On This Date in History

On this date in 1946, Sir Winston Churchill traveled to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri with President Harry S Truman and delivered his "Iron Curtain Speech."  Here is another giant in freedom's cause, Margaret Thatcher, commemorating in 1996 the fiftieth anniversary of that landmark event.

Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty?

On October 14, Lord Christopher Monckton gave a presentation in St. Paul, MN on the subject of global warming. In this 4-minute excerpt from his speech, he issues a dire warning to all Americans regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty that is scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.

A draft of the treaty can be read here:
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/docu...

Page 18: Section 38 of the "Share vision for long-term cooperation action plan" contains the text for forming the new government.

Page 40: Section 46 Subsection H of the "Objectives, scope, and guiding principles" contains the text for enforcement and establishment of the rule of law.

There has been considerable debate raised about Monckton's conclusion that the Copenhagen Treaty would cede US sovereignty. His comments appear to be based upon his interpretation of the The Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution (Article VI, paragraph 2). This clause establishes the Constitution, Federal Statutes, and U.S. TREATIES as the supreme law of the land. Concerns have been raised in the past that a particularly ambitious treaty may supersede the US Constitution. In the 1950s, a constitutional amendment, known as the Bricker Amendment, was proposed in response to such fears, but it failed to pass. You can read more about the Bricker Amendment in a 1953 Time Magazine article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art...

Lord Monckton served as a policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He has repeatedly challenged Al Gore to a debate to which Gore has refused. Monckton sued to stop Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" from being shown in British schools due to its inaccuracies. The judge found in-favor of Monckton, ordering 9 serious errors in the film to be corrected. Lord Monckton travels internationally to educate the public about the myth of global warming.

Mark Levin's Hope-Filled Remembrance of Margaret Thatcher on Her Birthday

Santorum Overtakes Romney in Ohio

Rick Santorum: Proving that in the heartland character counts more than money.

A Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday shows that Rick Santorum has now taken the lead in the Buckeye State.

According to Quinnipiac, Senator Santorum now leads Romney 36% to 29%, with the imploding campaign of Newt Gingrich trailing a distant third with 20%. 

It must be hard to leave the field after all the money Mitt has spent marketing a carefully manufactured image.  Perhaps he and Newt can work together developing space colonies, because as Margaret Thatcher once observed, "you can't make a souffle rise twice.  Truth is the daughter of time and the GOP electorate in the heartland can't be bought and has sorted out the principled, consistent conservative from the phonies. 

Correction Regarding Christina Jeffrey - She's Had 7 Campaign Managers

A file photo of Dean Allen (No. 7) talking with Newt Gingrich, who fired Jeffrey from her position as House Historian. The stories they will be able to share!

It has been called to our attention that our story about the many campaign managers of Christina Jeffrey - or more aptly, those who attempted to manage the campaign of Christina Jeffrey -- was incorrect. We had written that Dean Allen is Christina Jeffrey's 6th campaign manager. However, we were unaware of her first campaign manager, a gentleman with whom she began to collaborate on a book.

Therefore Dean Allen, who had attempted to run for SC Adjutant General but failed to file, is Christina Jeffrey's 7th campaign manager in less than one year.

Perhaps 7 will be a lucky number for them both. Mr. Allen is hoping to gin up for Dr. Jeffrey the kind of national publicity he received for his own "Machine Gun Social." But we are reminded of a quote from Margaret Thatcher: "They have never learned what every woman knows:- you can't make a soufflé rise twice"

A Union of the English-Speaking Peoples

"As we stand on the threshold of a new century - indeed, of a new millennium - it behooves us to remember what led to the creation of the English-Speaking Union in the first place.

Evelyn Wrench’s idea to form a society for the co-operation of the English-speaking peoples came amidst the carnage and chaos of the First World War. He was prescient. He believed then - and history has borne him out - that the security of the world would largely depend on the close co-operation of the English speaking peoples. Europe’s first great war had made that much clear; its second, only a little more than two decades later, would confirm it.

