world is a piece of cake. We've already got what they want, and we know how to extend life itself.

People tend to forget that doing for the weak is service to a King. It is payment to a regime of truth and the entire engine is powered by the barbarian beast of burden. Those of us outside of the protected class, those of us subjected to a different standard of right and righteousness are to be dumb animals. Our sinew, sweat and slobber don't have standing in the court of Progress. In this moral inversion, we are to be the silent, subservient help, in service to the general welfare of the protected class. Those of us without a color in the Angelou Code of multicultural complaint have no business partaking in the welfare state. If we are beyond the Pale, if we are not part of the Solution, if we engage in risky behaviors, if we dare to use physical punishments, if we are in the Oppressor Class, then we are not men but freaks. We Cheneys, we Rices, we Palins, we Joes are not to be trusted. We who defy the type, we God damned individuals. We who would bother to kick and scrap for more, to thow an elbow in the paint, to dance in the endzone with utter disrespect for the losers behind us. For there is no tribute valued by the King in doing for us. There is only the acceptability of our sacrifice. There is only our submission to the only value that has value which is all about the least brothers.

We who have decided not to be weak are off the list. Watch your back. The King is not happy with your excess.

Socialist Fishing

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever.

Give a fisherman a loan for a boat and he can feed himself, his family and sell more fish in the market. With sales tax on the fish you can pay a policeman to protect the fish market from theft. Grow the fish market through hard work and the man can pay off his loan save for a new boat, hire new fishermen and expand his fleet.  More fish allows him to trade with the next village. More spare time allows him to learn new ways of fishing, making his business more efficient, cutting costs, raising profits. Teach a man capitalism and you build a fishing industry.

But there are still people who don't know how to fish. There are still teachers of fishing who don't understand the dynamics of the fishing industry. All they know is that in this prosperous man's town there are still people who can't afford to buy a fish. So they tax the fishing boats. They put tariffs on the fishing export, they put more money into fishing headstart, even though it doesn't produce better boat captains. They say, I don't want to punish your success, I just want to spread the wealth around. They change society so that nobody feels the need to create a fishing industry - they just tax the one they have until... well until when?

The sea has a bad season and the cost cutting procedures no longer produce profits. Fewer boats can catch their limit so fishermen are idle. The taxes and tariffs have changed the cost of getting into the business, everybody has soaked the rich guy so that only rich guys can afford to stay in the fishing business. People depend upon the public services supplied by taxes, nobody wants to give them up. The bad cycle causes dislocations but with the tax burden it becomes unbearable. Fishing is kaput. People import fish from another country with no minimum wages,  retirement plans, health care, dental, vision, savings matching, and workman's compensation for the union fisherman.

The people demand social justice. They sue because the bedraggled business can't afford the quality control it once had. Popular politicians promise change. The President of FishCo closes his doors and takes his money and invests it in a less hostile business environment. He leaves the rest to his son whom he educated with an MBA. The politician regulates and adds more taxes for companies that take their business offshore. The politicians blame speculators, crooks, greed, corruption and promise jobs, jobs. They take tax money from fishing companies, and offer tax incentives to fishing companies so long as they follow the government regulations of the Ministry of Fishing which has a new cunning plan.

The inheritors of FishCo fight back. They hire lobbyists who understand the fish industry to change the laws of the ministry so that the fishing company can do what it used to do when it was profitable. They succeed. They go public and sell shares in FishCo and get listed on the exchange as FC.

OK this isn't fun any more.

The Impracticality of Philosophical Shills

I think that the most hurtful thing I have ever been accused of is being a shill for immoral people, which is the subtext of a number of comments recently posted here at Cobb. I do know how to respond, I'm just not sure that I'll do an adequate job. In the end, I'm sure that I can be seen as useless, which is probably the best outcome for all concerned.

I can recall when I became a national officer of a student organization in college. I had the thrill of being elected several times at the local, state and regional levels and finally at the national level. I was truly learning about leadership. I remember running for a second term at the national level and saying in one of my speeches that leadership was the best thing that ever happened to me as a person, and the worst thing that ever happened to me as an engineer. Today I talk politics, political philosophy and ideology. I find myself in the same ironic position. What I have learned about conservatism is the best philosophical thing I have learned and it is likely the worst thing that has happened to me as a black political partisan. It is ironic that in being a leader of engineers that I became a worse engineer and now that I have gained in philosophical wisdom it spells doom for me in politics.

It is clear to me that the practical things that many folks desire of this curiosity I have become, although not onerous, do not seem to grasp what I want to be all about. And I wonder if I'll ever have enough time or patience to explain how my study has changed me. That is because I am first and foremost a writer and my journey into the realms of how it is that people come to decide what they believe has taken me towards wisdom - a wisdom I often feel incapable of communicating, interactively at any rate. I have taken out my frustrations here noting as I have that half of the things that I find most interesting gain few remarks.

For example,  I attempted to identify Barack Obama in his Leftist roots and I've asserted that I feel kinship with him as he has triangulated rightward over the course of his campaign. I recognize how it is that the majority of black political opinion has been shaped by the Left and that it is the failure of this that moves us Right. As I told the reporter from the BBC, I just started my journey sooner than Obama. But it is also the case that in this kinship I assume that Obama's intelligence would compel him not to think his own experience was sufficient to frame his desire to use politics for good and that he would seek the wisdom of the ages, and having done so and landing to the Left of most Democrats that he would be following Socialist ideas and those originating with Marx as have so many black intellectuals of note. But all this has been taken as nothing more than beating of the black man on behalf of the white man, or if anything more than that then something of little use to anyone.

I have asked myself today what of my legacy - what is it that I seek to accomplish when all this writing is said and done, and I think that I have reached the limit of what writing can communicate in this form. If I am such a poor writer as to give such false impressions then I fail to see the point of continuing. This record assists me in making sense of everything I have said and thought on the subjects - almost seven thousand essays, reflections and comic strips over the years.

It is drudgery and I do wonder why I bother.

In discovering Oakeshott just recently I find that I have wasted a great deal of time and breath in evolving my understandings interactively. It is with that in mind that I am pleased to have upped my reading quotas this year, not that having all of these books on my sidebar has generated any discussion about them.

So here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to give up blogging until some distance after the election. Instead of writing new stuff, I'm only going to publish those partial thoughts which have backed up over the months. Maybe that will help. Other than that, the only idea that gives me comfort is the idea of turning off comments completely in the hope that writing without any expectation of interactivity might make me a better essayist in addition to the comfort of not having to attend to arguments which are really not what I want to talk about.

Brooks & Conservatism

To me the most important thing about conservatism then and conservatism now was not Ronald Reagan frankly, it was not politicians, it was a body of ideas. And to me the core principle underlying the libertarians and the conservatives is the principle of epistemological modesty. There are limits to what we can know and understand. The world is simply too complex to plan, too complex to think we can understand it. So we have to respect the institutions that have grown up and stood the test of time. We have to respect the truths that have evolved over the centuries and have been learned and passed down to us. And I think that principle which is the principle of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and others is the essence of everything conservatives do.
-- David Brooks

Break your neck and listen to this piece by David Brooks.

Hilarious. Insightful.

This is one of those moments where I get a bit frustrated and angry because I have had to take a whole hell of a lot of time figuring out how my own thinking has evolved to come to these same conclusions. I might have been introduced to Michael Oakeshott a long time ago and saved a lot of time.

Don't Worry, Be Sad

It occurs to me that the thing that annoys me about Hitchens' recent flipflop is that somewhere in his logic is some need for charisma. It occurs to me that without question John McCain is the boringest character to run for President since that other paragon of virtue Bob Dole. My answer. So what?

As much as I like the thrill of a fiesty press conference, I can't bring myself to believe that the most important thing about my electing of a president is the feeling I get in the voting booth. I'm not supposed to vote for the candidate that makes me happy. I'm supposed to vote for the candidate who is going to do the best job in the White House, the one I trust with the boring job of running the government of the United States. Not whom do I like in the campaign, but whom do I trust in the job.

In the end, there's nothing I've seen that makes John McCain a spectacular anything. He's a determined bipartisan workhorse who focuses on the serious issues. Somehow everybody has managed to find reasons to dislike him because he can't pick VPs who excite the public on both sides of the aisle. He can't manage to suppress the odd lunatic anywhere they speak ill of his opponent. He can't change the perception of people determined to associate him with Bush. These are things that people wish he would do, it would elevate their mood - it would get them charged up to support him, or give him the benefit of accumulated doubt.

