I would imagine that to practice the Socratic Method, a man must possess a curious mind and be less of an egotist, attributes the intellectually incurious Mr. O’Reilly lacks.
In any case, “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest” is a wonderful turn of phrase.
Update: I see we’ve been visited by one of the many fans of the big-government, interventionist neoconservative Bill O’Reilly. Did I miss that lot! This from “DUMB AND DIRTY NEOCON ARTISTS”:
Like any leftist, neocons support the meddlesome expansion of the “Managerial State” at home. Somewhat at odds with many liberals, the neocons want to take the same intrusive crusade abroad. This is what defines Bush’s neoconservative administration: social engineering both at home and abroad.
In his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck touched today on the differences between Republican and Democrat progressives vis-a-vis foreign policy. This was the closest Beck, the unambiguously pro-war, military-booster came to examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via war) the founders would have abhorred.
“The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.”
Militias are what the founders bequeathed, not mammoth standing armies.
Beck came close to articulating what readers of this space have been reading and imbibing for years. Warring for Democracy is the Republicans’ homage to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism; nation-building abroad is how the Democrats prefer to honor his “legacy.”
Beck quotes Thomas Jefferson a lot, as he should. But ideological wars like Iraq, unequivocally backed by Beck, belong to the Jacobin—not Jeffersonian—tradition.
I thought I heard Beck quote the 1821 words of secretary of state John Quincy Adams (the 2nd part of the program is not yet on YouTube): “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
If not Adams, Beck recited another founder’s exhortation against empire.
The next step for Beck is to reject the recreational wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan with the support of his ilk, and espouse a foreign policy compatible with limited authority and republican virtues. You can’t embrace small government at home and big government abroad. The last Republicans are in the habit of euphemizing as a “strong national defense.”
The beauty of Beck is in his goodness. The fact that at times he says remarkably confused things doesn’t change this.
Here are some glaring mistakes Beck made in today’s program. (Continued below.)
He declared that if Americans knew about the Progressives and their creeping, clandestine agenda, they’d reject it.
It all goes back to immigration, mis-education; the changing face of America, and general rot. A few guns and G-d types may reject the “conservative socialism” (progressivism) in which we are mired based on a visceral feel for the principles of the founding. But most Americans I talk to are clueless—and even hostile to the founding ideas. So let Glenn not presume that progressivism is not in the DNA of a changing America. Once the country is 50 percent Third World, Glenn might as well be talking to the hand.
LOST IN TRANSLATION. After bemoaning how Progressives, having infiltrated America’s institutions, have toiled to alter the meaning of the Constitution, Glenn proposed his own revisionism: rewrite the Federalist Papers so that Americans, whom Glenn insist are never dumb, can understand these brilliant, but difficult, debates.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’ That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be ‘a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.'”
WE KNOW that Attorney General Martha Coakley, who lost Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, is at the very least philosophically corrupt. But what about the said omissions of those who’re supposed to check the “lady” and her posse? I mean the roving citizen journalists, endeavoring to expose her?
I watched the hereunder YouTube clip twice. Perhaps I missed something but, as far as I could see (and hear), nowhere did the “journalist” filming the Coakley goons’ crass conduct articulate for her viewers why they ought to be furious at the conduct of these fascistic public servants.
WATCH the clip. What lessons for citizens does it impart? How does this YouTube snippet help, or even convey, the cause of liberty? The answers to these questions: “Nada” to the first; “it doesn’t” to the second. Not unless you consider being polite and not calling journalists Nazis as contributions to liberty and freedom.
Goons say to journalist, “You are on private property.” Journalist replies softly, “We want some questions answered,” “Why so rude?,” and, “We’re on a public sidewalk.”
Unless “journalist” is able to append a principled tag to her gritty clip, the Democrat mafia appears merely impolite.
THE SHORT, SWEET instructive reply to these fattened fascists would have been this: “You are NOT on private property but on public, taxpayer-funded property. You and Coakley are civil servants, beholden to the public who pays your way.”
What service do you perform as a putative journalist if you cannot convey the only philosophical truth the viewer ought to take away from this snippet? None, as I am sure a Democrat journalist could easily film similar infractions.
All this journalist has done is add a tit to the other side’s tat.
But to take instruction, one has to have courage and humility. Dream on, ilana.
Update (Jan. 24): Say the Democrat Party paid for the offices of this candidate. Is this property then accessible only to a select portion of the public? Was Coakley seeking to represent some constituents to the exclusion of others? At the very least, journalists ought to be able to pose such question, when a politician’s brown shirts turn them away from said premises on the grounds that the offices from which a candidate is operating are walled off from the individuals she is endevoring to represent.
“THE CONSTITUTION AND FREEDOM” is a series about the greatest political document ever written, the American Constitution. It is presented by the one and only Judge Andrew Napolitano on The FOX Nation, and is easily the most important broadcast in the checkered history of American television.
