Category Archives: Conservatism

UPDATE IV: Bachmann: Bling For Ron Paul? (Paul Wins Straw Poll )

Conservatism, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Politics, Private Property, Republicans, Sarah Palin

The following is from my “Bachmann: Bling For Ron Paul?,” now on WND.COM:

“A day after the GOP debate in New Hampshire, mainstream media awoke to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s undeniable abilities and magnetism. Before June 13, this mummified lot had turned to Meghan McCain and Chris Matthews for information about the congresswoman from Minnesota. …

Rep. Bachmann catapulted to fame late in 2008. Yet not a thing was said in the muck-raking media—Republican included—about her background. Just imagine what publicity Debbie Wasserman Schultz (or Sarah Palin) would receive had she provided foster care to 23 children in addition to raising five of her own!

Bachmann, moreover, earned a Master of Laws in tax law from the William & Mary Law School. (Women lawyers tend to flock to the less-taxing field of family law.) Not that you’d know it from the way she has been portrayed, but Bachmann is very clever. …

With a perfectly straight face, Lawrence O’Donnell, also of MSNBC (a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity), lapped up the sub-intelligent message issued by the “Snooki” of the commentariat: Michele Bachmann is “no better than a poor man’s Sarah Palin,” Meghan McCain announced. …

Americans inhabit a world of reality TV and other frivolity. To win the GOP nomination in this parallel universe, Ron Paul needs political bling—he will want the punch, pizazz and money bombs a Bachmann can provide. …

The complete column is “Bachmann: Bling For Ron Paul?,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (June 17): Just posted to Facebook:

My complete comment at WND: 1) Bachmann as tax attorney: people do what they need to so as to make a living: How many facebook, libertarian-leaning friends have I, a self-employed person, approved who work for the state? The state is, as Prof. Walter Block once put it, acting as a hostage-taker. The Sixteenth, as I put it, is “The Number of the Beast,” and Bachmann is forever tainted for having enforced the law.

2) However, I inhabit reality. Unlike many libertarians, I do believe in winning. We need to win if we want a future in this country. This is no time for robotic, tinny, go-by-the-book formulations and politics. 3) Bachmann under the tutelage of Paul would be a power-horse. You gotta be nuts not to reach for the closest thing to libertarian power we are likely to get. Having lived in “other” societies (check out my book to get a feel for that), I think I’m more passionate about getting to liberty than are people who were born to it, and are losing it bit-by-bit.

4) I’ve studies this woman since her appearance on the scene: Bachmann has the equanimity and force of a male. Her “manly” mind comes packaged in the frame of a well-bred, charming lady. This is America. Reality dictates that Paul needs “Bling.” He should form what will be a winning alliance.

UPDATE II: THIS IS NOT A BACKING OF THE BACHMANN BID. From Facebook, again, in reply to a friend who simply uses inaccurate language, in describing me as a backer of Bachmann’s presidential bid: I have never ever backed Bachmann’s presidential candidacy in my column or in my writing. The column is clear: I have backed a Paul-Bachmann ticket: “the GOP’s winning ticket: Ron Paul for commander in chief; Michele Bachmann as second-in-command.”

UPDATE III: JUDGE NAP. Via Austin Petersen on Facebook:

If Ron Paul were to win the GOP presidential nomination, there’s a chance he wouldn’t have to worry about geographical balance on his ticket. Paul, a Texas congressman and critic of the Federal Reserve, mentioned a former New Jersey judge and current Fox News talk show host — Andrew Napolitano — as a potential running mate, in an interview with TheStreet’s Alix Steel in Washington this week. Paul, though, did say he hadn’t “thought it through.”

You do know that this presidential pairing would advocate open borders. Or simply make laissez-faire immigration official.

UPDATE IV (June 18): The reader in the Comments section wrote this, with respect to my Update above (Judge Nap):

[Paul and Napolitano] would not be doing in the executive branch would be as important (or more so) as what they would be doing, specifically allowing the states to deal with these problems and not providing intrusive, tyrannical top cover for those who profit from these abominations.

