Monthly Archives: December 2008

BillO Tosses & Gores Governor Gregoire; So Far So Good (But…)

Christianity, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Freedom of Religion, Law, Media, Natural Law, The State, The West

I’m pleased Bill O’Reilly is targeting the left-liberal governor of Washington State. Seldom do I identify with any of the causes BO champions, other than his offensive against sanctuary cities and criminal aliens. I appreciate his passion over those issues. For the rest, he might as well be speaking Greek.

(I’ve noticed BO’s “theories” about Big Bad Oil have taken a back seat of late since market forces combined with an induced recession to render gas prices at an all-time low.)

I also defended BO effectively when he took the unpopular stance of personal responsibility with respect to Shawn Hornbeck.

But notice that BO always argues from the stance of the positive law. There is no such thing as natural justice in his universe, although his righteous anger about crime, by illegals or others, comes close.

In the case at hand, the odious Governor Gregoire sanctioned an atheist diatribe alongside the traditional holiday display of the Nativity scene in the state capitol building. BO defends Christmas on the grounds that it’s a federal holiday. Logical consistency, then, compels him to defend every foul federal holiday, including Martin Luther King’s dedicated day. (I’m sure there are other more ludicrous that the last.)

Since nobody notices how poorly written his columns are, no one will be the wiser about BO’s poorly constructed arguments. (Except those who read this space.) However, his fans would do well to think through how deficient BO’s argument against Gregoire really is.

Think about it: if Christmas were not a public holiday, would the vile, rude display this uncouth woman sanctioned be justified? How do you justify Christmas with reference to this country’s founding faith if you defer to State law that has banished that tradition from the public square?

You can’t! You always come short when you argue from the positive law.

As I’ve written (it’s under Quotables–and you have to attribute), “sometimes the law of the State coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.”

How much legislation? A lot:

We labor under over 56,009 pages of laws in the U.S. Code; 134,488 pages of regulatory laws in the Code of Federal Regulation, and more than 68,107 pages of laws in the Federal Register. There are upwards of 2,756 volumes (and counting) of judicial precedent. Correct me if I’m wrong. (Where is my good friend Jerri Ward when I need her?)

Over and out,
Your consummate natural lawyer

Update II: The Commie Who Controls the Economy From the Grave

Communism, Democrats, Economy, Political Economy, Republicans, Socialism

The excerpt is from my new WND column, “The Commie Who Controls the Economy From the Grave“:

“Republicans are as devout about Keynes as are [Democrats] Reich and Krugman. Nixon famously declared, ‘We are all Keynesians now.’ But my comment is redundant; Bush has bested the most committed Keynesian. ‘Nixon’s Keynesian conversion … looks positively quaint compared with the fiscal and monetary stimulus’ Bush has initiated, quipped Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post.”

“How much to hand out; who to hand it to; which handout makes the best use of taxpayer money; do the Big Three submit a business plan with their bailout requisitions, or not—that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”

“So who was this man, John Maynard Keynes, who controls the economy from the grave?”

“Keynes was a Fabian socialist strongly opposed to private enterprise. … Fabians departed from communists on the use of force. Whereas the communists believed in ‘attaining power by violence,’ Fabians perfected a form of the Islamic takiya—lying to spread the faith, in their case, state-socialism.”

Read “The Commie Who Controls the Economy From the Grave.” You need to know who Comrade Keynes was!

Update I (Dec. 5): Speaking of Republikeynsians, I heard Tony Blankley, editor of the Washington Times, tell the Obama Headquarters@Hardball, care of Chris Matthews, that the government must spend inordinate amounts of money. Demand has fallen. When consumers stop spending (at last!), urged Blankley, the government must step in and fill the gap; in other words spend like the consumer would have spent had he had the money, but since he can’t spend what he doesn’t have, the government must step in and spend what it doesn’t have.