It was in the 1930s that Winston Churchill set out to write A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Having served as chairman of the English-Speaking Union from 1921-1926, he knew well the importance of drawing together those who had stood their ground against Germany during the Great War. When he was finally able to return to his task in the 1950s, after the defeat of Hitler’s tyranny, he was more convinced than ever of what he called the English-speaking peoples’ “common duty to the human race.” In his commitment to the English-speaking peoples, as in so much else, Churchill displayed what President Ronald Reagan would later describe as “that special attribute of great statesmen - the gift of vision, the willingness to see the future based on the experience of the past.”

From its official launch on the Fourth of July, 1918, the ESU has prospered and grown into the international organisation we know today, bringing together in common cause over one billion speakers of the English language. Through your programmes and publications, your scholarships and exchanges, the ESU does so much to insure that we will remain united and continue to promote the fundamental principles inherent in our English-speaking cultures. For English is not only the language of politics, diplomacy, and finance, of international business and travel; it is also - and most important of all - the language of values.

The values of the English-speaking peoples which we celebrate are of ancient origin. In the preface to his History, Churchill pointed out that “by the time Christopher Columbus set sail for the American continent” Britain had already come to be characterised by a body of legal principles and institutions including “parliament, trial by jury, local government by local citizens, and even the beginnings of a free press.” These values which we share as English speaking peoples have come together in what we call the rule of law."

_____

1999 Dec 7 Tu, Margaret Thatcher.
Speech to the English-Speaking Union in New York ("The Language of Liberty").

SCHLAFLY: Fumbling Jobs Issue Will Lose Reagan Democrats

From The Washington Times
Commentary By Phyllis Schlafly

Conservatives bounced back strong after the elections of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and we'll do likewise again in 2010. The Gallup Poll just reported that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states, and the trend is up. President Obama is aiding our task of reinvigorating conservatives.

A speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1975 to the Conservative Political Action Conference contains a message worth repeating:

"I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, 'We must broaden the base of our party' - when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents ...," he said.

"Our people look for a cause to believe in ... raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people. ... Let us explore ways to ward off socialism. ... A political party ... must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency," Mr. Reagan said.

Here is our banner of bold colors:

1. Restore fiscal responsibility. Conservatives must call a halt to Mr. Obama's reckless borrowing and spending. This means defeating the wildly extravagant health care bill and the cap-and-trade bill, which should be called cap-and-tax.

2. Stand tall for American sovereignty. This means rejecting all United Nations treaties including the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the U.N. Treaty on Women. They all invade our sovereignty by creating committees of hostile foreign bureaucrats to monitor our compliance.

Standing for American sovereignty also means repudiating all devious ways of erasing our borders by deceitful code words such as "economic integration," "labor mobility," "North American Union," or "Free Trade Area of the Americas."

3. Make foreign and military policies serve the national security of the United States. George Washington's advice to be "at all times ready for war" means, at long last, deploying an anti-missile defense that can protect our people from attack by rogue nations. As Margaret Thatcher reminded us, Mr. Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

4. We must recapture the three important voting blocs that abandoned conservative candidates in 2008: Reagan Democrats, unmarried women, and young people.

We lost the Reagan Democrats by fumbling the jobs issue. Millions of well-paying blue-collar jobs have gone overseas where workers are paid only 30 cents an hour. We must make clear that conservatives stand for maintaining middle-class jobs that support a family. We must rewrite the unfair trade agreements that allow foreign countries to pretend to reduce their barriers against our products but substitute an equivalent border tax called the VAT (Value Added Tax) that discriminates against U.S. products. Conservatives must reject the trade agreements that allow foreign countries to subsidize their exports by rebating their domestic taxes, while U.S. companies pay very high corporate taxes.

We lost 70 percent of unmarried women because the Democrats are the party of generous handouts to unmarried mothers. Conservatives must stand up for marriage as the basic institution of society and must not allow the liberals to undermine marriage by using taxpayer-financed incentives in the multibillion-dollar welfare, child-support, and domestic-violence agencies to promote divorce, fatherless children, and the matriarchy sought by the feminists. Mothers should look to husbands for financial support, not depend on Big Brother Government to be the provider. The liberals will always be the party of bigger taxpayer handouts.