But when it comes to core values, McCain is my guy. Always has been, always will be - so long as he is a moderate conservative. It's really that simple. I cannot see why anybody who calls themselves conservative has any excuse to vote for someone who is not, especially given the fundamental conservative principle that it is not the government's job to provide happiness. That pursuit is on you, bub. So don't worry, be sad, and do the right thing.

Hitchens has decided to raise the properties of character and temperament over values and direction. He sees McCain as dishonest and Palin as a 'sick joke'. I don't see McCain as dishonest, I see him as running a sloppy and lackluster campaign. But I'm not voting for the best candidate, I'm voting for the most trusted president.

I'm Voting Democrat

Just in case you haven't seen it.

The Last Word on Palin's Fitness

You know what the question is. The answer is no.

My answer has always been "no and it doesn't really matter". But quite frankly, it does matter. And I'll tell you exactly why. If you ask me today who I'd rather have running the country between Palin and Rudy Giuliani, I'd pick Rudy. If you ask me who I'd rather have running the country between Palin and Thompson, or Romney or Tom Ridge, Palin would lose. If Palin were at the top of the ticket, in a contest between her and Obama, I'd pick Obama. But she's not.

I've got an itch in my head, and every time I hear 'Vice President' I think, 'leader of the Senate', the tiebreak vote. I don't think of Dick Cheney and all of the extra things he did. I think of the characters from '24' and 'The West Wing', party flacks and scheming rivals. I think of Vice President along the same lines as Majority Whip. The VP goes to the funerals of foreign dignitaries and rollouts of new weapon systems demonstrations. The VP debates the VP candidates during the campaign. But most of all, I think of the Vice President of the US, not as a second string quarterback, but as the President's man on the Hill, the liaison to Congress. When I really think about it, that's what I mean. So most of the time, I don't really worry about the likes of Dan Quayle in office. I mean exactly how did we suffer with Danny Boy? Everybody knows Palin's stronger than Quayle.

But, that's not the answer to the first question. Who would I rather have running the country? I'd rather have somebody who can do both, well. And I don't believe that Sarah Palin can do both well. She's not the second string quarterback. She's something else entirely.

I am satisfied that Sarah Palin has done exactly what McCain needed as far as the GOP is concerned. And I really love the fact that her nomination puts double emphasis on fiscal reform and fighting corruption. She's got maverick written all over her. She is a phenomenon to match Obama and she is the right breath of fresh air for American electoral politics. In short, as a candidate, she has perfection about her. She has thrown the opposition into fits, derailed their momentum, and exposed their prejudices. She has done so being second banana, which is exactly the right place to do it.

But.

She's not bringing anything to Washington in the same way GWBush brought nothing to Washington. By that I mean, when she comes as an outsider, all she can do is rip the Congress one way or another, rather than steer it from the inside like those who know the pace and flow of the Hill. That means she will be abrasive and will be stalled by legislative tricks, and the consequence of that is that McCain's agenda will have a tough time. The good news is that strategically, given Palin's direct, no-nonsense attitude for the country, rather than as an ideological partisan, she can take all of that public and invigorate a reform of Congress we haven't seen since Gingrich. That is a brilliant strategy and it is what McCain is trying to do. Bravo for him. It's a mixed blessing that could backfire in a time of crisis.

This week, we have crisis.

Crisis serves to remind us that when people run around with their hair on fire, they go to the biggest, strongest, bravest, smartest people they can find and they yell 'save me!'. And when they lack confidence in those in charge, they despair and grumble and backbite. Sarah Palin cannot lead the Democrats in crisis, so therefore she cannot very well run America in crisis. Now, Joe Biden can't lead Republicans in crisis, but to be honest, he'd fake it better. Obama could very well be Bushlike and rise to the occasion, but I have my doubts. McCain is McCain, a man built for crisis. In fact, the more conflict he sees, the better he gets. So we have two extremes on the right and two mediocrities on the left, in either case we have to pray for good weather.

We cannot wish ourselves into a better world. We have to deal with the one we have. You cannot be a real conservative and not expect chaos. Palin is not a natural conservative choice, she is a natural popular choice for social conservatives whose capabilities as a maverick says something important about a serious change in the domestic agenda. I like all that, but I go in with reservations. They are the same kind of what-if reservations I have in general. I quite frankly don't know who else McCain is going to pick or what exactly his domestic agenda is going to be. I'm all for bold action, but what's the action John? I'm all for a feisty, wildly popular partisan, but what's the agenda John? There's too much hope in this season's campaigns, and that makes this conservative uncomfortable. But I'll tell you my hope.

My hope is that McCain wins, because without a McCain win, the Republicans are sunk. With a McCain win, the Republicans moderate from Rovian tricks and work for the center and for the country. Country First is exactly what I want. If Republicans don't get the chance to do Country First, it will be 'Energize the Base' and we move more crazily to Right wing populism, and that even scares me. Sarah Palin is the smartest popular choice the GOP could have made; it could have been Ron Paul who is truly a crackpot. It could have been Huckabee, the Jimmy Carter of the Right.

If Obama wins, the Republicans have a better chance of going ape and reverting to extreme DeLay style arm-twisting in Congress. Why? Because a Democrat Executive and Legislative agenda under anybody but (ironically) Hillary Clinton will become a mad social scientist's dream. In other words, we go from Red and Blue to Black and White. The partisans in this country go berzerk under an Obama administration.

The risk of all hell breaking loose from external, uncontrollable factors that put Palin in charge of more than she can handle are slim but real and they really matter. But the risk of all domestic hell breaking loose from a retrenching GOP fighting as a minority against a Democratic full press on Washington is a certainty if Obama wins. And the reality of Obama's waffling and inexperience is as real as the redneck sensibilities of Sarah Palin.

Crisis brings clarity, and both sides give me reasons to freak out and head for shelter. But I'll take the possible risk with McCain over the certain risk with Obama.

Self-Determination

The Danger Zone with Doctor Mo

Two hours of Black Republicans. If you can stand it.

The Palin Speech

I accept the call to help our nominee for president to serve and defend America, and I accept the challenge of a tough fight in this election against confident opponents at a crucial hour for our country. And I accept the privilege of serving with a man who has come through much harder missions and met far graver challenges and knows how tough fights are won, the next president of the United States, John S. McCain. (Cheers, applause.)

It was just a year ago when all the experts in Washington counted out our nominee because he refused to hedge his commitment to the security of the country he loves. With their usual certitude, they told us that all was lost. There was no hope for this candidate who said that he would rather lose an election than see his country lose a war. (Cheers, applause.)

But the pollsters -- the pollsters and the pundits, they overlooked just one thing when they wrote him off. They overlooked the caliber of the man himself, the determination and resolve and the sheer guts of Senator John McCain. (Cheers, applause.)

The voters knew better. And maybe that's because they realize there's a time for politics and a time for leadership; a time to campaign and a time to put our country first. (Cheers, applause.)

Our nominee for president is a true profile in courage, and people like that are hard to come by. He's a man who wore the uniform of his country for 22 years and refused to break faith with those troops in Iraq who now have brought victory within sight. (Cheers, applause.)

And as the mother of one of those troops, that is exactly the kind of man I want as commander in chief. (Cheers, applause.) Thank you.

AUDIENCE: (Chanting.) USA! USA! USA! USA!

Why the Left Hates Fox

It finally dawned on me.

I can't help but notice that Right bloggers are defending the legacy of Tony Snow and Left bloggers are trying to call him another loser flack. I'm also noticing how some have blamed Fox for the legs on Jackson's ridiculous gaffe. One has repeated the litany of Righties up to Ailes at the top. I've always noticed that dozens of folks who don't bother to lookup Hayek still can't figure out what a semi-intelligent writer such as myself does following the marching orders of Bill O'Rielly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. The fact is that I don't, but that doesn't stop the guilt by association.

What I've figured out, appropos a phrase that sticks with me, is that the Left associates dissent from its panglossian policy experimentation as stupidity. The reference is here from William Weston, emphasis mine:

The least educated people have the most diverse group of political discussion mates, whereas people with graduate degrees are the least likely to talk politics with people who disagree with them. I can testify to how easy it is for conversation among academics, the most educated group of people, to turn into a one-position echo chamber. Liberalism is taken to be an IQ test, and the rare conservative is encouraged to be quiet or go elsewhere. For political disagreement I go to the coffee house, which in our town draws a broader range of people than the faculty club contains.

This is the land I grew up in, and of course with a family background of academics, it made sense. To do for those who previously couldn't is a sign of progress, and we should be all about progress. If you're not, you're stupid. Which naturally includes thier constituency - those who don't know how to do for themselves and need the work of society to help them out - society led by ... academics, the only people smart enough to show the way.

