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Category: ideological culture
Vice-President Joe Biden announced, yesterday, that he will not run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, ending many weeks of speculation.
The Veep’s exit from a race he never entered benefits Mrs. Clinton, who in those same polls has a larger lead head-to-head against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Much of “Middle-Class” Joe’s speech was the usual laundry list of progressive pie-in-the-sky, money-can-too-buy-us-love shibboleths:
- “President Obama has led this nation from crisis to recovery, and we’re now on the cusp of resurgence.”
- The public schools fail to adequately educate kids — at stupendous cost. Rather than innovate, Biden demands we “commit to 16 years of free public education for all of our children.”
- Biden’s biggest pitch was for “a moon shot to cure cancer.” (Cancer will be cured . . . but not by politicians.)
Still, Joe voiced something other candidates fail to emphasize:
[W]e have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart. . . . I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They’re not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.
That hasn’t been Hillary Clinton’s approach, having compared conservative Republicans to terrorist groups. Plus, to the question “Which enemy that you made during your political career are you most proud of?” she answered, “Republicans.”
“Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take,” Joe Biden added.
I guess Joe’s not for Hillary.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank is panicked about the “chaos on Capitol Hill.”
He hyperventilated, in a recent column, concerning the difficulty Republicans are having in choosing a new Speaker of the House, after the announced resignation of current Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), then the sudden withdrawal from the race by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and now the reluctance of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to seek the post.
We’re informed of the speaker’s importance — “second in line to the presidency” and “key to national security and domestic tranquility” — as if Milbank, alone, has access to a Constitution.
Yet, is it really “chaos” or continued gridlock that’s bothering our company-town columnist?
If it were, Milbank wouldn’t focus his attacks solely on conservative Republicans for their unwillingness to “compromise” (read: surrender). Both Democrats and so-called establishment Republicans seem equally adamantine.
According to Milbank, these conservative “hardliners” and “zealots” constitute “a rough crowd” who employ “thuggish tactics.” Why, they have “hijacked the chamber”!
How so?
They had the audacity to not always vote lockstep with Speaker Boehner; they balked at supporting the Speakership for Rep. McCarthy; and (heavens!), they even dared communicate their viewpoint to voters in McCarthy’s home district.
Could free political speech still be allowed by law?
Milbank reviles the “efforts by conservative groups to depose [McCarthy] before he ever took the throne.”
Depose? Throne?
Milbank even laments that Eric Cantor “would have been speaker today” had only voters in his district not voted for somebody else. Pesky voters!
Methinks Mr. Milbank has been lounging around the halls of power a tad too long.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In Tuesday night’s debate, Democrats put all their egos in one ideological basket: progressivism. Even Jim Webb managed to sound progressive . . . until he identified his prime personal enemy — the man he shot in wartime.
Bernie Sanders once again insisted on lecturing Americans on what it means to be a “democratic socialist.” Martin O’Malley relentlessly pursued an impossible dream, 100 percent carbon-free electric production by 2050 — far enough off to avoid any possible accountability. And Hillary Clinton said that, sure, she’s a progressive, “a progressive who likes to get things done!”
But what has she “got done,” ever?
It was her secrecy regarding the initial health care reforms back in her husband’s first term that helped spark the firestorm of opposition that led to the Revolution of ’94, and to the triangulating successes of the master of manipulative compromise, Bill Clinton. His was not a “progressive era,” though Democrats still use the 1990s as proof that their (“our”) policies “work.”
With exception of Bernie on gun control and Hillary on foreign policy and spying (Snowden gave out secrets to the enemy: traitor; she gave out who-knows-what via her insecure email server: blankout), the spend-spend-spend mantra of progressivism, mixed with “fair taxes” (higher tax rates) on the top 1 percent, was not challenged on the stage.
How far would they go to close ranks? Bernie sided with her regarding “your damned e-mails.” That’s so ideological as to eschew any consideration of character or loyalty or trust.