We lost the majority of young people largely because of what they are taught in the public schools, which 89 percent of kids attend. We must demand that public schools teach respect for patriotism, the Constitution, moral standards, Western civilization instead of multiculturalism (all cultures are equal), diversity (all behaviors are OK), and "social justice" (the false notion that students are victims of an unjust, oppressive and racist America, which makes them ripe targets for community organizers to mobilize them to vote for socialist candidates). The National Association of Scholars defines "social justice" as "the advocacy of more egalitarian access to income through state-sponsored redistribution." That is academic verbiage for Mr. Obama's pledge to "spread the wealth around," which sums up his current policies.

If conservatives deal with these challenges, they can be the Comeback Kids in 2010.

Phyllis Schlafly is a founder of the modern conservative movement in the United States and has been a national leader on a panoply of national and foreign-policy issues.

"Pope" Francis Assisted the Argentine Military Junta

On this day in 1983, thanks to Margaret Thatcher and British armed forces, Argentina's murderous military junta fell.  A key supporter of that criminal regime was none other than Jorge Mario Bergoglio.   "Pope" Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), according to Steve Pieczenik (MD, PhD, former United States Department of State official, psychiatrist) assisted the Argentine Military Junta between 1976-1977 in its crackdown of priests and nuns who tried to counter that regime.  Fancy that – the current Pope – assisted in the arrest, torture and subsequent murder of fellow Catholic priests and nuns.

 

Flashback Friday: Margaret Thatcher Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991

"All Honor to Jefferson"

From Imprimis
By Jean Yarbrough
Professor of Government, Bowdoin College

The following address was delivered at Hillsdale College on April 16, 2009, at the dedication of a statue of Thomas Jefferson by Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Art Anthony Frudakis.

IT IS one of the wonders of the modern political world that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Unaware that the “Sage of Monticello” had died earlier in the day, the crusty Adams, as he felt his own life slipping away, uttered his last words, “Thomas Jefferson still lives.” And so he does.

Today, as we dedicate this marvelous statue of our third President, and place him in the company of George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher on Hillsdale’s Liberty Walk, soon to be joined by Abraham Lincoln, it is fitting to reflect on what of Thomas Jefferson still lives. What is it that we honor him for here today?

Without question, pride of place must go to Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence. That document established Jefferson as one of America’s great political poets, second only to Abraham Lincoln. And fittingly, it was Lincoln himself who recognized the signal importance of its first two paragraphs when he wrote: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” where it continues to stand as “a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

That abstract truth, of course, was that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men, Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It is surely a sign of our times that so many Americans no longer know what these words mean, or what their signal importance has been to peoples around the world. The one thing they are certain of, however, is that Jefferson was a hypocrite. How could he assert that all men were created equal and yet own slaves? What these critics fail to notice is that this is precisely what makes Jefferson’s statement so remarkable. Under no necessity for doing so, he penned the immortal words that would ultimately be invoked to put the institution of slavery on the road to extinction. His own draft of the Declaration was even stronger. In it, he made it clear that blacks were human and that slavery was a moral abomination and a blot upon the honor of his country.

Jefferson was serving as Minister in Paris while the Constitution was being drafted, and played no direct part in framing it. But he did make known his objections, the most important being the omission of a Bill of Rights. After the Constitution was ratified, he returned to the United States to serve as Secretary of State in the Washington administration. In and out of government in the 1790s, he challenged Hamilton’s expansive views of federal power, warning against a mounting federal debt, a growing patronage machine, and what he considered dangerous monarchical pretensions.

In the tumultuous contest for the presidency in 1800, Jefferson presided over the first peaceful transition of power in modern history, assuring those he had defeated that they too had rights that the majority was bound to respect. His observation, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” established a standard toward which every incoming administration continues to strive.