Of course all intellectuals aren't liberal or progressive. And that's what makes the Left agonize. They believe that the progress inherent in their views must be the way that the lumpen masses see things. The Left is elitist, but they assume that their efforts on behalf of the masses will always be supported by the masses. And so in a democracy, they should always win. That's why they hate Fox News, because it destroys their monopoly. It gives people who aren't rich reasons to think like people who are. (And it's always the rich industrialists who is the intelligencia the academics are most envious of - after all that's where they get their money).

This explains a host of questions that black conservatives get, and any Republican who doesn't appear to be a wealthy miser. "How could you possibly betray your own best interests" is the root question. They simply don't understand intellectual diversity - that people's own best interests is not always down with a policy program or an agenda of 'progress'.

Moreover, on that IQ test thing - they really can't stand that Right Radio connects with average people, and that politics isn't always an intellectual pissing match. That's why the Left tends to gravitate to big hunking world-historical ideas just beyond the reach of the ordinary Joe. Global Warming / Climate Change is just a perfect sort of thing they love to suggest is beyond the ken of the best minds on the Right. Nothing pleases the left more than 'scientific consensus'. Whether it be the Iraq Study Group, or the IPCC or the War Crimes Tribunal. That's why they call it scientific socialism. It's supposed to be good for you.

A Black Conservative Coup

Today I sat with Kevin Ross and Christopher Bracey on News and Notes and had what I consider one of the most civilized, if not the first, good discussion about black conservatives on the radio. Farai and her producers did a great job in putting together the show under slightly adverse conditions. Ross is a Morehouse man who looks the part and we met in the hall outside of the studio. The segment we shared was the second. The first was the blogger's roundtable segment in which we covered the following.

A. Iraq and Oil
B. Barack & Flipflopping
C. Indigents in Hospitals.

It remains astounding to me how many people still pretend that there can only be one reason for a war. From now on, I'm going to bring a copy of the congressional joint resolution whenever I sense that I will be debating Iraq. They never get past that. I was hoping that some revelation of the facts about exactly how much (not much) oil is forthcoming that they would leaven their bile. No such luck. Starting 2013 the world can expect 1.5 million more barrels per day coming out of the six new fields. That will be split up how many ways? Who knows? But what's clear or should be clear to my opponents in this debate is that this amount, even if the US got 100% of it, would constitute less than 5% of our daily needs. I tried to inject mathematical logic into the discussion but that was very difficult to do. So I simply emphasized that for the first time the Iraqi people themselves get the money.

On Barack, I'm particularly interested to see how furious those whose audacious dreams he shattered will be. As I said the other day, Obama is now simply talking sense rather than crazy talk. There's only so much crazy talk he can spew, and now he has to placate people living in the world of reality, as opposed to such hard Afrocentrics characterized by Wright's version of liberation theology, ass-backwards generals like Wesley Clark and other associated donuts now being splattered under the Obama bus.

As for the poor woman who died at King's County, I really wanted to emphasize how it is that liberal sentiment has caused this situation. Whenever you have laws that assert an indigent person's right to sleep in public places, you deaden the public's ability to be outraged at the very idea. So you see somebody sprawled asleep (or comatose, who checks their pulse) on a subway or a sidewalk or a park bench, and you say that he has a right to be there, then you don't roust them or say 'somethings wrong here'. That's just exactly the kind of mentality that allows people to lay comatose on public hospital waiting room floors - somebody has defended their 'right' to.

--

In the second segment, I joined Ross and Bracey, whom I still owe an apology for not reviewing his book here, to talk about black conservatism itself and how we are dealing with the current campaign's cards.

I dig McCain for several important reasons. Broadly speaking, you either have governors or Congresscritters running for President. When you have governors, you check out their state's budget and how well he ran the joint. Did education improve, did he balance the budget. No such luck with these two. With Critters, you focus on what their legislative history is like. Obama has none. Clinton's was all about moderation in Iraq and health care. A known quantity. McCain is practically legendary for resisting strong-arm party line politics. He actually forged bipartisan coalitions and passed significant legislation. He completely resisted earmarks, he killed the Borking practice of filibustering to stall judicial appointments via the Gang of 14, and he changed campaign finance law. This is a man who knows how to get things done in Congress, and he has said that he wants 'question time' following the British model in which the President answers hardball questions from Congress publicly broadcast. What's not to love? The choice for me is obvious.

Additionally, with regard to black political empowerment, McCain is old school, not evangelical Christian Right. This is the kind of candidate that would support men like Jack Kemp. All Cobb readers should know that's my kind of Republican.

I made the point, which I think we should all keep in mind, that the Republicans are not going to magically find some voodoo to appeal to black voters. When it comes to the ethnic vote, it is what it is, and policy be damned. The only way to get the ethnic black vote is to run ethnic black candidates. Call it the role-model vote, call it whatever. That's our job as black Republicans to energize that black base, and all it takes is the single right candidate. I think Michael Steele still has that capacity, but for me personally - well I don't vote for personalities. So I'm in an odd position of second guessing the black ethnic vote - I'm not part of it. But as soon as that hump is gotten over, it becomes no big deal and people will realize that the Southern Strategy will be as rhetorically dead as it is dead as policy. In other words, black voters need a black voice to say 'it's cool'.

Ross sees in Obama a stepping stone up which happens to have a left foot on it. Existentially, I think that is a big nothing, but again it is because I wouldn't pander to an ethnic vote. Still, Ross is probably right to triangulate Obama into the house that Powell built. Word is that Powell will support Obama, but I've lately had issues with old Colin. Quite frankly, I would have rather that it be Harold Ford, if I had my druthers, and I think that if Ford were in Obama's place that would be more of my nightmare come true. But knowing what Obama is, and has been makes me a great deal more comfortable voting for McCain who is standout in his own right. Obama could have been a blue dog, but instead has been flirting with Weather Underground types. No freaking way.

Anyway, the hookup with Ross could be profitable for The Raven Group.

Allegory

This is a great video that presents an excellent argument against nuclear proliferation. If you have the patience and something of a strong stomach, it is worth watching all the way through.

The way I see things, technology is enabling, and idiot-proof technology empowers idiots. This video game, World of Warcraft is just that sort of technology. It is democratized, like many technologies become, and it leverages a class of individuals who are incapable of building the game, but quite capable of mastering the game. But it is not the question of whether people are smart or not, rather it is whether or not they have character which is based on the defense of democratic principles. Here you have Athene, who is rather obviously powerful in the virtual world of Warcraft who makes a very competitive living by keeping people alive that he doesn't respect. He is in a position of power and games the system by appearing to be generous, but he is clearly ruthless and megalomaniacal.

I expect that the experience of seeing the man behind the curtain, as it were, in all sorts of global pursuits will swing the pendulum back towards nationalism. Unless and until there are classic liberal values behind powerful government regimes, this kind of shock is inevitable. I say that with the assumption, of course, that my audience shares the values and ethics which find the person of Athene thoroughly disagreeable.   

The Baxter Dissent

I predict that California will have a a constitutional amendment in defense of marriage, and that activists for the cause of gay marriage have made a fatal error. California has insured every right except the express permission to redefine marriage, and now the State Supreme Court has overstepped its bounds in defiance of the will of the people. It's going to get loud and ugly and it is now most definitely a constitutional crisis.

I concur with the thrust of Baxter's dissent:

The question presented by this case is simple and stark. It comes down to this: Even though California’s progressive laws, recently adopted through the democratic process, have pioneered the rights of same-sex partners to enter legal unions with all the substantive benefits of opposite-sex legal unions, do those laws nonetheless violate the California Constitution because at present, in deference to long and universal tradition, by a convincing popular vote, and in accord with express national policy they reserve the label “marriage” for opposite-sex legal unions? I must conclude that the answer is no.

The People, directly or through their elected representatives, have every right to adopt laws abrogating the historic understanding that civil marriage is between a man and a woman. The rapid growth in California of statutory protections for the rights of gays and lesbians, as individuals, as parents, and as committed partners, suggests a quickening evolution of community attitudes on these issues. Recent years have seen the development of an intense debate about same-sex marriage. Advocates of this cause have had real success in the marketplace of ideas, gaining attention and considerable public support. Left to its own devices, the ordinary democratic process might well produce, ere long, a consensus among most Californians that the term “marriage” should, in civil parlance, include the legal unions of same-sex partners.

But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves. Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority, the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration. The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will.

In doing so, the majority holds, in effect, that the Legislature has done indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. Under article II, section 10, subdivision (c), that body cannot unilaterally repeal an initiative statute, such as Family Code section 308.5, unless the initiative measure itself so provides. Section 308.5 contains no such provision. Yet the majority suggests that, by enacting other statutes which do provide substantial rights to gays and lesbians — including domestic partnership rights which, under section 308.5, the Legislature could not call “marriage” — the Legislature has given “explicit official recognition” (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 68, 69) to a California right of equal treatment which, because it includes the right to marry, thereby invalidates section 308.5.5

I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature’s own weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat the People’s will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative interference. Though the majority insists otherwise, its pronouncement seriously oversteps the judicial power. The majority purports to apply certain fundamental provisions of the state Constitution, but it runs afoul of another just as fundamental — article III, section 3, the separation of powers clause. This clause declares that “[t]he powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial,” and that “[p]ersons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others” except as the Constitution itself specifically provides.

Download lockyer_decision.pdf

Jonah Goldberg's Signature Moment

I have just had the good fortune to have run across the set of ideas that are going to help me in properly contextualizing that thing which Nulan has accused GWBush of, which is 'war socialism'. It comes from Jonah Goldberg of the LA Times and National Review. His new book, Liberal Fascism, contains the thread of context. I think that it is likely to be the third and last intellectual history I read.

The first was Paul Johnson's Intellectuals which didn't help me a whole lot other than heat up my interest on the subject and set me up for the second which was Cornel West's American Evasion of Philosophy. Since then, and without any assistance from much more than at long last disgust with the kind of bohemian The Nation was turning me into and a realization that I had babies to feed, I have saved myself from Leftist foolishness. And with the small regret that I have yet to get any decent material into me on the philosopher with hiking boots,

What I believe that I will find in parsing Goldberg's history is some clue as why black nationalists have largely turned progressive and embraced identity politics instead of embracing patriotism and embraced the conservative idea of the republic and the mainstream. That is because of affiliations between their intellectual heroes, duBois in particular and his affinity for William James who is back through Rousseau one of those who believes that we can do what we want to. Of course I'm not stating this properly - I have yet to read the book and Hewitt's interview with Goldberg is flooding me with associations.

American liberalism is a totalitarian, political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying, but it is definitely totalitarian, or holistic, if you prefer, and that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and your outer appearances all have political salience for liberal fascists.

Yes, yes, yes.
What I've always been talking about is liberal overproduction, but when it becomes clear of the ambit of power of the will to power of the Left, it puts everything in clear perspective. I heard it in Michelle Obama's UCLA speech, I heard it in the arguments of activists for the cause of Gay Marriage, I hear it in the ambitions of the Greens for planetary planning and I hear it in identity politics. It is the urge towards a holism, it is the totalitarian temptation, it is the attempt to soaking politics through and through with 'solutions' for every aspect of life.

Who is the war socialist? That's easy. The socialist at war, and that was FDR who wisely moderated his ambition, but Walter Lippman wanted him to go further, and his descendants and a number of others desire highly to create a new statist religion which makes the citizen a new man in a new well-wrapped universe. Goldberg shows the ways in which FDR was like Hitler as well as the way GWBush's compassionate conservatism was.

If there is a discussion to be kicked off here which is of particular interest to me among the many things that will flow from this is the extent to which my neoconservative bent towards nation-building following in the tradition of Wilson, apparently a liberal fascist of the first order, should find its theoretical limits. This will force me to reconsider the differences between neoconservatism and paleoconservatism in foreign policy and upon which principles I should guide intervention yet stay away from protectionism and isolationism.

Goldberg's Liberal Fascism also will get us closer to a workable definition of American Fascism that we really never resolved in this old debate. But it is a sterling warning against what Americans buy into for the sake of unity, and few topics can be as contemporarily pressing as that.
 

 

Marry or Die

A. Charles is a thoughtful, diligent and provocative new commenter at Cobb who has done a great deal to help illustrate the difference between perceptions and principles of the American Left and Right. As part of his vision for the aim and role of government, which he now sees as going in the wrong direction, he quotes from Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965. There is one very salient point I would like to highlight as I do below.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities--physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which most parents will stay together--all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.

There is no single easy answer to all of these problems. Jobs are part of the answer. They bring the income which permits a man to provide for his family. Decent homes in decent surroundings and a chance to learn--an equal chance to learn--are part of the answer. Welfare and social programs better designed to hold families together are part of the answer. Care for the sick is part of the answer. An understanding heart by all Americans is another big part of the answer. And to all of these fronts--and a dozen more--I will dedicate the expanding efforts of the Johnson administration.

Johnson made this speech in the same year that the Moynihan Report was published. I cannot imagine that he was unaware of Moynihan's position as a fellow Democrat. Moynihan was right and Johnson was right about the health of the family being key to success in America. Today, only the Right is right in the same way.

Who made black people stop getting married? Countercultural hippy liberals, gays and feminists. Who wants to make black people get married? Conservatives. Johnson said a government revolution was necessary to keep black families together. Conservatives say a social revolution is necessary to keep black families together.

So here's my crazy idea that I know conservatives would vote for in a heartbeat, a big tax break for marriage, as a matter of fact a big regressive tax break. Starting in 2010, you get a $500 tax break for every year you stay married. Liberals would hit the ceiling. It would be hugely and disproportionately beneficial for blacks, the group that has the most to gain from getting married because we are, I think, the most unmarried group next to homosexuals. But for the sake of gays, I think liberals would trash the idea.

All that aside, it's important to bring Hymowitz into the discussion, because the status of the black family is indeed a huge debate in which the Left and Right differ greatly.

Given the legacy of slavery that made marriage impossible for blacks and Jim Crow laws that emasculated men, the unmarriage revolution was bound to hit blacks especially hard. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his controversial report "The Negro Family", he was warning the country about a 25% illegitimacy rate among blacks.  In one chapter of my book, I tell the story of how black leaders and black and white academics accused Moynihan of every sin in the p.c. book.  He was a racist who could not possibly understand "the strengths of the black family."  He was a sexist who failed to appreciate the "strong black woman" and her "extended kinship networks." It became impossible to have an honest conversation about what was happening in the black community for the next twenty years even as black welfare rolls, crime rates, and teen births were soaring.

Well, now the rupture between marriage and black childbearing is just about complete.  Seventy percent of black births are to single mothers. Seventy percent.  This has had a disastrous effect on men, who have lost their major social roles as provider and father. It is also a tragedy for the country because it makes the goal of full black equality unachievable. Growing up in single parent homes, black kids are destined to stay behind.

As a black conservative I ask the profound question why should blacks petition the government for programs to assist us in keeping black families together when we could do it for ourselves? 

Stuff White People Like

So I'm trying to work out how to communicate this interesting conundrum. I'm using that word a lot, not because I like ambiguity and puzzles, but that's just kind of a theme this weekend. The paradox is that people believe that black conservatives are trying to be white and that the core principle of Republicanism is deny government stuff to blacks, and I can't think of a logical way to disprove them. I mean it would be logical to tell them to go soak their heads, but I am trying to be informative too. I realize I'm being baited, but I'm sure there are people out there who are genuinely confused.

So I went and made a silly video. So silly that I'm not linking to it. You see the problem is that part of my writing thing is self-referential. So I need to involve myself in the answer to make it all personable. Then I'm also dealing with other interesting questions about black culture. So I decided to talk about things that I think that they think are white and black people don't do, but I'm black and I do. The problem is that I don't think of them as 'white' things. So I try class things, upper middle class, and then I come across like a floss rapper.

I cannot guess those things that black people don't do because they think they are too white, but I do. And at this point it's all so confusing that I don't know what any of it means or proves. Lucky for me I read white blogs. And one of those white blogs pointed me to another white blog about stuff white people like.

Here it is.

Now here's the semi-serious question. Do black people who worry about white people actually believe that white people have things that black people ought to have? Do they think that white people use racism to keep black people away from those things they like? If so, then the list of things white people like ought perhaps to be on that list of holes in the level playing field. Thus if black people could get those things that white people like, we'd know we are making progress.

On the other hand, white people might just like things that black people find irritating, offensive or just plain stupid and therefore not worth liking. Well it seems to me that there's only one way to find out, which is to ask some black people if they like the things that this white person says white people like. And then inevitably, there would have to be a blog about things black people like.

Obama: Disabilities

The Old School position is that crippled people find ways to make themselves useful, we should help them out. There is more than enough white collar work in this nation to get some kind of productive employment to the physically disabled. I'd onshore a bunch of call centers and take my points from that.

From Obama's site:

First, provide Americans with disabilities with the educational opportunities they need to succeed.

