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"Obama is Overwhelmed"
by Christopher Chantrill
IF YOU READ Solzhenitzyn’s August 1917 you will recall his description of the Russian commander on the front with Germany. He was in a daze, confused and demoralized by the blizzard of incoming information. That’s why it takes a couple of years in any war to sort out the good generals from the bad ones. It’s a question of temperament. Men who were sitting comfortably in a cradle-to-grave bureaucracy are suddenly called upon to make life-and-death decisions every hour. Most of them can’t make the unfold
| 03/09/09 7:38 pm ETDems' Luck Running Out?
by Christopher Chantrill
HOW LUCKY are the Democrats? They came into power in 1933 after a Republican president had been screwing up the economy for 3.5 years. They came into power in 1961 after President Eisenhower had paid down the WWII debt, so they could open the spigots for a decade of fun and frolic. They came into power in 1976 just after the end of a nasty recession. They came into power in 1993 just after a mild recession. But this time the Dems are coming into power at the beginning of a nasty recession. Maybe their luck is unfold
| 03/06/09 7:49 pm ETObama Blinks on Vouchers
by Christopher Chantrill
CANDIDATE Obama was sorta low-key about school vouchers, and you could see why. School vouchers are opposed by the No.1 special interest of the Democratic Party: teachers. Still, you’d think that in the District of Columbia, a majority African-American city, where the public school system is a national scandal, he might want to buck his supporters and let children get an education by climbing out of the train wreck. According to
| 03/05/09 8:27 pm ETLet's Get Serious Mr. President
by Christopher Chantrill
NOW THAT the president’s budget has been out for about a week, it is time to reach a judgment upon it. What can we say now about the course that President Obama has set for the federal government and, by extension, all the governments of the United States? I think it is becoming clear. The Obama administration’s budget is an error of strategic proportions. The Democrats ran in 2008 on a platform that proposed to give government a bigger slice of the Bush prosperity. We had the money for extra health care programs. unfold
| 03/04/09 7:17 pm ETThe Culture of Compulsion
by Christopher Chantrill
ACCORDING to President Obama, he doesn’t believe in Big Government. When he asked Congress to send him a recovery plan, he told the nation in his almost State of the Union speech, all he wanted to do was put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t. On the strength of that, writes
| 03/03/09 7:44 pm ETWhy Presidents Fail
by Christopher Chantrill
OUR LIBERALS friends are predictably annoyed by Rush Limbaugh’s hope that President Obama “fails.” It was ok to wish the most frightful things on President Bush. But this is different. On Saturday, Rush Limbaugh “doubled down” on the Obama failure meme. So let’s look at what he said at CPAC. This notion that I want the President to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem unfold
| 03/02/09 8:27 pm ET
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
Taking Responsibility
[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.
Gen. Hans von Seeckt, quoted in MacGregor Knox, Williamson Murray, ed., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050.
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
Responsible Self
[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.
Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.
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
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