Nyt Take A Powder Dems - Road to the Middle Class

THE NATION´S newspaper of record finally said it. Responding to a letter “from an opponent of the invasion who urged the American left to `get over its anger over President Bush´s catastrophic blunder´ and start trying to figure out how to win the conflict that exists,” The New York Times opined:

No one wants a disaster in Iraq, and Mr. Bush´s critics can put aside, at least temporarily, their anger at the administration for its hubris, its terrible planning and its inept conduct of the war in return for a frank discussion of where to go from here.

Oh good. So now after encouraging the crazies for two years the Times has suddenly decided it is time to get responsible. Maybe that is because Bush has almost won the war (it certainly is telling that the noted strategic expert Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) has recently called the Iraq War a quagmire).

On the matter of Sen. Kennedy, Tony Blankley thinks that “Ted Kennedy and the exit strategy crowd” can be explained by modern developmental psychology. At a certain age, children get to believe that they can manipulate the world through mere wishes. “Babies cry and mother brings them milk... They cry and mother changes their nappy. Thus the immature mind develops the magical idea that the physical world can be manipulated by merely wishing for something.” It is telling that Sen. Kennedy would never think of developing an exit strategy for something he believes in. Like government education.

Liberals have been telling this Vietnam Quagmire story to themselves for a generation. But there was never a quagmire, and the American people never turned against the war. What happened was that liberals turned against the war and managed to pitch President Nixon out of office. Then a Democratic Congress cut the funds to support South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese invaded the south, and that was the end of the Republic of South Vietnam. After it was all over liberals needed a narrative that exculpated them from their responsibility for sending twenty million people into slavery. They decided that their policy to get out of Vietnam at any cost was a noble attempt to extricate the United States from its Vietnam quagmire.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“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

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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