Second, end discrimination and promote equal opportunity.

Third, increase the employment rate of workers with disabilities.

And fourth, support independent, community-based living for Americans with disabilities.

All noble sentiments. No noble sentiment should get any more than COLA at the Federal spending level. Maintain what's there.

Obama: Civil Rights

My Old School position is that African Americans need to focus their forward thinking on the politics of social power. Implicit in this is that civil rights guarantees for all Americans are pretty much in tact and that there is only marginal maintenance to be done. The idea of expanding civil rights is an overproduction which cheapens and demeans the entire practice and specifically that there is no 'Latina' Rosa Parks and that what illegal immigrants demand is not civil rights because civil rights should only be granted to citizens. Furthermore that the economic and political problems of African Americans today are not largely due to any denial of civil rights.

From Obama's site:

Strengthen Civil Rights Enforcement

Obama will reverse the politicization that has occurred in the Bush Administration's Department of Justice. He will put an end to the ideological litmus tests used to fill positions within the Civil Rights Division.

If indeed Obama ends ideological litmus tests to fill those positions, he will be left with a conundrum of sorts. One hopes that he will. But the conundrum is that in fact, the applicant pool at the CRD has been largely white and the big stink generated last year was that there wasn't proportional racial representation. IE not enough blacks and assertions of a 'hostile workforce'. Some stifling of that BS would be a welcome change. But you have to remember that people who want to work in the CRD are already self-selected ideologically. Changing some questions on a form doesn't mean a whole lot.

Combat Employment Discrimination

Obama will work to overturn the Supreme Court's recent ruling that curtails racial minorities' and women's ability to challenge pay discrimination. Obama will also pass the Fair Pay Act to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work.

If I recall correctly, there was a basic statute of limitations placed upon lawsuits for discrimination that was set to about two or three years after the fact. It was reduced to about a year. I could be wrong and am too lazy to double check. I think the effect would be negligible and that the Supreme Court was making common sense. If you're being discriminated against at work, it doesn't take a year to figure it out.

The Fair Pay Act sounds reasonable, but it could be anything. I think it opens up a can of worms. Specifically the worm discussed in one Cobb thread that got no comments. Basically, an American employer cannot ask a woman if she plans to become pregnant. Women who have no plans to get pregnant are better employees as compared to those who do plan to get pregnant. It is entirely reasonable to reward those women who will be more reliable and productive on the job than those who will take time off for other purposes. Why can that not be considered? It is only logical to treat women like women, to pretend that pregnancy has no effect on productivity is disingenuous.

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes

Obama will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice's Criminal Section.

Strengthening is not necessary. He should focus on standardization as a Democrat. As a Republican, I would leave it to the states, each of which, like Georgia, has its own set of criteria for 'bias crime' or 'hate crime'. He can raise the profile if he likes but this is not really a civil rights issue. It's a marginal subset of crime anyway. If he were to attempt to strengthen sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums or in any way force judges' hands, I'd oppose it. Again, this looks just like standard talking points. Nevertheless, it sounds like an expensive way to make a Federal Case out of the kinds of crimes that aren't even capital crimes. Nobody is going to get death for a hate crime under Obama, so what's the point? It just expands the prison-industrial complex. (heh) BTW, would a jihadist at GTMO be considered perpetrators of hate crimes?

End Deceptive Voting Practices

Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.

Who could be against that? Is it really a problem?

End Racial Profiling

Obama will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.

Double edged sword.  Ward Connorly would be the strange bedfellow if Obama was serious about this. You can't "end racial profiling" without generating more racial paperwork. I know exactly how the Feds have gone about this before. They force officers to fill out a new race form at the bottom of all of their citations and traffic stops. Then they analyze the results in spreadsheets. They are forcing a greater racial consciousness into the daily work of officers and generating a bureaucracy to monitor it. LA has been the great experiment and the results have been mixed. I say simplify.

Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support

Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.

Bullshit waste of money. Provide that to non-criminals who are already integrated into society, you twerp.

Eliminate Sentencing Disparities

Obama believes the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.

It has already been done. Obama needs to update his website. Or is he going to take credit for a decision made during the Bush Administration?

Expand Use of Drug Courts

Obama will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.

Somewhat reasonable for a kinder, gentler America. However the devil is in the details. I think you should call losers losers. I don't see how he puts this under the rubric of civil rights. It should be under crime and punishment or health care.

Cheney Surprises

Now that I've gotten into the 9/11 and post sections of Hayes' Cheney biography there are a number of rocking surprises,

Wolfowitz' Reticence
Paul Wolfowitz, in discussing military options for Iraq was a bit ahead of the game after 9/11 and Cheney told him to keep his shirt on. But Wolfowitz' most ambitious plan was to essentially put US in the role that the UK ultimately filled, which was to take control of southern Iraq and stay out of the capitol. The would have the effect of cutting Hussein off from his ports and changing the nature of the sanctions to those we could monitor as being effective on the regime and not hurting the people. It could still be said that this was interventionist and pre-emptive, but it was on a much smaller scale and may have been an adequate compromise.

Andrew Lundquist's ETF
The flack raised over the substance of Cheney's energy policy was entirely political demagoguery. David Addington, the head of Cheney's staff and chief counsel warned Cheney early on that he should pay attention to the guidlines of FACA. This was the rule that applied to disclosure of task force work in the executive branch. The warning was that FACA was the rule that tripped up Hillary Clinton's health care task force during their time in the White House. Essentially, if you have any non-governmental members of the task force, they are subject to disclosure. There are two important points. One, Cheney didn't run the task force, and two the task force did not run afoul of the FACA ordinance.

Cheney was already aware of the Halliburton jokes and so decided to hire on Andrew Lundquist to be the executive director of the task force. Lundquist took some time to decide but finally left the private sector and signed on. Cheney was in a bit of a pinch to get started because he needed someone already in the energy business to explain exactly the kind of thing that prompted the need for the task force - the energy crisis in California which involved the foolishness of some deregulation and California having to buy electricity on the spot market. (a bit about that)

Folks in the power business understand that electricity demand is generally something we are able to plan for years in advance, and it hasn't generally been a problem handling that. (I built some systems for 3 different energy companies over the years. I know they do commodities hedging up to 20 years in advance). What's difficult is managing freaky weather and peak demand. When this happens, utilities bring small plants, called 'peakers' online. The trick is timing. All power generation plants have to go down for periodic maintenance. What you don't want is to get stuck with peak demand when your peakers are down. When that happens you have to buy power from out of state or out of the region. Hopefully you've had an agreement that allows you to do so, but if you don't and have to buy energy on the spot market, then you lose a huge amount of money - because electricty prices are regulated. You can't sell peak power at too much of a premium over regular power. This gap is essentially what broke PG&E and Edison seven years ago in California.

Several utilities in California had no contracts in place to reserve energy at a low price from outside providers. The DWP in Los Angeles did, and they got through that period with no changes in rates or interruptions in service. Cheney wanted somebody besides himself to do that explaining and run the task force. Lundquist was the man.

The energy policy task force was a 'checkbox' committee. Which is to say, the Bush Administration had already formulated their energy policy and already had their priorities in hand - nothing particularly surprising at all, your standard "expand energy resources, reduce dependence on foreign oil, energy independence stuff". The job of the committee was to run all of that by various interest groups and have them essentially rubber stamp or modify slightly what the Administration had already decided, which was another reason Cheney punted to Lundquist. Naturally, the renewables people were disappointed at their marginal standing and began pitching their bitch. At some point the noise overcame the signal and various individuals ratcheted up the controversy. Specifically, the NRDC sued.

Cheney was simply stubborn and had Addington make the point, and fight on that point, that the energy task force was compliant with the FACA rule on disclosure and there was no legal right nor precedent for full disclosure. Lundquist himself didn't care one way or another, he'd just as soon turn over the papers. Cheney had nothing to hide, but he also had something to prove which is that you simply can't boss the executive around when they are already in compliance.

In the end, the decision to force Cheney to turn over all their papers was vacated.

The current candidate positions are here.

Clinton's Law
Bill Clinton signed into law a little-remarked upon bill which oriented his administration towards regime change. It was known as the Iraq Liberation Act. For a long time in the lead up to the war and justification for it, I was unaware of the existence of this law and its policy implications, which are specifically for regime change.

Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 - Declares that it should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.

It doesn't get any clearer than that. All the time I wasted talking about No Fly Zones, I could have gone directly here. Wow. Furthermore, it was revealed in the book, and this is something I pay some attention to a little bit better, that the CIA was a shy party to an attempted coup. Some Iraqi whose name I cannot recall, basically told the US that he was, in light of our stance, going to try to take Saddam out himself. It was a disaster and he lost his life. So how exactly did people expect regime change to take place? My point is that regime change was not a strictly PNACian idea. The more I repeat the phrase, the more I recall Colin Powell saying it, but in fact it was American foreign policy three years before 9/11.

