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by Christopher Chantrill
July 23, 2008 at 4:24 pm
IN HER LATEST article marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher takes out after the fake Obama world tour. Even Andrea Mitchell, she writes, realizes that Obama is faking it, faking press conferences when no media was actually there.
"Let me say something about the message management. He didnt have reporters with him, he didnt have a press pool, he didnt do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call fake interviews, because they are not interviews from a journalist[.]"
The problem is that the candidate is all symbolism and impressions, not grounded and critical.
This ties in with some mournful comment about the halcyon days of the universitybefore the PC era. Paul Greenberg writes about the extraordinary professors he studies under at Columbia, Missouri.
The remarkable thing about those teachers was not their scholarship, though theirs was indeed remarkable, but the immense care and patience - the tenderness almost - that they took with us students.
Of course, these professors were almost all liberal. But they wanted their students to know both sides of the story. In The New Criterion historian Alan Kors writes elegiacally of the sadnesss of todays university education.
The problem is that professors today are in a hurry. They have only four years to demolish the US-centric world-view of their students so they dont have time for scholarship and development of a critical mind. They must just push their agenda, every day.
The problem with this sort of thing is that, in the end, you end up hurting yourself, not your students. And the folks powering Sen. Barack Obamas fake world tour will find that out too, sooner or later.
Todays generation of liberals wont listen to conservatives, and wont give them the opportunity to contribute to the academic conversation. That means that the mistakes of todays generation of liberals will not be exposed until they have actually been enacted into law and into foreign policy.
We can see a preview of what is in store from the current energy flap. Its all very well to confidently predict a new Flood a century from now as global warming engulfs the planet. These prophecies may be right or they may be wrong. But what about the impact of $4.50 per gallon gasoline on working Americans right now? Our liberal friends seem not to have thought about tha. Indeed they seem not to care.
Conservatives have been worrying about it for a while. In part, we care because liberals have taught us to care.
So when the current liberal generation comes face to face with reality, whether in 2009 or 2013, it aint gonna be pretty.
Sphere: Related Content | | printChristopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.
E. G. West, Education and the State
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets
and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
When we received Christ, Phil added, all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill