VDARE.com’s Allan Wall sums up the reprehensible spectacle of the GOP presidential candidates appearing on the “Spanish-language network Univision.”
Wall lauds Tom Tancredo for being the only one to have refused to partake in the Hispanic, special interests circus. How right he is. And how un-presidential the seven dwarfs looked, baffled faces strained in an effort to comprehend the language:
[OPEN QUOTES]
“The fact that only Tancredo understood that pandering was a bad idea tells us more about the state of the GOP than it does about Tom Tancredo. As he explained the day before the forum:
‘It is the law that to become a naturalized citizen of this country you must have knowledge and understanding of English, including a basic ability to read, write, and speak the language. So what may I ask are our presidential candidates doing participating in a Spanish speaking debate? Bilingualism is a great asset for any individual, but it has perilous consequences for a nation. As such, a Spanish debate has no place in a presidential campaign.’ [Tancredo: GOP Candidates ‘Pandering’ At Spanish-Language Debate The Denver Channel.Com Dec. 8th, 2007]
The questions were loaded, of course. The first was about ‘declining support among Hispanics for Republicans.’
Mike Huckabee blamed Republicans for not pandering enough:
‘If the Republicans only got 30 percent of the vote, somehow we didn’t do a very good job of communicating that that’s what we would provide in terms of opportunity and fairness.’
McCain blamed ‘the rhetoric that many Hispanics hear about illegal immigration’ which ‘makes some of them believe that we are not in favor nor seek the support of the Hispanic citizens in this country.’
Candidates were also asked if they were ‘taking a risk’ by appearing at the forum. That’s funny, it took more guts for Tancredo to stay away from the event than for them to attend it.
Mitt Romney called for pandering: ‘Republicans are going to come and speak to Hispanic Americans in the language they understand best, so we can get their votes and they can understand that we are the party of strength and the party of freedom.’
Rudy Giuliani said that ‘Hispanic Americans are Americans, just as much as all other Americans. They have the same values, the same interests.’
(Well, if that’s true, why pander to them? Why have a special forum for them, translated into a foreign language?)
Then Huckabee got going again, and said that if he had refused to appear on stage ‘It would insult every voter in the country.’
Huh?
The Huckster even thanked his hosts for allowing him to grovel: ‘And I want to say thanks for letting us have this audience on Univision.’
On the question of Official English, McCain said he wanted English used by all Americans.
(So why was he at this Spanish language forum then?)
Ron Paul said all federal business should be in English, but made a weird pop psychology diagnosis: ‘I sometimes think that those who attack bilingualism sometimes are jealous, and we feel inferior, because we’re not capable.’
(Why did he say that?)
The GOP candidates were asked what should be done with the illegal aliens in the country.
Giuliani said we should first get control of the border, then get a tamper-proof ID for the illegals who are in the country (amnesty, in other words). The only people Giuliani would kick out would be the people who don’t show up to claim their amnesty!
Huckabee too, though he denied it, seems to support a form of amnesty as long as the illegals go home first. And he wants a guest worker program which is fast and easy to get into. The former Arkansas governor drew applause when he trotted out a totally irrelevant credit card analogy:
‘If you can get an American Express card in two weeks, it shouldn’t take seven years to get a work permit to come to this country in order to work on a farm. So if our government is incapable of making that process in that length of time, then we should do it in a way to outsource it.’
‘Outsource it’? To whom? To the government of Mexico—for whom Huckabee arranged the installation of a Mexican consulate in Little Rock?
Then Huckabee lapsed into a ‘compassion’ riff inevitably leading to Big Government solutions:
‘When people come to this country, they shouldn’t fear. They shouldn’t live in hiding. They ought to have their heads up, because the one thing about being an American is, we believe every person ought to have his or her head up and proud, and nobody should have to be in hiding because they’re illegal when our government ought to make it so that people can reasonably come here in a legal fashion.’
Increasingly, this guy reminds me of George W. Bush back in 2000.
Which is not good.