Nigerian Uranium
Yes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger. So the whole thing about the 16 words, in the end, were justified. I still haven't been able to wrap my head around everything relating to  Wilson & Plame and I'm not through that section of the book yet, but the bottom line was the Bush didn't deserve getting bashed on that point.

Powell's UN Presentation
The biggest surprise of all is that the decision to make WMD the focus of the presentation to the UN was Colin Powell's. Cheney and Wolfowitz' idea was to have two whole days of testimony which included the more substantial documentation on how Saddam was supporting terrorism. Their take as that the best case for war against Iraq was the full case, which would take a substantial amount of time to present. Their tack would be to make it clear that even despite some possibly dodgy intelligence on Iraq, the full context of Saddam's threat to the world had not really been made to the UN Security Council, and they needed to be fully embarrassed into action considering their relative passivity in the past. So they made three six inch binders of the full briefing which included extensive documentation of the role of AQ in Iraq, and the extent to which Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Palestine, using WMD on his own people, and selling technology and arms to AQ and other Saudi terrorist groups. Powell took one look at that pile and threw it out.

Of course the great irony in all this was that the anti-war crowd and the containment crowd would have had their most oft-used rationale more satisfied had Powell not gone for the quick slam dunk. Surely those determined opponents of the Bush Administration would have come up with something else, but I think those who were most pressing for continued sanctions would have had a much more difficult go had the long form prevailed.

-

So. We have been adjusted.

Viguerie's Numbers

CPAC folks were asked what they would do it McCain wins the nomination:

           299      29.9%  “strongly support McCain”

            279      27.9%  “I will vote for McCain, but do not expect to work or contribute”

             35       3.5%  “I will vote for the Democratic nominee”

             90       9.0%  “I will vote for a conservative third party candidate if one is on

                                     the ballot in my state”

             40       4.0%  “I will not vote”

            257      25.7%  “I am undecided at this time—I need to see if Senator McCain

                                     reaches out to conservatives in a serious and meaningful way”

 

            “From these results, it is clear that Senator McCain has a challenge in gaining the conservative support he needs in order to win the general election,” says David Franke of ConservativeHQ.com. “Only 3 in 10 conservative activists strongly support him. Even if you add in the people who will limit their activity to voting for him, and all of the undecided conservatives (not likely), he will have only 83.5% of the conservative vote. Historically, the Republican presidential candidate needs more than 80% of the conservative vote in order to win. The poll results show he can possibly reach that level of conservative support, but it will be dauntingly hard.”

So he's got better than half the CPAC vote, but perhaps not their money, nor their spirit. Will 50% be enough? I think so and I'm happy for the clarity in difference. I am pleased that McCain is not sucking up but clarifying his positions in order for respectful disagreement. Again I note that McCain-Kennedy was subjected to the will of the people through Congress and that is the thing that made McCain change his tune - not the love-hate relationship with think tanks and activist groups.

Mac's Majority

I tried to get on the Hugh Hewitt show this afternoon in the first hour but that was dedicated to callers who were originally Romney supporters, I guess. So I got screened. The point I wanted to make was simple and I think it should be obvious, and that is that the people have spoken and they ought to get some props for that. What people? That's exactly the question nobody seems to want to talk about - instead we get all this belated hagiography of what a great concession speech Romney made.

Hugh was being gracious to the front-runner and it didn't seem much of a stretch for him to do it, but he reduced McCain's viability down to precisely the single point that Romney conceded to him, the War. I know it's difficult for pundits to back off and give the benefit of the doubt to the herrenvolk, but in this case I think the rank and file Republicans were dead right to give Super Tuesday to McCain.

In many ways, this kind of snubbing is parallel to the kind of Christians that get all of the props by the Conservative Movement are those evangelicals who flock to Dobson and Pat Robertson. I can remember a couple weeks ago when a Right Radio caller asked their conservative host precisely what 'evangelical' meant, as if she thought Born Again Christians were the only kind and that label was a secular pejorative. It took the host several guesses to get around to Catholics were examples of Christians who were not evangelical.  At times it seems that conservative activists believe that to be the case and that the temperament of evangelicals is the only temperament suitable for Republican politics. Similarly they don't seem to recognize those Americans to whom conservative ideas appeal, but who are not driven to zealotry. It doesn't take much zeal to cast a thoughtful vote and Super Tuesday should stand as a reminder that a majority of Republicans have not found the 'true' conservative candidate to their liking. Instead the Republican who doesn't spend his days evangelizing for the conservative movement has Republican America's confidence. This is Mac's Majority.

It is fundamentally impossible to express conservative principles in lockstep, that is because one of the principles is liberty. We cannot be constrained in our passions, and they will find their way out in a million ways - as of Monday, in three major ways. Now it's down to two. Those who fight truly for the principles will recognize what's best is McCain's victory - the majority of Republicans already have, which is why we are where we are today.

Forging together the new face and expression of Mac's Majority is the task at hand. Romney supporters will be here next week. What they will say is that they're holding their nose. When you hold your nose, you cannot be swayed by flavor. The flavor of contenders no longer counts, but rather the nutritious substance of the front-runner and eventual party nominee.

Arch-Conservative Reality Check

The past few weeks, certain conservatives, whom I will refer to as arch-conservatives, have been pounding a large and loud drum, which is that McCain is bad for the party. What they really mean to say is that they hate the idea of man who serves the needs of the nation over their narrow interests. Well, as a moderate conservative, I can say tonight that there is nothing quite as satisfying as winning, and now all of the depression I felt after the Super Bowl is over. Let us be clear about it. McCain is the man. On this Super Tuesday, John McCain has won more delegates than Romney and Huckabee combined. It's not even close. 

McCain:  525
Romney: 223
Huckabee: 145

Now we will witness the sputtering of arch-conservatives and a realization that they do not control the tent poles of the GOP. Some of them can't stand it, but they're all going to have to live with it. The electorate has spoken, and there's not much else to say.

The other day I was poking around to find the biggest endorser of Romney. I don't know, other than Rush Limbaugh, Coulter, Prager, Dobson, and Hewitt, who are the biggest supporters. But as I mentioned before, Kemp, Giuliani, George P Schulz, Schwarzenegger, Gramm and Tom Ridge are all on McCain's side. I like Right Radio as much as anyone, but they really went off the deep end this time and have just misjudged the heretofore silent majority.

So you can believe that there's going to be a lot of spinning in the wake of the McCain triumph. What is interesting to me is where  the RLC is going to stand, and how folks are going to come out, albeit late for McCain. Viguerie has already admitted that the ball is McCain's court and now looks for some kind of way for McCain to make the proper noises in response to the horrible squawks people like Tom DeLay have made, in making the arch-conservatives feel some measure of respectability in the wake of the denial of 'pure' Romney at the polls today. But for DeLay and some others, there's some hell to pay considering how much they have been sounding of late so much like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction telling us how they will not be ignored.

I wonder if it isn't premature to say that the RINO moment has arrived. And of course moderate conservatives like me will not have to live with that pejorative if we demonstrate our power to make a new majority coalition. What is perfectly clear, and Karl Rove says it himself is that the lessons of the Reagan Era are obvious.

Every presidential election is about change, and no more so than at the end of a two-term president's time in the White House. Parties have to constantly update themselves if they hope to remain relevant. The difficulty for both Republicans and Democrats is that our political system is at a point where more than the normal amount of party growth and development is needed. Both parties are suffering the consequences of seeing substantial parts of their 20th-century agendas adopted; both parties are struggling to fashion new answers to the new challenges of a young century.

But that's not to say that the Reagan legacy is exhausted. Ronald Reagan's legacy was not simply that he was "a campaigner and orator of uncommon skill," as Don Campbell argued last week in USA Today. President Reagan's gifts to the Republican Party were ideas: growing the economy through tax cuts, limiting government's size, forcefully confronting totalitarian threats, making human rights a centerpiece of America's foreign policy, respecting unborn human life, empowering the individual with more freedom. Those ideas endure.

