A sad day indeed. John Cox and Allen Forkum have done outstanding work that I've highlighted many times here on this blog. I will miss checking out their new editorial cartoon work each week, but I completely understand and empathize with their decision to hang it up.
John and Allen... you will be missed, and thank you for leaving so many powerful marks for us to refer back to. Your work moved the ball forward more than you can possibly know. Thank you!
... John Edwards, though he represents the thinking of liberal mentality across the board, could not be more mistaken.
True nobody made him 'God' (and we all breathe easier for that.) But God did very much make him, and more importantly He made him a representative to his children, to teach, to instruct, to guide, and to help grow his children into fully functional and thoughtful adults who will then be able to do the same for their children in the days to come.
To not exercise the responsibility of teaching his children, or even more dangerously in Barack Obama's case of willfully teaching his children behavior and immoral justification, liberals are at best proving that they do not have the critical discernment needed to recognize the difference between right and wrong. At worst they are demonstrating negligent or intentional contempt for their children and society. And if they are that confused about something so basic as instructing their children, how will THEY be equipped when weighing the balance of good and evil in the world and nation they hope to lead?
In exposing their thinking on something so simple to us they confirmed that I would never trust them to baby-sit my own child, therefore how on earth can they be given oversight of the free world?
Indeed.
On the subject of families, Brent Bozell writes on hollywood latest attack on our culture on the frustrated family hour.
The bottom line is, serious efforts to reduce CO2 will lead to lower living standards through higher costs of living. And it will be all for naught because there is little or no relationship between man-made CO2 emissions and climate change.
There's an excellent booklet available from the National Center for Policy Analysis (ncpa.org) titled "A Global Warming Primer." Some of its highlights are:
"Over long periods of time, there is no close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature."
"Humans contribute approximately 3.4% of annual CO2 levels" compared with 96.6% by nature.
"There was an explosion of life forms 550 million years ago (Cambrian Period) when CO2 levels were 18 times higher than today. During the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, CO2 levels were as much as nine times higher than today."
What about public school teachers [not to mention Time magazine in the cover above] frightening little children with tales of cute polar bears dying because of global warming?
The primer says, "Polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 in 1950 to as many as 25,000 today, higher than any time in the 20th century."
The primer gives detailed sources for all its findings, and it supplies us with information we can use to stop politicians and their environmental extremists from doing a rope-a-dope on us.
“My desires were a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.”
– Oscar Wilde, writing at the end of his very hedonistic life
Related: Listen to Dennis Prager talk about how we never have enough on his happiness hour radio show. Check the sidebar to the left for all of Dennis' more recent happiness hour audio podcasts.
Liberals love to think of themselves as intellectual and nuanced, but liberalism is incredibly simplistic. It's nothing more than "childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues." Very seldom does any issue that doesn't involve pandering to their supporters boil down at its core level to more than feeling "nice" or "mean" to liberals. This makes liberals ill equipped to deal with complex issues.
Since liberals tend to support or oppose policies based on how those policies make them feel about themselves, they do very little intellectual examination of whether the policies they advocate work or not. That's because it doesn't matter to them whether the policy is effective or not; it matters whether advocating the policy makes them feel "good" or "bad," "compassionate" or "stingy," "nice" or "mean."
Because of this, liberalism has more in common with religion than it does with other political ideologies like conservatism or libertarianism. Moreover, liberal beliefs are more like religious doctrine than any sort of battle-tested policies that bear up under logic or examination. Although the interpretation of the doctrine that the Left supports may change a bit over time, just as religious doctrine does, it's essentially taken on faith, like scripture.
That's why, for example, you may see ferocious debates on the right side of the blogosphere about the war, illegal immigration, or spending. But, with the netroots, the debates almost always revolve around the best strategy to get more liberals elected. The issues are not really up for debate, other than debate over how to get them enacted.
Mildly related: Michelle Malkin interviews columnist and author Diana West about her new book The Death of the Grown-up:
Here's the closing answer to the question posed in the title above:
“That we’re fighting Al Qaeda,” he said without hesitation. “[Abu Musab al] Zarqawi invented Al Qaeda in Iraq. The top leadership outside Iraq squawked and thought it was a bad idea. Then he blew up the Samarra mosque, triggered a civil war, and got the whole world’s attention. Then the Al Qaeda leadership outside dumped huge amounts of money and people and arms into Anbar Province. They poured everything they had into this place. The battle against Americans in Anbar became their most important fight in the world. And they lost.”
These men - and there are thousands of them like Travis Manion - are truly the best of the very best.
"When we first arrived in Iraq, one of the other Military Transition Teams in the city had a member killed. Our team was obviously affected, and we conducted a team meeting after his memorial service," wrote Kubicki. "Travis spoke at length, easing the minds of many team members. He was very proud of being a warrior, and the warrior spirit. I remember him saying that it would dishonor a man as a warrior if you did not continue the fight, despite the pain and loss. We have turned back to his words to help us through this time."