Wrong—at least as far as the Judge goes. He has repeatedly claimed that immigration is within the constitutional purview of the federal government. This has been his constitutional argument against just about anything the states are doing to defend their beleaguered citizens. Yet the Judge has also advanced the anarchist’s more-congruent argument: any person in the world has the absolute right to venture wherever, whenever. You can’t have it both ways, or is this an effective intellectual strategy to rule out the legitimacy of any response to the ongoing invasion of considerable swaths of private property along the border?

This libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of humanity to venture wherever, whenever. In a world where absolute private property rights were upheld, this might be a proposition, but not as the statist status quo stands now.

UPDATE V (June 19): Paul Wins Straw Poll.

Writes the campaign for liberty on behalf of Ron Paul:

“And the winner of the 2011 Republican Leadership Conference Straw Poll is . . . RON PAUL!

Those are the words – uttered just minutes ago here at the RLC in New Orleans – that are sending shockwaves throughout the entire GOP establishment.

And it was YOU that made it happen! I can’t tell you how much that means to me.

You see, at last year’s straw poll, establishment darling Mitt Romney defeated me by only one vote.

But this year I defeated my nearest rival by more than 200 votes!

That means the establishment can no longer deny the fact that there is widespread grassroots support within the GOP for a return to constitutional government.”

If you’re in it for winning, Rep. Paul, it’s time to get some of that Bachmann bling, with which to broaden the base.

You can read my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” on Kindle now. The print copy is available both from Amazon and from the Publisher. Hurry: Publisher is currently offering free shipping, including to our readers in South Africa. To purchase, click on the “Buy From StairwayPress” Button.

The French Vs. The American Revolution

Ann Coulter, Conservatism, Democracy, Europe, History, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Ann Coulter’s point (in her book Demonic, apparently), as to the difference between the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution and the American Revolution is important, although neither new nor original. The “Revolution in France” is how the great Edmund Burke referred to the French Revolution. Burke believed that replacing monarchy with (a murderous) morobcracy was fundamentally, well, unFrench.

I have not seen Ms. Coulter’s citations. I don’t read her books (other than Treason, a book that did more than follow the tired theme, “liberals bad; conservatives good). Still, it would be interesting to see who Ms. Coulter cited in support of her recycled thesis.

Some of the sources I cite, in addition to Burke, are in “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara” (October, 2010):

“… one rarely hears Burke mentioned in American public discourse, yet my countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious ‘Revolution in France’ …
‘Even Thomas Jefferson seems not to have grasped at first how different the French and American Revolutions were. The confusion continues today. Paine belongs to the Che Guevara ascendancy, which admires nothing unless a good dose of murder is present. There are American scholars, however, like Peter Stanlis, and Francis Canavan, who appreciate the utter consistency of Burke’s outlook with the main tendencies of American civilization. Burke said the French Revolution was murderous and would have terrible consequences. He was borne out, not only by the bloody course of the Revolution itself, but by the Communist and Nazi menaces, which drew their inspiration from and surpassed in their wickedness, the pathology of Revolutionary France. The USA played a huge part in defeating these modern despotisms, and modern France very little.”

Conservative Hollywood Hooey?

Conservatism, Gender, Hollywood, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist

The “case that Hollywood is liberal” is hardly novel or new, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg observes about Ben Shapiro’s book “Primetime Propaganda.” I’m not even sure that getting “a whole bunch of liberal Hollywood muckety mucks to confess their very liberal agenda” serves to out these shameless idiots.

Does Shapiro get at the core of the problem?

One aspect is that, as I wrote, “Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.”

However, there’s more to it. Does Shapiro enunciate the fact that on a meta-level, Hollywood’s increasingly impoverished scripts, with few exceptions, have indeed created a parallel reality, one that is increasingly reflected in real life (say, in the workplace)?

*Gender junk: Woman is brawny, brainy, and beautiful; man is a buffoon. An 80-pound waif manages to wallop a 200-pound gangster with no punctures to the silicone sacks. Her hulking cop partner trots after Great Woman obediently, and is forced to endanger his life to compensate for her lack of physical prowess in police work, firefighting, etc. As in “The Killing,” normalized is the dysfunctional life of the anemic, morose midget of a female detective, while her decent male partner, who ought to be her boss, is cast as the out-of-place brute.