Duh, yeah we get it. We know the value of those ideas, and we also know the marginal value of trying to get absolute lockstep fidelity to the extreme ends and caustic litmus tests for programs associated with those ideas. They are turmoil and resentment and that's what the GOP suffers today, and quite frankly the shiny sheen of newly minted ideologues trying their damnedest to jump through those hoops while trying to make it look effortless. Really, did anyone like Viguerie believe this time last year that Romney was their last, best hope? Everybody representing that has lost miserably. Tancredo lost miserably. Hunter got stomped. Thompson was tentative in even entering the race. Why? Because it is now self-evident that the arch-conservative ideological 'base' is not what gets this party started. Alan Keyes is perfect candidate for them and he loses everywhere every time. Nobody is going to draft George Allen nor any other perfect arch-conservative candidate. We have to all grow up and recognize that the Conservative Movement has moved and the arch conservatives are sounding more and more shrill every day. But most importantly, they cannot win alone, and they can't bully the rest of us.

Reality is here, now. Reality is McCain.

Now Vigeurie Freaks Out

Richard Viguerie is the next of the ideological purists to have a mental conniption. I got his email this afternoon. He wants to open up the convention and suggests some pure conservatives unsullied by the campaign thus far:

• McCain has Reagan’s toughness, is a Vietnam War hero, supports a strong military, and opposes pork-barrel spending, but sides with liberals on immigration, freedom of speech, taxes, environmental extremism, and other important issues.
• Huckabee is a Reagan-style populist and a conservative on social issues, but is sympathetic to Goreism, and he fought conservatives on taxes, spending, immigration, and other issues when he was governor.
• Romney has adopted a mostly-Reaganite platform, but he is suspect because he converted to conservatism only after serving as governor, and, besides, many conservatives see him as a probable loser in November.
• Ron Paul is the real straight-talker in the race, the one who stays truest to the libertarian beliefs that are, as Reagan said, “the heart of conservatism.” He is the one candidate who doesn’t confuse a strong defense with the failed policy of nation-building. But most conservatives want a powerful U.S. presence in world affairs and will never support Paul’s defense and foreign policy. In any event, Paul’s chance of getting elected, or even nominated, is infinitesimal.

American Digest sees things clearly as usual.

Warming To McCain

I've already said it. I trust McCain, and listening to him debate Romney at the Reagan Library, I still like him, despite Hugh Hewitt's shameless commentary. Hugh is still eating the 'conservative base' dog food. What he doesn't seem to recognize is that this is going to be a general election. The only candidate who has proven that he can work both sides of the aisle and succeed despite the conservative base is John McCain.

But I am listening to McCain have brain farts and it's annoying. I like the way he operates in that he's clearly not one to deal with a lot of hypothetical promises and his rhetoric shows that, whereas Romney gets cheeky when crossed and starts pointing out facts which lie in accord with stereotypical notions which fall onto his side. McCain has a much more reasonable leadership approach, whereas Romney is trying to prove that he's the proper inheritor of the conservative legacy. That makes Romney more brittle because he has to live down his flips. If McCain weren't so impatient, he could break Romney. Instead it's going to be a long slog.

McCain really incensed Hewitt by talking to the Global Warming trope. He emphasized American inventiveness and nuclear energy. Romney suggested that cap & trade will send domestic energy intensive businesses overseas. Huh? What? McCain should have really slammed him on that one. Are you going to let GM move to China? is what he should have said. Anyway, all this global warming crap will blow over, but green marketing is here to stay. McCain is wise not to dismiss the green economy. The real bottom line, it seems to me, is not a domestic cap and trade policy, but a global one. It's not clear to me yet that McCain is taking his regulatory cues from overseas.

Speaking of cues. I tried to find out who has actually endorsed Romney and could find nothing on his site. McCain has got some heavy hitters, including most of the moderate Republicans I've always liked, chief among them, the smartest man in the Reagan Administration, George P. Schultz. You may recall that Schultz ran Bechtel. I find it difficult to imagine that he would fall for any baloney about climate change. Now you should know, in case you don't, that Schultz is buddies with Warren Buffett and Arnold Schwartzeneggar. Arnold is scheduled to endorse McCain.

Also, you should know that Jack Kemp and Phil Gramm are both on board with McCain. I don't need to tell anybody that Jack Kemp was one of the first Republicans that I liked, and still do. And he's one of the centrist Republicans that got spit on by cranks like DeLay. Kemp's also on the board of Oracle. I didn't know that.  Also Tom Ridge is a major figure on the McCain team. Now the Tom Ridge story, as you know, is very interesting. He was Colin Powell's choice to be SecDef. Then that wanker Gary Bauer spoiled it and we ended up with Rumsfeld. So after 9/11, Ridge got the consolation prize of running Homeland Security when it first started. Now he's in a prime spot.

So it's going to be very clear here that my gang of moderate conservatives is lining up behind McCain and the ideologues who are desperately seeking a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan are going to throw their weight behind Romney. What Huckabee is doing in there, I don't know.

McCain: The Straightest Moderate

McCain is the candidate I trust the most in the White House, and tonight he just thrashed Mitt Romney. The common wisdom says that Giuliani, who was arrogant enough to suggest that Iowa and New Hampshire don't count, is going to pull out of the race tomorrow and throw his support to back McCain. That makes sense, and I hope it goes that way.

Jay Reding wisely says:

Sen. John McCain is an American hero, a man of great personal integrity and someone who has always stood strongly on the side of his country. He often rubs conservatives the wrong way, and his “maverick” image causes much consternation—however, when it comes right down to it a man who agrees with us 80% of the time is better than a woman who represents the worst of American politics and a man whose great rhetoric is but a cover for a fundamental lack of real-world experience. We may have our issues with John McCain, but when it comes down to the basic principles of the party: fiscal conservatism, a strong national defense and strengthening the family, McCain has his heart in the right place.

I predict that it's what all Republicans are going to be saying in the coming months, as soon as they recognize two out of three things. 1. Perfect is the enemy of good, and 2. Time's up for the standard social conservative hardline. 3. McCain gets serious bills passed in a partisan Congress.

A McCain/Giuliani ticket can only be beaten by a Clinton/Obama ticket. And if Obama sells out to Clinton, well then he'll never get any respect around here any more, and shouldn't get any from any of his devotees to 'change' no matter how misled they already are. It seems to me that Obama only works in Obamavision, but I digress.

A McCain presidency ought to be a single-termer, and I think we'd all be happiest with that. He'll have the good sense to not run again, I think. But the real news here is what a Romney failure means in light of what social conservatives aim to do in the GOP. I think it means that we break from a full press to the right on every issue to a reasonable press on the issues that matter most, National Security and the Economy. If America goes Socialist, a lot of us won't want to have our babies born here. But I kid. The clear message that Florida has sent is that they want McCain, and it really starts to change from here on out, because it wasn't even close.

Hewitt Freaks Out

Hugh Hewitt has gone from blameless to shameless in 2 years flat. It's hard for me to imagine that I've been listening to him for that long, but that's about right. Hewitt's head is about 180 centimeters up Mitt Romney's anal orifice, and disappearing fast.

I know that I have been terribly unfair to Mitt Romney. There is basically nothing I like about the man, except his rhetoric on policy. But then only when I read it, never when I hear it coming out of his piehole. He hasn't said the thing, he hasn't pounded the fist, he hasn't made the gesture. He's a suit. Not an empty suit, just a suit. I can't figure out a way to like him.

And yet Hewitt is talking about him as if there were no way the Party could survive unless Planet GOP starts revolving around Romney's star. He can't stand McCain, over the bleating protestations of Michael Medved, who makes sterling points about dragging up old stuff that people with more intellectual bandwidth than a squirrel shouldn't nitpick. So today Hewitt drags in Santorum to crap all over McCain on immigration.

Hewitt freaking out is just another symptom of the deeper problem Republicans have, which is the death of the significance of Karl Rove. There is no other political master operative and the GOP is out of ideas with regard to how they can keep all the big tent poles standing. Everyone, it seems, is dumbstruck by the fact that there is no Reagan. There is no 'true' conservative to the rescue. Instead the are lame-duck hacks who led by strongarm, not by inspiration. The fact the Republican Party is suffering from a complete lack of personality is echoed every day by Republicans everywhere who find something admirable to say about the true charisma of Barack Obama. It's undeniable. None of us Republicans are madly in love with any of our candidates. There are only the Ron Paul obsessives. The rest of us are holding out for a hero who simply doesn't exist.

The Hewitt freak out, and by extension the Republican freak out is going to remain the status quo until one of these guys gets inspirational. It ain't likely, but stranger things have happened. What are the chances that Hillary Clinton will do something to finally appear charming and sympathetic? That's about the same chance as we have of finding another Gipper.

