You’ll have to read the first to appreciate the second, as they are part of a conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe, Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”
Under discussion is the subject of Professor O’Keeffe’s latest book, “Edmund Burke.”
One of the questions I asked Dennis was “Why is it that one rarely hears Edmund Burke mentioned in American public discourse, yet my countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke (‘the greatest Irishman who ever lived’) for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious ‘Revolution in France’?”
Indeed, although neglected, Edmund Burke’s thinking is central to American—and any other—ordered liberty.
Be sure to read the two columns, which you can follow from Barely a Blog to WND.COM.
It was interesting to hear Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, two oft-closeted establishment Republicans, use the pronoun “we” in discussing the Republicans and their “Pledge to America.” The Repbulicans are the team to which the two belong. Team Republican has issued a paltry pledge that did not displease La Coulter or Hannity.
The Preamble to The Pledge is quite nice, except that it seems sacrilegious for dirty dogs such as the Republicans to suddenly speak up about first principles they’ve seldom respected—original intent, the Tenth Amendment, etc.
“America is more than a country” states the pledge. Indeed. But it is also a community of souls once linked by a common history, heroes and traditions—a community rapidly being dissolved by central planners.
While the Republicans pay homage to the propositional nation (America as an idea), a cursory read tells me that their commitment to the flesh-and-blood American community remains pretty pitiful.
UPDATE I (Sept. 24): Have the Pledge makers promised to repeal “the new Paycheck Fairness Act passed by the House 256 to 162”? “The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society,” writes Pat Buchanan in a brilliant column, “Equality or Freedom,” on pay parity being pursued by the Obama administration.
If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.
UPDATE II: The Pledge is festooned with huge, “patriotic” images. To me that’s very reassuring—as reassuring as the promise by these power-hungry creeps to “roll back government spending to prestimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone.” Wow, $100 billion in a debt of $110 trillion! Now that’s bold. Basically the Republicans, who still don’t get it, are promising to return to 2008-level spending.
Notice all the legally safe, adjectival ejaculate used by these cobra heads to qualify their promises: “common-sense limits on the growth of government.” You know that to the Coulter and Hannity Republican, limiting any accretion in the military-media-congressional-industrial complex is tantamount to treason. “National security” (minus borders) is a big stick with which they like to beat their Democratic opponents. It’s the only stick they have, given their statist record.
Indeed, the Republikeynesians will “impose a net hiring freeze on non-security federal employees and ensure that the public sector no longer grows at the expense of the private sector.”
Republicans are tinkering on the margins, as Ron Paul has suggested, with no commitment to say which departments will be eliminated; or to tackle the philosophy of government, etc.
UPDATE III: “Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either ‘neoconservative welfare-warfare statists or global social democrats,’ or national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and a support for the very welfare infrastructure that is at the root of the social rot they decry.”—ILANA MERCER
Except for one republican (for he is not a Republican). Run Ron, run.
Check out this new production, “I want Your Money,” touted on Fox News. It opens with Stephen Moore, of the War street Journal, pronouncing the stimulus a hoax. But Moore is a member of America’s failed philosopher kings who has consistently failed to predict anything. This same snake-oil merchant was all for Keynesian tinkering before he turned against it, and then only on purely utilitarain grounds (“it hasn’t worked”).
Moore’s book before last was titled “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer.” If that’s not an indictment, nothing is. “Bush’s bailout society” is an instantiation of the principles upon which “Bush’s ownership society” was founded: credit for those who are not creditworthy.
There are some nice Reagan quips in this trailer tease, though. Nice because they are rooted in rights, not in utility (what works for the hordes):
• There’s a word for redistributing the wealth, it’s called theft.
• We could say that they spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors because they are spending their own money (Moore would never talk openly about ownership).
Then Moore the moron pops up with this pearl: “It is fiscal child abuse,” the allusion being to spending for posterity.
Fuck the kids; I’m sick of them. I pay for their miseducation. They’re the reason my aspirin bottle has to be pried open with the jaws of life. Fuck ’em. From what I’ve seen they deserve to be sold into slavery. The state should not enslave me and mine. I don’t need “The kids” to justify my right to live free of subjugation.
The rest of the clip is crammed with Bush bitches and Newtered dogs superimposed upon the earnest Tea Party protest.
Clearly, this message is part of the Republican Party’s campaign of co-optation.
The following is taken from my new column, “Crazy Like A Fox,” now on WND.COM:
“From Cleveland, Ohio, Obama issued forth this week with renewed vigor. Media plaudits notwithstanding, the president’s words were either inane or simply insane.
An instance of “insane” was Obama’s professed fealty to a “lean and efficient government.” The trillion-dollar deficit man declared: “I believe government should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families, so long as those choices don’t hurt others.”
On the sly side was the president’s confession that he was propelled to run for president because for much of the last decade, a very specific governing philosophy had reigned about how America should work … The idea was that if we just had blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everyone else to fend for themselves that America would grow and America would prosper.
Evidently, Oprah’s backing and naked ambition had nothing to do with Barack Obama’s selfless ride to the nation’s rescue; it was the philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism, RIP.
Not for nothing did Ayn Rand call capitalism “the unknown ideal.” This ideal has not been practiced in the US for a very long time; it is a fable that George W. Bush was an unfettered capitalist.” …
UPDATED: Bush & Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Bush gave the economy its first stimulus, or “shot in the arm,” as he called it, in 2002. Like Obama, Bush believed with all his brutal little heart that consumption undergirds the American way of life and that any slack in consumption must be filled by government spending.
Bush gave us the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by which Bush federalized corporate law, and ensured that the SEC’s politically voracious prosecutors were able to pursue any business executive as long as a lay jury could be convinced the unfortunate chap intended to mislead or stiff shareholders. The same “capitalism” saw the detestable Deciderpass an enormous prescription drug entitlement program, Medicare Part D, and “No Child Left Behind,” which further federalized education and increased the reach and size of the federal government. Let us not forget the “Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)” of 2008, which showed the way for Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009.