Quite a revolution . . . in the party.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Swedish “Generosity”
The headline? Gaspworthy: “World’s First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, To Install Muslim Prayer Space.”
Are we being punked? Onion–ized?
I checked: apparently not.
The place is the Seamen’s mission church in the eastern docks of Stockholm. The Church of Sweden’s local bishop challenged the mission’s priest with a what-if: Suppose a Muslim came off the boats and wanted a place to pray?
Had the encounter been just a one-off, we could shrug it off. But this is one latitudinarian cleric, and she didn’t let it go:
Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels,” the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths.”
Generosity über alles strikes again!
I’ve long wondered about radicals who infiltrate religions. If you don’t like Catholicism, join or start something else; if you find the Baptist Conventions opprobrious, check out the Methodism, Greek Orthodoxy, or . . . Thelema. Why horn in on someone else’s religion?
But there is a reason it’s happening in the city that gave us “Stockholm Syndrome.” The Church of Sweden’s a state institution, while Scandinavia’s real religion is secular progressivism. You need no gift of prophecy to see where that’s bound to go.
Separation of church and state just makes sense. To each religion its own. There need be no fighting for adherents, or laying down of one’s own beliefs merely to appeal to “inclusion.”
Unless or until you get the government involved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Caliph/f or Nyet
We live in a time when intelligent people expend vital brain power concocting explanations for war that weigh drought as a more significant cause than . . . previous tyranny and warfare.
Yes, the President’s friends and acolytes defend the notion, in all seriousness, that it is unregulated capitalism leading to global warming and Levantine droughts that made Syrians all unruly. This explains everything!
Just blame Islamic State violence on the weather and not on . . . the murderous dictator willing to kill masses of his own people, the intoxicating ideology of jihad, and (definitely not!) on Barack Obama’s Mideast policies.
I emphasized the Syrian dictator’s acts last Sunday. But surely American foreign policy — going back to Bush, at least — destabilized the region, and constitutes a major cause of the violence.
A far greater cause than our car-driving addiction! And coal!
And flatulent cows . . .
Blame shifting is not just a foreign policy vice, though. My Townhall column began not with the nascent Caliphate’s droughts, but California’s. And there’s more than just a few syllables of pronunciation similarity. People are assigning the wrong causes in both regions.
When California’s government-run water system subsidizes almond growing in a near desert, of course there is going to be waste. And yet politicians focus on home water use, scolding folks for taking long showers.
Yet, who sets the price of the water homeowners buy? Who, then, is responsible for the incentives to which consumers react?
The State of California. Suffering no drought of disastrous dictates by politicians in over their heads.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Politicians love talking up job creation. Presidential candidates, especially, pretend to a Svengali-like virtuosity in producing paychecks and, if only handed the keys to the White House, creating — presto! — a bunch more.
This year, Republican Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has been repeatedly attacked by Democrats, democratic socialists and her Republican opponents for firing 30,000 workers during her tenure running the company. As if she did so out of meanness.
Sunday, on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd went at her again.
“I find it very rich,” Fiorina fired back. “Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, all the Democrats who are attacking me, they’ve never created a job, they’ve never saved a job, and their policies destroy jobs, including Mrs. Clinton’s latest position on Keystone Pipeline.”
Mrs. Fiorina offers context for her “failure”: “I led HP through a very difficult time. The NASDAQ dropped 80 percent. Some of our strongest competitors went out of business altogether, taking every job with them.” As she sees it, her team “saved 80,000 jobs. We went on to grow to 150,000 jobs. We quadrupled the growth rate of the company, quadrupled the cash flow of the company, tripled the rate of innovation of the company. And went from lagging behind to leading in every single product and every single market. I will run on that record all day long.”
I’m not endorsing Fiorina, either as candidate or as CEO. Just sayin’ that those attacking her on 30,000 jobs don’t know anything at all about actually creating even one real one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Bernie Sanders is many a progressive’s fairy-tale candidate.