Why not just legalize the illegal aliens, Thompson and Romney were asked and both pointed out that it was unfair to immigrants who had gone through the legal process. Duncan Hunter correctly stated that an amnesty would encourage more illegal immigration. McCain tried to cover all the bases, talking about border security, Hispanic anchor baby soldiers in Iraq, and love and compassion. Mitt Romney’s hiring of a company that used illegal workers was brought up, and the former Massachusetts governor used it to call for an employment verification system.
Anchor babies were brought up. Thompson was asked the loaded question: “Do these children have the right not to be separated from their parents?”
Thompson could have responded that every day American citizen children are separated from their citizen parents, due to work, business, travel, incarceration and military service abroad. So why do we hear more sob stories about the illegal alien deportees and their children?”
[SNIP]
There’s more from this pukefest, interspersed with Wall’s excellent acerbic commentary. Read it.
Values Vulgarizers
Foreign Policy, Individual Rights, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, The West
One of our regular contributors here on Barely a Blog makes an uncharacteristically incoherent comment on his own blog:
“…on the subject of the war against civilization …Mercer gets it (she just wants us to fight it Marquis of Queensbury rules with our foot in a bucket.)”
Can he be serious? Apparently. Wait for this: Accolades for offering a strident defense of the West go to the prototypical open-borders Objectivist, whose positions are generally indistinguishable from those of the neoconservatives.
Philosophical incoherence at its best.
But it’s predictable. In my commentary over the years—cultural and political—I’ve mounted a systematic defense of Western values as I see them. This includes—gasp!—defending the distinctly Western character of the US (and the West), something the neocons and the Objectivists who ape them daren’t do.
The neocons and their Objectivist friends, on the other hand, have cheered the unprovoked bloodletting in Iraq and have deceptively framed as individual rights the “values” the US is planting in that country’s blood-soaked soil.
Because of their incremental convergence over the decades with the liberal left, this axis has, to all intents and purposes, embraced “equality” as a value for which they’re prepared to drag the country kicking and screaming to war.
Iraq is a colossal bit of social engineering. To the fact that the US is not defending individual rights in Iraq—not by any stretch of the imagination—add the matter of jurisdiction. A constitutional American government has no right to use the property of Americans to free people around the world. The Iraqi people, moreover, did not sanction the American government’s faith-based democratic initiative. These are the fictions for which neocons and their Objectivist tagalongs are willing to kill and have others killed.
Nation building and assorted mindless meddling have also found a place within this “philosophy.”
So what is my apparently constricting prescription? First, bring the armed forces home, so they can protect this country, not Kosovo, Korea, and Kurdistan. Next, scale back mass immigration, legal and illegal. Defending negative liberties at home is more effective and less violative than waging aimless, unwinnable, rights-sundering wars.
As anyone who’s followed my writing over the years knows, I most certainly support fighting and winning just wars. (The position I deride in this post equates unjust war with a defense of the civilization—a position too dumb and evil for words.) My stance is congruent with individual and national sovereignty, constitutional principles, and just war ethics.
Again, the prototypical warring Objectivist our misguided friend praises is indistinguishable from a neoconservative. He is tough on crime, in general (a good thing), big on war crimes (a bad thing), and even bigger on the idea of inviting the Third Word to our shores. All of which the left supports. There’s a reason the media has grown fond of the neocon/Objectivist/Catoite hybrid.
In the age of unreason, violence-for-values verbiage defeats my own coherent defense of the West. Atavism trumps reason, because it appeals to primitive emotions.
This is the vulgarization of values.
Updated: Are Objectivists Cultural Philistines?
Democracy, Music, Objectivism, Technology, The West, The Zeitgeist
When it comes to culture, too many Objectivists display quite a bit of philistinism. For example, from their publications one is led to believe that the Superman/Spider-man genre of film is somehow the pinnacle of Western cinematic accomplishment, philosophically and stylistically. Or at least, this is the impression they give, perhaps unintentionally.
In her appreciation of music, Ayn Rand was undeniably very limited. She took mainly to Rachmaninoff. So what? Her imperfections are not the point. Ayn Rand was enough of an innovator to have her eccentricities. The point, rather, is the cult-like conduct of her acolytes—to religiously assimilate the peculiarities and tics of another is to relinquish one’s judgment, and learning curve, to say nothing of one’s individuality. Monkeys mimic.
