"Do we respect a gay baker’s right to choose not to bake a cake for the Westboro Baptist Church with icing that reads God Hates Fags?"
... Piers wasn't a host interested in his guest's new book, he was a bitter partisan who had a series of pro-Obama talking points to get out ...
...what was most ironic was watching the CNN host prove many of the book's central themes true. The Left isn't interested in honest debate. Instead they engage in all kinds of passive-aggressive rhetorical tricks to win the moment ...
... What happened last night is a symptom of CNN's bigger problem, and that's that they hide behind a dishonest shield of objectivity that only serves to insult the intelligence of the Left and Right.
... Hitch was a court jester for the liberal elites. He took care never to violate their most sacred taboos. Like Stephen Jay Gould, who also died too young, also of cancer, Hitch carried the banner of soft Marxism forward into the post-Soviet era. ...Raymond De Souza
... For many of Hitchens’ fellow journalists, the virtuosity of his brilliant writing and bracing conversation earned him a pass on the hatred. But hatred it remained. His commercial genius was to harbour hatreds sufficiently vast and varied that a lucrative constituency could be found to relish all of them....Jonah Goldberg
... He was no conservative. You can’t really be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition and hate religion. You can be a non-believer, I think. But you have to at least have respect for the role of religion and maybe a little reverence for the role of transcendence in people’s lives. Hitch had nothing but contempt. It was one of the last truly asinine Marxist things about him.
... I’m not inclined to sugarcoat my take on the man given how he could be absolutely cruel when spouting off about the deaths of others. He could be mean, pigheaded, and insensitive (though never dull!). He could also be generous and kind. He was a brilliant and gifted polemicist who sometimes took the easiest way out by going after his opponents’ weakest arguments rather than their strongest. He defied easy categorization while having a gift for categorizing others. He’ll be missed because he was so damn good at being Christopher Hitchens.
Contrast with the virulent hatred expressed by the left for Novak on his death.Ted Kennedy and I didn't occupy much political space in common, but I always admired his ability to build coalitions for the things he believed in, assemble a first-rate staff and bravely represent a coherent point of view. He was also a man who would answer your questions forthrightly and then invite you to have a drink.
In his last months, he and his wife Vicky also found time to come to the aid of a fellow cancer sufferer — my old boss and friend Bob Novak. He died only a week ago from the same type of brain tumor that felled Senator Kennedy. When the conservative columnist was diagnosed last year, Vicki Kennedy reached out to Novak with the lessons they'd learned about treatment. "He and his wife have treated me like a close friend . . . and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke University, which I did," Novak wrote in one of his last published columns. "The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone's life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington."
The loss of two great men I knew to the same disease in the space of a single week certainly fills me with a greater appreciation for the brief time all of us have on this earth.
From the self-parody file:A foolish, sexist, racist judge - just what’s needed in Obama’s post-racial America."I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." -Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001
[via]Nothing could be further from classical liberalism than the American "liberalism" of today. The two are polar opposites. Classical liberalism is about the flourishing of the individual and the community through the free action of individuals. Modern liberalism is about government deciding what is good for the individual and imposing its decisions by force. That is precisely what Adam Smith and all the great classical liberals opposed.
The slogan of modern liberlism is "equality", meaning not equality of opportunity but forced equality of outcome. In practice that amounts to efforts by government to hobble the more energetic and intelligent members of society so that that they don't reap "unjust" rewards. The inevitable result is the triumph of the lazy, the stupid and the mediocre. Let me modify that a bit. Under "liberalism" energetic and intelligent people do triumph, but they do so by demagoguery and dishonesty rather than by acting for the benefit of all.
Modern liberalism suffers from several problems. One is the question of legitimacy. Why should a particular class, say Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Alan Wolfe, and the faculties of the elite universities rule the rest of us? Is Nancy a countesss? Is Alan a duke?
Another problem is that the lust for leveling will likely destroy our society economically. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Affirmative action/political correctness has trashed most of the humanities and social science departments in American universities. But hitherto math and physical science have for most part part escaped unscathed. But since the election of you- know-who the feminist mafia smells blood. They are demanding quotas in math and the hard sciences. You don’t have to have a Larry Summers size IQ to see where that will lead.
What Wolfe doesn’t understand is just how fragile are the achievements of western civilization and how large is the threat posed to those achievements by the Orwellian perversion of the definition of the liberalism.
April 15, 2009 4:00 AM
As one reader asks, "Does this mean the failure to obtain a lube/oil/filter every 5,000 miles should be criminalized?"And:
From a reader: "... the oil change would take a week and the government cost would be around $1000.00"
Jonah Goldberg: "What if GM were a newspaper?"JAMES LILEKS: Maybe I’m old-school, but “President fires CEO” looks as wrong as “Pope fires Missile.”
Via Mark Steyn, who commented:...finally won the right to keep his sign: "This is America: When Ordering, Please Speak English." It took him two years, much abuse and hundreds of hours of work by paid and volunteer lawyers, but a local regulatory body finally ruled his sign wasn't discriminatory or offensive.
Jonah, Philadelphia's "Commission on Human Relations" should remind Americans that every malign Canadian novelty eventually works its way south of the border (multiculturalism, socialized health care, me).
I have nothing against the ... agenda; I only dislike coercion and lies. I'm not in favour of environmental smoke, only opposed to environmental hysteria. And I marvel that we don't even blink anymore as government metastasizes into such private spaces as our cars.
Unhealthy as smoking is, it's not half as unhealthy as politicized science. When the Czech President raised the alarm this week about the cause-driven state "that transcends the individual in the name of the common good," he was only reminding us that in order to survive cancer or global warming, it's unnecessary to succumb to tyranny.It certainly is unnecessary to succumb to tyranny. But we’re gradually and apparently happily succumbing anyway. Eventually, when we’ve given up all of our freedoms, all that is not forbidden will be compulsory. Then we’ll have achieved the ultimate progressive, collectivist utopian dream, The Borg Hive.
What do you call a conservative who is winning an argument with a leftist? "A fascist!" Thanks to effective leftist propaganda and plain ignorance, fascism is widely held to be a right-wing ideology. This lie has been so successful that even many right-wingers are prone to believing it. However, the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. Nazism, Fascism and fascism are distinctly left-wing phenomena. Like most variants of socialism, they are totalitarian ideologies.
[there’s] a mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate the same social space." [...] in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.
...international fascism drew from the same well-springs as American Progressivism.
... American Progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism [...and] projected their own sins onto conservatives.
'Liberal Fascism' is a fascinating, revelational read - one of the few political books I’ve found hard to put down. It’s a must read for every conservative and libertarian. Liberals and other socialists should read it too. Though I suspect that most leftists aren’t keen on having their ideological roots so clearly exposed - and they’ll go out of their way to deny and denounce much of what Goldberg reveals.
- President Woodrow Wilson (1913 - 21), the first (and last) Ph.D. in the Oval Office, was the twentieth century’s first totalitarian dictator "doing more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve".
- the American progressive establishment of the 20's and 30's enthusiastically supported Hitler’s, Mussolini’s and Stalin’s totalitarianism, racism and eugenics.
- fascism was manifested under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s heavily statist New Deal policies.
- more recently, American fascism has softened and mutated into Hillary Clinton’s "It takes a village" progressive, happy-faced, politically correct world of diversity, multiculturalism, universal health-care and environmentalism.
- modern liberal progressives are ‘nice’ fascists, but fascists none the less.