As president of the United States, Jefferson sought to rally the country around the principles of limited government. His First Inaugural Address reminded his fellow citizens that their happiness and prosperity rested upon a “wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” This, he thought, was “the sum of good government” and all that was “necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” Although Jefferson had omitted property from the inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration, he strongly defended private property because it encouraged industry and liberality—and, most importantly, because he thought it just that each individual enjoy the equal right to the fruits of his labor.

From these political principles, Jefferson never wavered. Writing in 1816, he once again insisted that the tasks of a liberal republic were few: government should restrain individuals from encroaching on the equal rights of others, compel them to contribute to the necessities of society, and require them to submit their disputes to an impartial judge. “When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions.”

At the same time, Jefferson believed that constitutions must keep pace with the times. If the people wished to alter their frame of government, say, to fund public improvements or education, they were free to do so. But they should do so by constitutional amendment and not by allowing their representatives to construe the powers of government broadly. He particularly objected to the Court’s sitting in judgment on the powers of the legislative and executive branches, or acting as an umpire between the states and the federal government. To cede to the judiciary this authority, he believed, would render the Constitution a “ball of wax” in the hands of federal judges. In his battles with Chief Justice John Marshall, he defended the principle of coordinate construction, as Lincoln (and almost every strong president since then) did after him, arguing that each branch of government must determine for itself the constitutionality of its acts.

After his retirement from politics, Jefferson returned to Monticello, where he continued to think about the meaning and requirements of republican government. Republicanism, he was convinced, was more than just a set of institutional arrangements; at bottom, it depended upon the character of the people. To keep alive this civic spirit, he championed public education for both boys and girls, with the most talented boys going on at public expense all the way through college. He envisioned the University of Virginia, to which he devoted the last years of his life, as a temple that would keep alive the “vestal flame” of republicanism and train men for public service. And here, I cannot help but notice how the recent renovations and additions to the Hillsdale campus seem to take their inspiration from Mr. Jefferson’s university, paying graceful homage to an architecture of democracy that inspires and ennobles.

As Jefferson understood it, education had a distinctly political mission, beginning at the elementary level: schools were to form citizens who understood their rights and duties, who knew how earlier free societies had risen to greatness, and by what errors and vices they had declined. Knowing was not enough, however. Jefferson also believed that citizens must have the opportunity to act. Anticipating Tocqueville, Jefferson admired the strength of the New England townships and sought to adapt them to Virginia. The wards, as he called them, would allow citizens to have a say on those matters most interesting to them, such as the education of their children and the protection of their property. If ever they became too dispirited to care about these things, republican government could not survive.

The wards were certainly not the greatest of Jefferson’s contributions to the natural rights republic—that honor must be awarded to the Declaration—but they were his most original. Instead of consolidating power or attempting to forge a general will, Jefferson went in the opposite direction, “dividing and sub-dividing” political power, while multiplying the number of interests and views that could be heard. He saw these units of local self-government as a way of bringing the large republic within the reach of citizens and so keeping alive the spirit of republicanism so vital to its preservation. And in this day and age, when the federal government seems to intrude on every aspect of our daily lives, and people feel powerless over matters of most interest to them, can we doubt that he was right? For this insight, too, let us echo Lincoln: “All honor to Jefferson”!

JEAN YARBROUGH is professor of government and Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College. She received her B.A. at Cedar Crest College and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research. The author of American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People and editor of The Essential Jefferson, she is currently completing a study of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive critique of the Founders.

Daniel Hannan: Why Americans Should Back Brexit

The campaign is in full swing. On June 23, Britain will decide by referendum whether to leave the European Union (EU). Most of the political establishment, including the leaders of all the main parliamentary parties, are arguing for a “remain” vote. But the country is unimpressed, and opinion polls remain evenly balanced.

South Carolina's Newest RINO?

We remain hopeful that Mrs. Haley will restore to her platform support for a parent's right to seek out the best school for his or her child, regardless of who happens to manage it. If Mrs. Haley can readily compromise what were touted as core principles, on what issue can she be trusted?

Mrs. Haley rode a strong tide of resentment toward RINO, establishment Republicans; if she is now going to act like one, we see little reason to cast a vote in this race. As Margaret Thatcher pointed out, "Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides."