Despite the dangerous, difficult work, Manion later made plans to join his old Recon unit and continue working in Fallujah past his MiTT rotation. He believed in his Marines and mission. I wish he could have lived to see Fallujah now - a newly hopeful city, pacified to no small extent by the efforts of the Iraqi Army and their American advisors.
We had a brief acquaintance, but I was specifically inspired by Travis Manion when we met that chilly evening in January. Here was a young man - ridiculously athletic, smart and good-looking - who could have enjoyed a life of ease with the world at his feet, yet instead chose one of the most difficult paths imaginable. His subsequent actions and ultimate passing have inspired me even more, and continue to inspire others.
"Let all know too, we shall fight on, insh'allah (as God wills), as Mulazam Manion would want, and would do," said Col. Garza.
I pray to God that we honor their sacrifice and their memory with all of the perseverance, discipline and courage that it takes to ultimately succeed against the Islamic Extremists... wherever they may be.
Also, welcome home from Afghanistan Sgt. Sam DelGrande! I hope you thoroughly enjoy your leave, and that the rest of your deployment is safe, successful and rewarding. Thank you, and your men, for your service. God bless, and God speed.
And here's some positive news that the MSM won't be sharing any time soon. Michael Totten is doing an outstanding job covering the war in Iraq. Here's one of his recent postings called Anbar Awakens Part II: Hell is Over:
Ramadi has changed so drastically from the terrorist-infested pit that it was as recently as April 2007 that I could hardly believe what I saw was real. The sheer joy on the faces of these Iraqis was unmistakable. They weren’t sullen in the least, and it was pretty obvious that they were not just pretending to be friendly or going through the hospitality motions.
You'll find more military journalists in the sidebar on the left. Real reporting that you won't find on CNN or any of the major networks. Check it out.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance. "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.
Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.
Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention. "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics," said Avery, "but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see."
Successes are occurring, and accruing, in Iraq. Al Qaeda is still a powerful enemy, but they cannot be happy with their Iraqi franchise this summer.
Readers of my dispatches have gotten first hand reports of the kinds of positive indicators that General David Petraeus described in his progress report.
The atmosphere is changing in Iraq and I've been posting dispatches and videos that illustrate just how profound this change is in some cases.
I was the first to say Iraq was in civil war, and many readers were angry to hear me say it. Well, I'll be the first to say that I predict some sort of milestone for the war in Iraq will occur early in the next year. It's dangerous to predict like this, but something fundamental has changed in Iraq.
There is one important qualifier: this will only happen if General David Petraeus is supported by our elected officials to implement his proposed plan, without meddling from those same elected officials. Oversight and accountability are not the same thing as backseat driving after siphoning out half of the gas tank.
As you watch, ponder the fact that our Democratic superiors, who have intoned so stirringly about how the administration has failed to take the war seriously, are willing to piss away the seven minutes of questions allotted to them for crap like this instead of asking Petraeus and Crocker questions about what’s happening on the ground.
... and Rudy responds:
And Dennis Miller chimes in too... not just on MoveOn.org and their calling General Petraeus a traitor, but worth checking out for sure:
"I think contrarianism is creativity for the untalented"
Update: Surprise, surprise... the NY Times gave MoveOn.org a 66% family discount for the "Betray-Us" ad. Shockingly unshocking from the operation where they're dedicated to all the agenda-driven news that's fit to print. Will this get any MSM coverage? Don't hold your breath.
I don't know about the McCarthy comparison, but here's a nice summary from the NY Sun:
They [moveon.org and its ilk] have abandoned decency and bersmirched decent people not in pursuit of a more aggressive and broader fight against a vast evil but in pursuit of a capitulation. The one encouraging thing is that this is coming into focus as America is preparing to go into a national election, a process in which demagogues are often unmasked and the wisdom of the American people tends to assert itself.
Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater October 27, 1964
Here's a wonderful snippet from this speech... also known as "The Speech":
... Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer - not an easy answer - but simple.
If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace - and you can have it in the next second - surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face - that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand - the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. ...
"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so."
"Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong."
"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
"Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
"The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."
"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."
"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."
"No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.
"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."
... There are many reasons. I believe that naivete about human nature and about evil heads the list. But high up there as an explanation of liberal and leftist thinking is the desire to be loved.
All normal people want to be loved -- and that is a very good thing when the love is sought from good people with whom we have close relationships.
But many people want to be loved by far more than friends and relatives. For example, most celebrities ache for the love of the public, and while that is a psychological problem for them -- since the love of the public is not personally fulfilling and one then craves it more and more -- the yearning of celebrities for an adoring public has no negative impact on society.
The yearning to be loved becomes a major problem, however, in most other instances. It becomes a problem, for example, when in raising children parents are guided by a desire to be loved by them. Parents cannot properly raise a child if they are unwilling to be disliked, even occasionally hated, by their child.
[...]
But there are two areas where liberals do express a yearning to be loved, and these have macro, indeed, global, ramifications.
The most dangerous one is the liberal desire for their country to be loved.
