Friday, August 29. 2008
Suddenly, the left is concerned about motherhood. Ain't that special? Allah ponders the future: This is phase one. Phase two will be, “Wouldn’t a strong, responsible, authentic feminist woman have aborted it?” Man, I’m downright giddy at the thought of where the next eight weeks are going to take us.
How about Hillary? Is she one of the women who'd appreciate the opportunity here? Geraldine Ferraro says that many women feel disaffected by the way Hillary Clinton got treated by the Democratic Party and the media — and they will appreciate an opportunity to support a historic ticket...
Ace on the " experience" issue: I do admit he has more experience dealing with terrorists first hand... but we don't need to talk about William Ayers and his Manson-enthusiast wife Bernadette Dohrn right now.
History either way? A senior campaign official in the John McCain campaign confirmed to FOX News on Friday that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will name Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It's official: here's the announcement...
I got yer change right here
We all know it's a cult, but they're actually now openly pirating Christian terms to advance their candidate. I gotta find a transcript.
Here's what I heard: Commence the deliberate mixing of religious and civic language... For Barack Obama, for Joe Biden, for me, for all of us, the principles of faith call us to service.
With faith in the American dream, we strive for better schools, economic justice, and smarter foreign policies because we believe in the God-given principles of equality, freedom, and opportunity. With faith in each other, we work for a common-sense approach to politics that focuses on results, not partisan division, because we recognize that we're all in this together.
Aren't we all tired of a Washington that doesn't have any faith in us? Fellow delegates, fellow Democrats, and fellow Americans, now is the time to let our faith guide us to action once again. It would seem to me that a Washington that had faith in us as citizens would be willing to allow us to live our lives as unencumbered by the government as possible, as truly free individuals with rights and responsibilities to care for ourselves. More expansive government is referred to as a "nanny state," Tim. That's what you're arguing for, right? A nanny isn't there to trust her wards; she's there to watch over them, to limit them, to make sure that they don't do anything that might harm themselves. That's not what our founders intended. We need to put our faith into action -- to elect a president who will put middle-class Americans first again and reward companies who create jobs in America instead of shipping them overseas. Hmm. What about foreign companies that build factories here? Do we shut them down because they're not American owned? Or does this policy only work in one direction? We need to put our faith into action -- to elect a president who will end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil and invest in green-collar, clean- energy jobs right here at home. Obama will be a president who can - by the sheer force of his will, it seems - call into existence the technology that will allow us to end our dependence on oil and switch over entirely to an economy powered by... good feelings? What exactly? BTW, one fine way to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil would be to drill domestically. Just a tip. We need to put our faith into action -- to elect a president who will invest in our students, teachers and schools, and make college affordable once again for every American family. Oh good lord. As if education budgets won't grow every year by remarkable amounts under either McCain or Obama. FAIL. We need to put our faith into action -- to elect a president who will responsibly end the war in Iraq, give our veterans and their families the support they need, and reinvigorate our military to face the challenges ahead. John McCain is the only person running that I know of who has always advocated responsibly ending the war in Iraq. He's always wanted to win it. The jack-ass you're talking about was forced to acknowledge the success of the surge that he opposed and then stated that even if he knew then what he knows now, he'd still have voted against it.
Now, let's really just lay into the religious language, shall we? If we put our faith into action, we can move mountains.
We can move the mountains of negativity and division and gridlock.
We can move the mountains of special interests and business as usual.
We can move the mountains of hopelessness that surround too many of our people and communities.
Does anybody here have a little faith tonight? Is anybody here ready to move those mountains?
Starting right here in the Mile High City, we will put our faith into action; we will reject the failed policies of George Bush and John McCain; we will elect Barack Obama our next president.
In the words of the gospel hymn -- "move mountain."
Say it with me -- "move mountain."
Say it with me again -- "move mountain."
Mountain, get out of our way! Wow. Just... Wow. Witness the founding of Obamianity, the newest political religion. Jonah Goldberg was right.
Thursday, August 28. 2008
Corporatism, Industrial Policy, Crisis-Mongering, Nationalism (Hidden in Euphemism) [Jonah Goldberg]
Gosh, I could swear someone wrote a book about this sort of thing.
Regarding Milt Rosenberg's show in the last post - here's a recap from an observer...
A quite long and very intellectual examination on the Obama phenomenon over at City Journal: Yet if Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders’ adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as “ideological minorities” to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those “absolutists” who would defy the community. The “ideological core of today’s GOP,” he writes, is “absolutism, not conservatism,” an absolutism driven by those who prize “absolute truth” over “communal values.” This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives.
Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is “a rejection of absolute truth.” His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West’s traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man’s fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic—an instance of utopian overreaching.
Machiavelli was ready with a solution. He helped prepare the way for the politics of redemptive healing by working to overturn the older morality. In particular, he undermined the West’s most potent myth of diabolic amorality and delusory hubris. Two years after he completed The Prince, Machiavelli composed a fable, Belfagor, or the Devil Who Took a Wife, in which he ridiculed the idea that the devil can take possession of a man’s mind and corrupt those around him. In assuming (correctly) that the diabolic qualities of his redemptive prince would be easier to swallow once the devil himself became a joke, Machiavelli blazed a path that Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, and Shaw afterward trod. No one fears the devil that Voltaire refused to renounce on his deathbed. (“This is no time to be making enemies,” he jested.) Goethe’s Mephistopheles is charming, as is Shaw’s (in Man and Superman). Even those characters whom modern European artists have intended to be diabolic (such as Balzac’s Collin) arouse sympathy in a way that older devil-characters (Shakespeare’s Iago, for example) do not.
Dostoyevsky was among the few who grasped the momentousness of the change that Machiavelli initiated in the West’s conception of diablerie. Near the end of The Brothers Karamazov, he describes an encounter between the devil and Ivan Karamazov. The devil appears, not with claws and horns, but in the guise of an elegant man of the world: he phrases his mordant taunts in French and laughs at modern intellectuals who believe that he doesn’t exist or who worry that to admit his existence would harm their “progressive image.” Dostoyevsky implied that it was precisely when the devil became a wit that the intellectual classes of the West succumbed to the most familiar form of diabolic temptation: the belief that men can transcend the limits of their condition and “be as gods”—demiurges with the power to heal the world’s pain and reshape it in accordance with a beautiful idea. Via Milt Rosenberg at WGN Radio, who tasted the wrath of the Obama Cult for daring to examine the Leader's past.
Monica Conyers pitches a fit over hotel accomodations; police intervention required.
Wednesday, August 27. 2008
Krauthammer on Obama's acceptance speech: The Berlin folly -- in English.
The Superbowl Halftime Show -- without the game.
What's the finish? Maybe Obama’s got Zhang Yimou to do the hidden-rope trick, and have him lifted, Beijing-style, to the heavens when he’s done. Will he reappear three days later at the Bird’s Nest? Title of Krauthammer's post? "Has he lost his mind?"
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