South Carolina Gov Race: What’s Haley Thinking on School Choice?

From Cato Institute Blog
By Adam Schaeffer

Nikki Haley promises to be a star governor if–most likely when–she’s elected this fall by South Carolina voters. Word is she’s a committed fiscal conservative, and her background is steeped in a successful family business, not large corporations, so she should have an intuitive grasp of what makes our economy grow.

And Haley has a long, solid record of supporting school choice through education tax credits in South Carolina. As recently as August 19^th, Haley was reported as saying, “like Sanford, she would veto a bill to expand public education options unless it included help with private tuition. She agreed with Sanford that it must be all or nothing, saying otherwise the Legislature won’t return to the debate.”

Now that’s the stuff.

But Haley has recently put out some concerning and confusing statements on school choice. “Haley said approving private-school choice, which would provide tax credits or vouchers to pay private-school tuition, was not a priority. ‘That is not my focus; my focus is the school funding formula,’ Haley said.”

Changing the funding formula is all well and good. It might save some money. But it will NOT improve education in South Carolina. Education tax credits will improve performance and save much more than any public school reform. School choice should be Haley’s only education issue.

Why is she backing away all of a sudden? Sure, the primary is over, but Haley is leading comfortably in the polls. Education tax credits pull down serious majority support across nearly every single demographic in South Carolina. White voters, black voters, old and young, Republicans and even Democrats. This is a great issue. And backtracking on a signature issue could tarnish her fresh, reformer image.

Most important, school choice is the right policy. Haley always seemed to have a deep understanding that only an education tax credit program can substantively improve education in South Carolina.

Margaret Thatcher: The Woman Who Changed Britain

Daniel Hannan: How Big Should the State Be?

When the times require another Margaret Thatcher, Daniel Hannan will be that leader.  In this BBC discussion, he addresses the appropriate size and scope of government.

America Betrays Britain in Her Hour of Need

American and British Soldiers Parade Together During World War I

Of all the classless, ignoble and anti-American things this most reprehensible of Presidents has done, his betrayal of America's closest ally in an hour when she may yet again have to defend the self-determination of the Falkland Islanders from Argentina's Marxist cleptocrats, is a new low.

Obama made it clear when he returned the gift of the Churchill bust, that in addition to having no class whatsoever, he rejects all that for which America has stood, shoulder to shoulder, with our closest ally. He rejects America's leadership in the world, our historic defense of freedom and self-determination not only for us, but for all those who seek the torch of freedom. He rejects the principles that forged and supported an unparalleled, special relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill and Thatcher and Reagan.

As we have noted before, there is a natural, organic unity of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world based on their history, language and culture. They share a belief in "fair play," a dedication to individualism, have a strong sense of justice, and a willingness to stand up for the "little guy" and those who have been unfairly treated. These cultural qualities are the foundation for the great hallmarks of the English-speaking world -- Magna Carta, habeas corpus, trial by jury, freedom of speech, common law and America's own Bill of Rights.

We should expect that an American President at war with all that America's founders created, would be at war with those who share our values. But try as he might, no alien, two-bit, community agitator from the corrupt Chicago political machine will ever undo that organic unity.

We have a President who is known throughout the world for apologizing for America. In this small corner, we profoundly apologize to our British readers for the mistake America made in electing this despicable and illegitimate President. We are sure it is a mistake America will correct at the first opportunity.

Et tu, Barack? America betrays Britain in her hour of need

Barack Obama has taken a neutral stance on the Falklands (Photo: Getty)

From The Telegraph
By Toby Young

It was a headline I never expected to read: “US refuses to endorse British sovereignty in Falklands oil dispute.” Washington has declined to back Britain in its dispute with Argentina over drilling rights in the waters surrounding the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. President Obama’s position is one of strict neutrality, refusing to take sides. According to the State Department:

We are aware not only of the current situation but also of the history, but our position remains one of neutrality. The US recognises de facto UK administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party.