So really the best thing that can happen on the Right is that the gloves come off and Rudy, Fred, John and Mike start cracking on each other and the fur flies. It's something we'll respond to. But better yet, it will give these stiffs some life. It's easy to know we cannot stand Hillary, it's harder to know what we won't allow McCain to stand for. But Romney has to instigate it. He can't be afraid of somebody wagging about 'negative campaing ads'. That's what politics is all about, bashing your opponent and then bludgeoning him into submission such that the public loses all confidence in him. None of the GOP has really even gone after Ron Paul.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

A Slow Race Car

I've been told that a 'moderate conservative' is as oxymoronic as a slow race car. Here's what kind of moderate conservative I am. It bears repeating.

The kind of moderate conservative I am would be simply this: I'm a fiscal conservative, believing in small government and generally against the welfare state, but I'm not a social conservative. I don't believe in political activism which values a particular lifestyle or degrades another. My own personal beliefs about lifestyles (for lack of a better term) is indeed conservative, but that's not something I want my Americans to be politicizing.

My think tank is the Manhattan Institute. Of all of them out there, I find most in common with what the guys at Manhattan say, including John McWhorter and Kay Hymowitz.

RLC Slate

Senator John Danforth, Lt. Governor Michael Steele, and Governor Christine Todd Whitman today proudly announced the slate of Republican candidates that the RLC is endorsing in the 2007 elections. You can learn more about the candidates by checking out our brand new website design: www.republican-leadership.com.

"We must have strong state and local candidates positioned for the years ahead. Redistricting in 2010 will be a crucial point in the political landscape, and we are determined to ensure that the Democrats do not control that process," said Lt. Gov. Steele. "That's why these candidates and others are so vital to the party's future."

"These candidates and incumbents are the kinds of leaders our nation needs – leaders who will fight for the true Republican values of fiscal restraint and local control," said
Senator Danforth.

"We have selected candidates running for local and state offices because we believe in reclaiming the Republican Party from the ground up," noted Governor Whitman. "Returning the Party to its focus on fiscal conservatism and less government interference in people's lives is a crucial goal, and one that these candidates will help us achieve."

The Unmarried Black Womb: Ground Zero

Alan Keyes throws a curveball of Middle Passage proportions:

“Did you know that something like thirteen million black babies have been killed since Roe v. Wade, as a result of this holocaust of abortion? Did you know that the black population today is something like twenty-five percent less than it would otherwise be, because of abortion? Did you know that black women are disproportionately likely to have abortions, that more black babies are being aborted today than are being born, and that, as you project these kinds of tendencies into the future, the black population becomes a negligible factor in American politics and other things, over the course of the twenty-first century? I look back on black Americans with a heritage of oppression and slavery that, unfortunately, is involved in this question as well, because seventy-eight percent of the abortion clinics that are provided by the most numerous provider of abortions in America, Planned Parenthood, are located in or near the black community. Blacks are thirteen percent of the population. They account for over a third of the abortions. So I think that, on these important issues, we have to look for the patterns that still target people on the basis of race-and they’re targeting people in the womb.”

Do you hear crickets?

The Gymnastics of Snubbing Tavis

Mirror on America writes:

I will give Maryland Senatorial Candidate Michael Steele credit. In an interview this week, Steele said that the GOP should be at Tavis' forum, and that they need to either ' put up or shut up' about being serious about presenting a platform to the Black community.

But, I haven't heard from any more prominent Black Republicans or Conservative Bloggers...their silence is deafening. And, until they speak up and out about this, they should just keep quiet about the GOP actually being a ' choice' for Black folk. But, as with so much else with the GOP, Black Republicans will find some sort of mental gymnastics to excuse this away.

My mental gymnastics are simple, and they are simply a reverse of the mental gymnastics that allows people to think Tavis Smily represents 'the Black community'. The GOP is already a choice for black voters. All we have to do is listen to the candidates when they talk to America. The mental gymnastics that make blackfolks separate and distinct from everyone else are precisely all the trickeration needed. We can all do that in our sleep, the hard part is undoing that.

Part of the forward flips was the de-blackfication of the Fox News Network. Some politicos decided that Fox Network was not for black people. So when Fox invited black politicos to speak on their network they declined to participate. A lot of people fuss about a level playing field. That act was nothing more or less than a forfeit of the playing field, and suddenly Fox became too white. It wasn't Fox that declared itself white. It was black political partisans that did so.

Republicans shouldn't have to do backflips to undo the racial flips of black political partisans. But that is the standing presumption of those who consider themselves too black for the mainstream to understand. Of course nobody really cares until this multicultural separatism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy of being 'underserved'. Then having marginalized themselves expertly into minority status, they will come with their special pleas for ways and means for 'outreach' to work. There is no need for outreach. Just turn on the TV.

As for Steele, he's right. The burden should be on Tavis Smiley and everyone else who wants a special audience with the GOP to deliver audience and patronage. We all know that when the NAACP was serious about inviting GWBush, he showed up. That required a change of leadership and attitude. If the NAACP, as weak as it is, knows how to get the President, Tavis Smiley should know how to get candidates. I just happen to believe that Smiley is not backing down from the dismissive and hostile attitudes his Contract With Black America crew has with the GOP.  If it's going to be like that, fine. That's politics. But don't pretend that it's racism, or anything else.

Local Local Local

(from the archives, June 2004)

I have been appointed to startup the new Southwest Los Angeles chapter of the CCR, the California College of Republicans. This chapter's territory is the 47th Assembly district which encompasses, among many other neighborhoods, Ladera Heights, View Park, Baldwin Hills and 'the Dons' which comprise, next to PG County in Maryland, one of the largest upscale African American communities in the nation. It's where I grew up.

The CCR is one of about 7 grass roots statewide Republican feeder organizations. Each has its own charter and character. I have only met a few of the CCR officers, but I do know that the statewide chair is of Arab descent. (The other two CCR folks I have met are black including the president for LA County, and the president of the South Central chapter.)

This Thursday, I will be attending my first meeting, headed by Austin Dragon, the South Central president. Julia McGinty (I believe is her name) will be the featured speaker. She is an officer in the Schwartzeneggar camp.

My purpose in Republican activism is to establish an independent grass roots black conservative voice which constitutes a credible and practical threat to the status quo. This should affect Democratic complacency, black political fence-sitting, Republican disrespect and the overall domestic dialog on black progress. My goal was to increase black Republican registration threefold over the next 7 years. My expectation was to move from 5 to 15%, and I expected that the constituency in question would be comprised largely of upscale white collar blacks as well as small businesmen and Independents. However I am finding that there is even a broader spectrum of blacks that the GOP might appeal to.

Along the way I expect to do a lot of mythbusting and basically see for myself what's up with the Republican Party. I am especially concerned at the distance and difference between Ward Connerly and a black constituent base, and my inspection of Thomas Wood, a coauthor of prop 209 (CCRI), demonstrates that there is some real sense of responsibility to anti-discrimination. In otherwords, smart Republicans are calling Ward on his ahistorical shit.

I have been impressed with Republicans in local politics, especially Steve Soberoff, for whom I voted in the last LA mayoral campaign.

Online is crap. And that includes Project 21 which although I don't find suspect in its motives, I find lacking in its sophistication. Still, I think my own prejudices about people needing to come Correct makes me more critical than I need to be. I don't think that the average voter needs a 10 page thesis on why they should vote Republican (or just register Republican), I think they just need a few good reasons. And I find the reasons against such a move to be generally stereotypical ranting.

My focus in Republican politics is local, local, local. While I may be a strategic thinker, I am really interested in patronage. What do I get for delivering votes? Who do I get to know? What plans am I made aware of? This isn't rocket science. Half of the people in government are having conversations that African Americans are not a part of and that has largely been by African American choice. I choose to find out. Nobody's stopping me, and so far I've been encouraged and welcomed.

There is only a limited amount of *anything* that's going to get done through politics. And I think that the reason the Sharpton and Jackson et al still get credibility is because blackfolks haven't chosen anyone else. What do we want from politics? What do we want from government? And if the whole universe of black demands are more health care, more civil rights, more decriminalization of drugs, then Sharpton is the answer. If your political agenda comes from the civil rights movement exclusively, then Sharpton has you covered. But if you want something else then you have to turn to somebody else. So part of this is about finding what else is available, because black patronage has been very narrowly defined. That may have been enough for daddy, but it ain't enough for me, and it won't suffice for my children.

The Conservative Brotherhood is working. We may decide to do a group blog but for now, we're all independent voices on the right. And since these are people who already are self-motivated, credible and popular, we don't worry about falling off. I think this is the kind of organization we need to build. Just networking people who, like Cosby, have always been doing the same old thing. It's just a little bit higher profile - because people don't know.