Well, yeah.
Not “once upon a time,” but today . . . the federal government’s public debt is in the double-digit trillions. The total debt — consisting also of unfunded/underfunded welfare state “promises” — may be in the triple digits. Still, politicians pat themselves on their backs when they deliver annual deficits under half a trillion per year.
Meanwhile, Senator Sanders, former member of America’s Socialist Party and current caucuser with the Democrats, is running on the “freebie” platform: let’s spend more!
He serves as the pusher of a very old folly: thinking that good things come to us without cost.
But the costs have to be paid.
And will be.
That’s the essence of common-sense wisdom since ancient times. Usually I conjure up an accountant or an economist to explain this, but why not go back to folklore? Folk and fairy tales, along with myths both ancient and modern (remember Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?), tell us that magic powers come at a price.
And those costs can be killer.
Far-left-of-center magic pretends that not only can Bernie provide “free” stuff for everyone (including those of us in his “hard-working middle class”), but also that the wherewithal for these goodies (college, medicine, food, shelter, meaningful work) can easily come from . . . three pot-of-gold sources: “the rich,” “print more money,” and that least plausible sprinkle of fairy dust, “government efficiency.”
We tell children fairy tales not to make them wish for magic solutions, but to illuminate the logic of responsibility.
Bernie didn’t get that lesson.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“You have signed the death warrant for science,” scientist Peter Webster wrote to a colleague, recently.
The recipient of this charge had signed onto an entreaty to President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren — along with 19 fellow climate scientists. They asked for an investigation into companies and organizations that publicly express doubt about predictions of impending catastrophic man-made global warming. Specifically, they urge the administration to pursue this line of assault using the oft-abused RICO statute, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
Yes, the scientists are calling for harassment of dissenters and straight-out censorship.
Ronald Bailey, over at Reason, calls this a “new low in politicizing science.” Climatologist Judith Curry, who quoted Webster’s above judgment as an epigraph to her post on the subject, colorfully characterized her reaction: “When I first spotted this, I rolled my eyes — another day, more insane U.S. climate politics.”
The 20 alarmists, for their part, draw a parallel to the tobacco RICO investigations that were so influential a few decades ago. But that original case was badly decided. Moreover, RICO laws are themselves an affront.
The anthropogenic global warming catastrophists have previously undermined their case — lies, conspiracies to hide data, misleading use of computer models, and a relentless campaign to turn scientific inquiry into “settled science” will do that. But now, the grotesque spectacle of scientists demanding that the full weight and force of coercive government come down on their “opponents” completely destroys any remaining shred of credibility.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Pope Francis met with Fidel Castro over the weekend.
It’s not the first time the Bishop of Rome has met with a dictator, in Cuba or elsewhere. But it is the first time this particular pope has done so.
Next stop on this tour? The United States.
The pope’s most pointed words were directed not to the Communist nation but south by southwest, to Colombia, from where hail contestant parties to peace talks (the government versus leftist insurrectionists) now being held in Havana. The pope wishes no breakdown in the talks, urging that the world cannot afford “another failure on the path of peace and reconciliation.”
Pope Francis has been credited with the thawing of cold war relations between the United States and Cuba, and, for his part, praises both parties for the detente, which he has dubbed “an example of reconciliation for the whole world.”
But Cuba remains under tyranny; the people cannot speak freely and are impoverished under the thumb of socialistic regulation. The pope may not be seeing elements of causality here, of teleology, of purpose: Cuba’s poverty is not caused by the American embargo, really, but by a pernicious attachment to outdated ideas of government supremacy over people.
Unfortunately, many of the pope’s most famous remonstrances about capitalism suggest that he may be closer to the Castro brothers’ oppressive Marxist ideology than to a more liberatory approach.
While the pope publicly prays for reconciliation, Americans would be better off if we repudiated reconciliation with destructive ideas that too easily get packaged as “humane” and “Christian” when they are really, and deeply, precisely the opposite.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