Has it come to this? Tony Blair sacrificed his political career and jeopardised Britain’s international standing by making common cause with America in the War on Terror. No matter how often he claims it was because he believed it was “the right thing to do”, we all know what was really going on in his head. He simply didn’t want to break ranks with the United States. The Atlantic alliance has been the cornerstone of British foreign policy since 1941, when Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt joined forces against the Axis powers. Dean Acheson may have declared that Britain had lost an empire and yet to find a role, but successive British Prime Ministers have know what their role is and, by and large, it has been to stand shoulder to shoulder with America, presenting a united front in a series of global conflicts, from the Cold War to the Gulf.

It is not just cynical realpolitik. Our two nations have more in common with each other than they do with anyone else. We share a belief in liberal democracy, in freedom, and it is largely thanks to our willingness to commit ourselves to the defence of those ideals that the world has not been engulfed by fascism, communism or Islamofascism.

For this alliance to survive, both countries must recognise their obligations and, from time to time, that involves one of us setting aside more localised concerns for the sake of the cause. Tony Blair would have preferred it if President Bush had been prepared to wait for a second UN resolution before launching the invasion of Iraq, but he decided that Britain should follow America into battle nevertheless. He recognised that the preservation of the Atlantic alliance had to be prioritised above all else, both for our sake and the sake of the world.

In return, we naturally expect America to side with us when it comes to our own territorial disputes — and this element of quid pro quo was recognised by Ronald Reagan when he backed Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands War. It wasn’t in America’s regional interests to side with us, but Reagan knew the terms of the deal: It was your country, right or wrong. You don’t abandon your closest ally in her hour of need.

So it is truly shocking that Barack Obama has decided to disregard our shared history and insist that we have to fight this battle on our own. Does Britain’s friendship really mean so little to him? Do the sacrifices Britain has made in defence of the Atlantic alliance count for nought? Who does he think will replace us as America’s steadfast ally when she finds herself embroiled in a territorial dispute of her own — possibly with the very same motley crew of Latin American rabble rousers? Spain? Italy? France? Good luck with that, Mr President.

You’d think that having made his bones in Chicago, Obama would know the Chicago Code of Honour: When someone picks a fight with a friend of yours, they pick a fight with you.

It is at times like this that I remember the words of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s unofficial emissary to Britain during the Second World War. In our darkest hour, when we stood virtually alone against Hitler, Hopkins was dispatched to Britain to assess our situation. Did we have the will to remain in the fight? Was this a country that America should risk its national interest to defend?

Before Hopkins returned to deliver his verdict to Roosevelt, Lord Beaverbrook gave a small dinner party for him and it was there that he rose to give a toast. “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” he said. “Well I am going to quote to you one verse from the Book of Books: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’”

Amen.

The Heart of an Islamist

From FrontPageMagazine.com
By David Solway

[The following is an excerpt from David Solway's new work-in-progress, Living in the Valley of Shmoon .]

The West, whether the European Lilliput or the American Brobdingnag, has not yet realized that Middle Eastern-style autocracies are categorically different from Western-style democracies. It does not appreciate the role of culture and history in forming the folkways, attitudes and presuppositions of a people. It has not understood that the Islamic world does not play by our rules and that it lives by an entirely different code of conduct from that which we have taken for granted for centuries—a code in which reciprocities, trade-offs, standard negotiating parameters and the dialectic of mutual advantage do not signify. We refuse to see that we are dealing with a culture that is fundamentally alien to ours and that does not accept the axioms, postulates and expectations of politically pragmatic discourse or the procedures of reasonable accommodation. It is a culture whose institutional basis has almost nothing in common with the civic armature of Western civilization that has allowed the latter, albeit at great cost and in far too desultory a fashion, to resist its own homegrown tyrannies.

In the 21st century the Leviathan that would swallow us rises from another sea than our own. Western Christendom and post-Christendom are based on a completely different “symbolic order”—Jacques Lacan’s term for the way symbols are used unconsciously by a culture—from that of the Islamic world, especially with respect to the concept of individual autonomy, the modalities of personal salvation, the idea of citizenship, the rule of established law and the binding force of international accords.