One of the most often repeated liberal laments about American foreign policy under President George W. Bush is that America is more hated around the world than ever. As if a country being loved is evidence of its moral virtue.
The very idea is irrational. Name a country that is loved. Does a single country come to mind? Of course not. Canadian students traveling abroad often make sure -- via a big maple leaf on their backpack, for example -- to communicate that they are Canadian, not American. But that is because of America-hatred, not because foreigners love Canada. The idea is amusing. Are there pockets of Canada-love in India about which we have heretofore not heard? Are there 50 people in Uruguay who love Sweden, to mention the liberals' most admired country?
[...]
The aim of the United States of America should not be to be loved. As nice as that would be, the one superpower on earth is never going to be loved -- though I would bet a large sum of money that if China or Russia or any other country became the reigning superpower, people the world over would yearn for the good old days when America was the superpower.
America would presumably be more loved if it abandoned Israel or if it abandoned Iraq. Each case would be morally wrong, but, hey, we'd be loved. Liberals believed we would have been more loved if we had destroyed our nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. Or if we had not pressured West Germany into accepting Pershing missiles.
Prager, as usual, is right on the money with this. Read all of this column at the link I provided before the quotations above. Click Dennis' photo to browse all of his columns at TownHall.com.
Also, I'm linking all of Prager's "Happiness Hour" radio shows on the left sidebar now. Check them out if you haven't listened before. You can find all of his radio podcasts (3 1-hour audio clips each day) here. Mostly fantastic stuff, and no commercials! :-)
10. Victimhood. A lifelong study of good and evil has led to me conclude that the greatest single cause of evil is people perceiving of themselves or their group as victims. Nazism arose from Germans' sense of victimhood -- as a result of the Versailles Treaty, of the "stab in the back" that led to Germany's loss in World War I and of a world Jewish conspiracy. Communism was predicated on workers regarding themselves as victims of the bourgeoisie. Much of Islamic evil today emanates from a belief that the Muslim world has been victimized by Christians and Jews. Many prisoners, including those imprisoned for horrible crimes, regard themselves as victims of society or of their upbringing. The list of those attributing their evil acts to their being victims is as long as the list of evildoers.
This is also true in the micro realm. Family members whose primary identity is that of victim usually feel entirely free to hurt others in the family. That is why psychotherapists who regularly reinforce the victim status of their patients do the patient and society great harm.
If my belief is even partially correct, the preoccupation of much of America with telling whole groups that they are victims -- of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and classism, among other American sins -- can only increase cruelty and evil in America.
"It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country." - Noah Webster (1790)
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." - G. K. Chesterton
"It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn." - George Washington
"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late." - Thomas Sowell
"It’s getting close to the point where Osama bin Laden could deliver the keynote speech at the Democrat National Convention." - Rush Limbaugh
"Contemporary politics is all about phony energy, about running around slamming doors for the sake of it—or, more to the point, opening them and tossing through a huge sack of taxpayer dollars." - Mark Steyn
"In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution." - Alexander Hamilton
"You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
"Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies." - Theodore Dalrymple
"It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world." - Theodore Roosevelt
"If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?" - Tom Tancredo
"Just about every generation has some horrific evil that it must fight. For the Democratic Party today that evil is carbon dioxide emissions. For the rest of us, it is an ideology that teaches that its deity is sanctified by the blood of innocents." - Dennis Prager
"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all." - Voltaire
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." - Thomas Sowell
"The firm basis of government is justice, not pity." - Woodrow Wilson
"Not everything you may care about is in the Constitution. It is a legal document that had compromises in it. What it says it says; what it doesn’t say it doesn’t say." - Justice Antonin Scalia
"Liberals believe in burning the American flag, urinating on crucifixes, and passing out birth control pills to 11-year-olds without telling their parents -- but God forbid an infidel touch a Quran at Guantanamo." - Ann Coulter
"A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
"Though God alone is competent to judge the heart, we can and must judge whether objective behavior is bad or good, right or wrong." - Dr. Marcellino D'Ambrosio
"While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." - Samuel Adams
"If any group of citizens is uniquely unqualified to tell someone else how to vote, it’s those of us who live in the sheltered, privileged arena of celebrityhood." - Pat Sajak
"The believer in God has to account for the existence of evil and suffering. The atheist has to account for the existence of everything else." - Dennis Prager
"Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid" - Ronald Reagan
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." - Barry Goldwater
"Appreciate the good in your life, and the good will appreciate." - Tal Ben-Shahar
"The dustbin of history is littered with remains of those countries that relied on diplomacy to secure their freedom. We must never forget... in the final analysis... that it is our military, industrial and economic strength that offers the best guarantee of peace for America in times of danger." - Ronald Reagan
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
"But America can still survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope." - Mark Steyn
"Compassion should be applied in the personal (micro) arena, but standards should be applied in the public (macro) arena. Too often compassion is applied in both." - Dennis Prager
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism. " - Thomas Sowell
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - John Stuart Mill