Nevertheless, Objectivists fetishize Rachmaninoff, and try and make the case that classical music’s worth hinges on one representative of Russian Romanticism, rather than on very many giants from other places and periods.
Objectivist publications often feature large, glossy photos of tall American buildings. This rather hackneyed, crude imagery is meant to capture man’s heroic mastery of his environment. I’m an enthusiastic champion of man as master of the universe. But these displays are just too outsized, clunky and out-of-date.
Patriotism is all well and good, moreover, but realism, at least to this writer, is paramount. If Objectivists—and Americans in general—tuned into the world, they’d recognize that our once-great cities are looking rather shabby and old. I am told that America is no longer the place for the latest in architecture (that goes for free-market capitalism too. Here are more amazing buildings).
Sean, who’s at the pinnacle of the electrical engineering profession, always chuckles at the shiny technology shots in said publications—these are supposed to stand for innovation. The projects depicted are often statist rather than private. But even odder—and off—are the “heroic” images of the microchip assembly line. Don’t Objectivists understand that the assembly line is where the product designed by industry innovators is put together by factory workers?
An emphasis on the values of equality and representative mass society is increasingly central to the more militant among Objectivists and certainly to the neocons—values that are also America’s main export. Perhaps celebrating those low on the creativity ladder comports with this philosophical tenet.
Related post: Mitt’s Sincere Sermon
Update: You have to be a complete philistine not to know what the common usage of that word is: “philistinism” means uncultured. However, for the challenged, the word “cultural” appears in the title of the post. People wrote in claiming the concept referred to a “denial of ethics,” and that I was claiming Objectivists lacked in ethics. Ridiculous, considering I’m very much influenced by Ayn Rand’s ethics.
A post, moreover, that opens with a demonstration that its writer cannot use a dictionary is not going to be posted—if the writer doesn’t know what “philistinism” commonly denotes, and cannot check himself, then the chances his post is worth much are slim.
Related post: “The Values Vulgarizers“
Updated: Mitt’s Sincere Sermon
America, Christianity, Elections 2008, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Objectivism, Religion, The West, The Zeitgeist
I don’t think a commentator can credibly understand or expatiate upon America, in particular—and the West, in general—without reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Heck, one can’t appreciate the greatest composer of all times—Bach—without acknowledging the contribution of his muse—Christianity—to the glory of his music. Ditto for many other great artists.
This is why there’s a sterility and a lack of believability to the religious-hating aspects of Objectivism. As to Christopher Hitchens, he’s an ex-Trotskyite. Why would he understand America?
I say all this even though I am irreligious (although very Jewish in my thinking). America is undeniably and deeply religious.
Having no dog in the fight over Mitt’s Mormonism, I have to say, moreover, that listening to his speech about his faith was moving. Admittedly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have some odd ideas. Not so the Mormons I know; they are very fine people. And quite magnificent is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; it’s in fact the finest in the world.
As you can see, it’s impossible to untangle religion in the West and the glorious cultural contribution it has inspired in the faithful.
Particularly loathsome in their mocking commentary about Mitt’s sincere sermon were Keith Olbermann and his Washington-Post henchman—they compared Mitt to their idol, J. F. Kennedy, and found him lacking, to put it mildly. The two did, however, drive home how loathsome the liberal left can be.
Update: Jerri (listen to her great interviews) will enjoy this excerpt from the Hebrew Bible in the First Book Of Samuel. It’s one of the oldest, greatest, most forceful injunctions against the wickedness of centralized power. (Let me tell you, it’s so much better in the original Hebrew). How can one grasp the ancient quest for liberty without proper reverence to this tradition and its revelational component? Note that the king, warns G-d, will take a tenth of the people’s wealth. If only! Send us such a king who will enslave us to the tune of a tenth only!
1 Samuel 8
Israel Asks for a King
1 When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as judges for Israel. 2 The name of his firstborn was Joel and the name of his second was Abijah, and they served at Beersheba. 3 But his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice.
4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint a king to lead [a] us, such as all the other nations have.”
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. 7 And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle [b] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.”