This glut; this orgy of idiocy, reminds me of a Fellini film, I think it was, where the heroes decide to get together and eat themselves to death. Anyone old enough to remember its name?

This won’t keep the nausea at bay, but I recommend reading “Keynes and the Reds” by historian Ralph Raico. More examples of takiya à la socialism–the myths Keynes’s acolytes have spun around him. His theories ought to have been sufficient to discredit him.

Update II (Dec. 9): In case readers have disobeyed me and failed to read Raico’s “Keynes and the Reds, here is an excerpt:

“…it is commonly held, Keynes was a sincere, indeed, exemplary, believer in the free society. If he differed from the classical liberals in some obvious and important ways, it was simply because he tried to update the essential liberal idea to suit the economic conditions of a new age.”

“But if Keynes was such a model champion of the free society, how can we account for his peculiar comments, in 1933, endorsing, though with reservations, the social “experiments” that were going on at the time in Italy, Germany, and Russia? And what about his strange introduction to the 1936 German translation of the General Theory, where he writes that his approach to economic policy is much better suited to a totalitarian state such as that run by the Nazis than, for instance, to Britain?” …

“A notable feature of Keynes’s praise of the Soviet system is its total lack of any economic analysis. Keynes appears blithely unaware that there might exist a problem of rational economic calculation under socialism, as outlined a year earlier in a volume edited by F. A. Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning, which featured the seminal 1920 essay by Ludwig von Mises, ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.'”

“Economists had been debating this question for years. Yet all that concerns Keynes is the excitement of the great experiment, the awe-inspiring scope of the social changes occurring in Soviet Russia under the direction of those ‘disinterested administrators.'”

“This brings to mind Karl Brunner’s comment on Keynes’s notions of social reform: ‘One would hardly guess from the material of the essays that a social scientist, even economist, had written [them]. Any social dreamer of the intelligentsia could have produced them. Crucial questions are never faced or explored.'”

Read the complete essay “Keynes and the Reds, and report back.

Poll Shows Americans Buy Obama Bull

Barack Obama, Iraq, The Zeitgeist, War

“Fifty-five percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday back the president-elect when it comes to reducing the number of American combat troops in Iraq and increasing the number in Afghanistan.

“The reason is simple,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “The war in Iraq is very unpopular, while a majority support the war in Afghanistan.”

This seems to bear out what I conjectured sometime ago in “A War To Call His Own”:

“Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own. In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.”

'Hindus, Jews, And Jihad Terror in Mumbai'

Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

“Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements. Urging a ‘full struggle’ against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress, he stated:

We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.”

SO WRITES ANDY BOSTOM AT THE AMERICAN THINKER. The article, “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai,” fills in the lacunae left by the media, which “offered no speculation about Islamic Jew hatred as an obvious potential motivation for the transparently selective attack on Mumbai’s Chabad House — a focal point symbol of the miniscule [sic] Jewish community of 5000 (or 0.03%) in a city of some 15 million inhabitants. More egregiously, this neglect of any hateful Islamic motivations for the targeted murder of such innocent Jews — including a young Lubavitcher Rabbi and his wife — was accompanied by consistently dehumanizing and demeaning references to these victims as ‘Ultra-Orthodox,’ and their entirely false characterization as ‘missionaries.'”

MOST POIGNANT WERE THE ASPIRATIONS OF “Sir Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958), the preeminent historian of Mughal India,” who “wrote admiringly of what the Jews of Palestine had accomplished once liberated from the yoke of jihad-imposed Islamic Law. The implication was clear that he harbored similar hopes for his own people, the Hindus of India, and those of their Muslim neighbors willing to abandon the supremacist, discriminatory, and backward mandates of Islam”:

Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule. (See Kinglake’s graphic description). Today Jewish rule has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the modern civilised life have been made available in this little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there from the countries ruled by the Shariat [Sharia; Islamic Law]. This is the lesson for the living history.

The complete article is “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai.”