Update V: Paul WINS Straw Poll At CPAC (‘Beltway Politburo Worried’)

Conservatism, Elections, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, Ron Paul

Rep. Ron Paul has won the straw poll at the 2010 CPAC convention, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Out with the regimists!

This is an informal poll; it’s not a well-controlled one. Out of 10,000 conference attendees, approximately 2500, very motivated Paulites voted, which means that they might have slanted the outcomes. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the Tea Party element has assumed control of the conservative movement.

Will they see to it that the bums and their statist sycophants—the Bill Bennetts, Ann Coulters, Rush Limbaughs of the world—are tossed out and replaced with strict Constitutionalists such as Peter Schiff and Rand Paul?

Perhaps as the republic tanks, the people are finally rising…

Update I: Glenn Beck commences the keynote address, and declares: “The Republicans have not had that come-to-Jesus moment.” And: “I am a Republican and I have a problem”—this moment of GOP contrition and recognitions has not transpired, says Beck.

About the Republicans’ quest for that Big Tent: “What is this, a circus?”

My version: “If the Republicans don’t stop their love affair with idiots, it’s not a bigger tent they’ll be seeking, but a giant tin-foil hat.”

At this stage, Beck has descended into America boosterism. The evening is young. Let us hope he does not waste the opportunity to substantially bash the GOP and zero in on economics, monetary policy; in other words, deliver some Paul pearls.

Glenn: “To restore America, we need less Marx and more Madison.”

Praises Calvin Coolidge.

Finally a fleeting Beck Breakthrough: “We don’t need to export democracy; the best example to the world is to lead by example.” But short lived. He fails to return to this vital point.

Beck then makes a huge historical and philosophical faux pas reading the progressive Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” as if hers were the richly textured words of a Thomas Jefferson. Lazarus was a progressive interloper, whose sonnet ushered in all the maxims of mass immigration we’ve come to know.

Update II: Beck’s address was not the stuff of tea parties. He hit all those soaring notes the sentimental yentas on his show and in his audiences love to hear. But as for substance: he gets an “F.”

Update III: Back to Paul. ABC leads with the news that “Conservatives [Have Picked]: Ron Paul For President In 2012.”

Update IV (Feb. 21): Hours after we reported it here on BAB, CNN joins a growing chorus among MSM in acknowledging That This Is News: “Rep. Ron Paul surprise winner of CPAC presidential straw poll.” Whoever asserted that the “the 74-year old libertarian hero” would be in his 80s in two years was sprouting nonsense on stilts. Paul will be young enough to dismantle whole departments; dismiss large sections of the oink sector, and allow us all to begin breathing life into the economy again.

Update V (Feb 22): “The small Beltway Politburo that runs CPAC is worried,” writes Tom Tancredo at WND.COM:

the Beltway Politburo strives to demonstrate their superior cleverness by undermining the grass-roots consensus. On two key issues, CPAC offered detours and blind alleys, not leadership…
Whereas grass-roots conservatives and millions of 912 patriots – along with 80 percent of the American people – understand the need for border security as a precondition for immigration reform, CPAC board member Grover Norquist is busy launching a new project in support of the Obama administration’s plan to grant another amnesty to 20 million illegal aliens. Neither border control nor immigration enforcement was included as a topic for any of the CPAC general sessions.

Update III: Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable

Democracy, Education, Elections, English, Etiquette, Family, Intelligence, Liberty, Propaganda

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM weekly column, “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable”:

“Don’t ask why the ‘news’ is all aflutter for Meghan McCain, but earlier in February, she issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, on a forum – ABC’s ‘The View’ – that is a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity:

The Tea Party Movement was ‘innately racist,’ Meghan said. This was why “young people were turned off by the movement.” And , in her most grating Valley-Girl inflection: ‘I’m sorry—revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English.’

The rude reference was to Tom Tancredo’s observation that people ‘who cannot spell the word vote or say it in English’ are determining elections in America.

The former congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was on to something. The Founding Founders decided in their wisdom that only propertied males would vote. To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than ‘Meghaan.’ As to the other limitation: The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics – and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. And all too well did the founder know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.

But what would ‘Meghaan,’ a member of the Millennial generation, know about a group of truly great revolutionaries whose average age, in 1776, was 44?

“The ‘Meghaan’ Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason.” Yes, ‘Meghan is a member of a studied cohort, born between 1980 and 2001.” Read more about these “needy and narcissistic dullards.”

The column is “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Feb. 19): To the critic hereunder: The column references “The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work,” an article that distills the conclusions of a book packed with data. The method of the column: go from the particular to the general; go from one colorful case everyone knows and move to the general.

Update II: “Thomas” below is yet another instructive case study on the Millennials, their demeanor and capabilities. Note the run-on, ungrammatical, misspelled, incoherent sentences. T. has not been taught to write a simple sentence with a subject, a verb and the attendant clauses. Not his fault, I guess, but I know many self-taught individuals who’ve made up for the deficiencies of their teachers just fine.

He’s arrogant and insulting; is big on the ad hominem and the non sequiturs; but incapable of putting forth an argument. An example of a non sequiturs hereunder: I should be picking on another generation, he says. Maybe, but this column is about his generation (I presume). The the fact that another generation is problematic doesn’t invalidate a critique of the Millennials. See what I mean by a non sequituir?

My column argued that, for the most, not his but my generation has invented and is perfecting the gadgets he cannot do without, yet he repeats the following fallacy: The twitterering twits are prescient and streaks ahead of us, their parents.

In fairness to the poor creature, I have received many such letters in my career. They tend to be from younger people, but not always.

Finally, another typical sign of grandiosity: He has not read the posting policy on this blog. Since rules are not for his ilk, he does not dare limit the reader’s exposure to this word salad of his. A good teacher would have red inked this letter, and taught the young man to say what he is struggling to say in one short paragraph.

As you can imagine, there are a dozen more insulting messages demanding space on this, my private property. The insults, moreover, evince the utter absence of intellectual curiosity—T. had not read any of my writings or my bio, so has cheerily lumped me with all of Hannity’s handmaidens.

Update III (Feb. 22): Robert’s point I’m afraid is simplistic; and certainly not the thrust of my article. Hint: Most everything I direct my cultural commentary at, and this column is no exception, can be summed up thus: ORDERED LIBERTY. Ordered liberty is about hierarchy. Read “THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES.” Perhaps the larger philosophical point of everything cultural I write will become clearer.

Updated: 'Take My Pound Of Flesh & Sleep Well'

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Individual Rights, Private Property, Taxation, Terrorism, The State

So wrote Joseph Stack, the pilot of a Piper Cherokee plane, before he crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices.

What transpires when a government says to a desperate citizen, vaguely conscious of his natural rights, “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide”?

What transpires when times get particularly tough. And they just take and take and take what’s not theirs to take. So Joseph Stack said, “Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different …”

However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.

The founders intended for government to safeguard the natural rights of Americans. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on their property and, by extension, on their lives. Joseph Stack took his, in the hope of taking out some of them.

More here.

Update: Repetition is a theme on this blog. So I will cut-and-paste my last reply to the exact same moral equivalence the provocative, if repetitive, Myron has already advanced. How about coming at me with a new angle? I’m being made to go around in circles. Here goes from our last debate about anti-state violence:

MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh, for example, committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government with the causes of the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” is akin to conflating MY causes with those of Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, again the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin.”

What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that?

Stack is justified in his anger against the shakedown agency and its agents who partake in pillaging their countrymen. He’s wrong to try and kill them. I feel so lame saying this, but it’s the safe thing to say. Incidentally, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was more sympathetic than Fox’s statists on steroids.