*Junk Science: Take your pick. The choice is endless, from the multiple personality disorder falsehood, to the global-warming canard and the root-causes-of-terrorism rot, to the “diseasing” of all aspects of evil.

Who can forget James Cameron, who having “worked extensively with robot submarines,” imagined he could help the film directors of BP to plug the oil plume? Cameron’s plan included that liquid metal robot from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

*Good Government must always temper bad business.

*The canonization of kids and critters. In Hollywood’s case, America’s kids, who’ve never been dumber, are deified. The depiction of the natural world is a cartoon, festooned with errors and ignorance and plain delusions.

This Idiocracy was at work, I believe, in the film “Rio,” in which parrots, who resemble only humans and primates in their unique, brainy ability to manipulate objects with their adorable, human like digits—are depicted as having the claw-configuration of a common bird. Here my T. Cup is manipulating a toy block and reading Reisman’s Capitalism. (T. Cup has since grown his flight feathers and acquired 30 words, including sentences used in context, a feat Hollywood types would find hard to accomplish.)

Such was the ignorance of those who put this film together (and they call conservatives stupid?). Hollywood may mirror the cretinism of America at large, only many times amplified.

*General affirmation of slut and celebrity.

Alas, judging from their Bio information, too many Facebook friends who call themselves conservatives or libertarians profess to favoring movie and TV programing that does all of the above. Other than their penchant for FoxNews, the programing these Facebook friends favor and support is the most perverse of Hollywood programing (in terms of some of the parameters above).

My impression is that unless a protagonist is against G-d or for abortion, conservatives are culturally deaf to the piffle spewed by Hollywood pea brains. What’s more, conservatives are obsessed with Hollywood. If they were serious, they’d write Hollywood off—stop writing about these phony fools, begging them to grace their shows and panels, and simply withhold buying power by not purchasing/patronizing Hollywood’s crappy cultural products.

More later.

UPDATED: Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed’ (More Gloom)

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Democrats, Fascism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Paleoconservatism, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

The following excerpt is from “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” my new WND.COM column:

“Last week, this column explained the divide between Americans and their ‘Overlords Who Art in D.C.’ I asked that you quit invoking words too weak to describe that divide. ‘Disconnect,’ ‘disrespect’: These are soft designations; they don’t begin to bridge the moat that separates you from your sovereigns.

Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and the government that literally has them by the genitals is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.

If you’re a tax payer — at least 50 percent of Americans are tax consumers — you are the Beltway’s bitch.

So stop beseeching sinecured statists for ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ They will never know what it’s like to slum it in your neighborhoods. They’ll never experience the effects of inflation and rising prices as you will; they’ve voted themselves salaries twice as high as yours and pensions in perpetuity. You’re paying.

Think of yourself as a servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows. That’s how I felt as I drove through the suburbs of Northern Virginia, in October of this year. I saw what Peggy Noonan lushly described in her Wall Street Journal column, excerpted by John Derbyshire in his full and fair assessment of the tottering American experiment, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism …

The complete column is “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” now on WND.COM.

Avail yourself of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, on Kindle.

Merry Xmas to all,
ILANA

UPDATE (Dec. 25): “IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME” (as the Beatles lyrics go). The Powers that Be thought “Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim” (and also happens to have “the equivalent of a pacemaker”), needed a reminder of her ordeal.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.
“I turned to the police officer and said, ‘I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'” and they said, ‘No, you have to do this,'” she said.
Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.
“I told them, ‘No, I’m not going to have my breasts felt,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are,'” said Hirschkind.
When Hirschkind refused, she says that “the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.”
An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Hey, what do you know: A noisy, irate, flying public has changed the behavior of their sovereigns not a whit. Who would have thunk? (See “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed.”)

And what do memebers of the sheep herd say about a middle aged, ill American lady being mauled by rabid TSA dogs?

“I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it,” said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

It matters not a bit that “less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down.” This practice is a matter of policy, not happenstance. Theoretically, everyone could be molested, very many are. No freedom loving individual should be consoled by the repulsive, “rare-occurrence” excuse.