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| Harris on Ratzinger at Regensburg | Born on the Fourth of July |
Why Did the Brits Invite Clinton and McCain?
by Christopher Chantrill
September 28, 2006 at 9:27 am
WHY DO THE Brits like to have American politicians address them at their political conferences?
This week Bill Clinton, his mind cleared after telling off Chris Wallace on eevil Fox News, gave the Labour Party a pep talk at its annual conference in Manchester. Don’t make the same mistake we did, he told them.
Next week Senator John McCain is going to address the British Conservative Party at its annual conference in Bournemouth. And so the British Spectator’s Matthew d’Ancona is in Washington to interview the man who has his name on a law that diminished Americans’ free speech rights and now has opposed President Bush’s efforts to interview terrorist suspects.
Of course, thousands would argue that Fox News’ tactics in the famous Clinton interview consistuted torture banned by Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention, particularly the prohibition in Section 1(c):
Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.
So maybe John McCain should be working on legislation banning Fox News from asking questions that might hurt the positive self-esteem of Democratic former presidents.
But back to McCain. What would the British Conservative Party want to be doing with John McCain? But it seems like the Brits like him because he appears as a centrist, and that is how David Cameron is “rebanding” the Conservatives.
But it makes you wonder. Is there something about John McCain that we conservatives just cannot see? Some brilliant approach to governing, some stunning record of judgment that is too obvious for us to grasp?
Or are we the guys that understand McCain only too well: too much “honor,” too much senatorial pride, too much desire to be well-thought-of by the media, and a live-long question in the judgment department?
As Hugh Hewitt says: “[John McCain] is a great American, a lousy senator, and a terrible Republican.”
The question still remains: Why do those Limeys like to have US politicians over, over there. Particularly when the Brits really don’t like the US and aren’t afraid to say so.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
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
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
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
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
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
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
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
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