We must also bear in mind that the enemy holds a clear advantage in what Norman Podhoretz has called, after the Cold War, World War IV: the terrorist camarillas, unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, have few structural assets to protect and the rogue regimes which protect them rely on their control of the oil supply and their stockpiling of Western currency reserves for immunity from retaliation. When a set of cultural assumptions rooted in an alien scripture and a traditional worldview which repudiate what we have come to understand as social and political evolution is added to these factors, the task before us takes on dismaying and redoubtable proportions.

We really have little idea how foreign the Islamic mindset is to our way of thinking and feeling. For example, we regard a death in battle as a loss—the word “losses” is a common synonym for “casualties”; whereas in the Islamic view, as attested in both the Koran and the hadith, each “loss” in battle is no such thing but a translation into paradise, a picayune price to pay for the gift of immediate salvation and part of the “bargain” the believer has closed with Allah. What we see as losses, the Muslim sees as gains, the “supreme triumph” guaranteed by the Faith. “Allah has purchased of the faithful their lives and worldly goods and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for his cause, slay and be slain…Rejoice then in the bargain you have made” (Koran 9:111). Death is sought and celebrated. This has no point of contact with what we have hallowed as the dicta of reason. What we do everything in our power to evade, the enemy joyfully welcomes. What we suffer as a privation, the enemy cherishes as a promotion. What we regard as a curse, the enemy accepts as a benefaction. Try, as they say, to get your mind around that.

As Lee Harris argues in The Suicide of Reason, in a prolonged standoff the rule of law is no match for the rule of the jungle, the individualist “rational actor” cannot hope to triumph against the collectivist “tribal actor”—at least, not until he adapts his strategy to meet the challenge—and the “myth of reason” in which we have come to believe, if we are unable or unwilling to refocus our attitude to the world, will see to our defeat at the hands of those who do not recognize the “normal rules of engagement” and “cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of [their] tribe.” And the crisis we are now facing does not allow for that species of adjournment we call diplomacy or the nepenthean illusion of “dialogue” with an interlocutor who does not abide by its formative assumptions. Time is running out. “The borderless challenge of emancipated warriors,” cautions French philosopher André Glucksmann, “allows us little leisure for procrastination” (City Journal, August 2007). If we are not careful, it may well be game, set, match.

What the situation cries out for today are deeply educated and farsighted statesmen of the stamp of Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion, or at the very least determined political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Instead, our fate is in the hands of one-dimensional, small men and women without vision, knowledge of history or the courage to act, except insofar as they are prospecting for votes. It is not only, as Joe Klein contends in Politics Lost, that the political process has been trivialized by the burgeoning tribe of “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters who…have robbed public life of its romance and vigor,” but that the subjects of the “pollster-consultant industrial complex” are themselves devoid of moral and intellectual substance to begin with. This fact was recognized by Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who in a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia said: “When I speak with the American, I speak with someone who doesn’t know anything” (Steven Emerson Blog, March 25, 2008). Add to this sorry spectacle of political vapidness and acedia the editorial vaporizings of a philistine press and the parlous state of journalistic ethics, and we have, to put it mildly, a big problem. Yet it does not take a mantic expertise to discern the probable future should we continue to sit back, swallow the sedatives of standard political analysis and let events take their course. For it is not just that Jews are under threat in the new wave of antisemitism spreading throughout the world. It is the Western secular democracies as well, in which both Jews and non-Jews have, if only intermittently, enjoyed the benefits of peace, prosperity and common egalitarian values, that are in grave danger of subsidence.

This is what all too many in the West, including its power-holders and influence-peddlers, refuse to understand. We are truly in a war, different from any war we have fought in the past, waged on many different fronts from fifth column infiltration to an expanding demographic to incendiary physical assault to “Dark Web” terror attacks on basic cyber infrastructures to the introduction of Shari’a Compliant Finance on the stock market, but a real war nevertheless that will persist well into the century. Let us not dissemble or extenuate. In its militant dimension it is a war that is once again approaching our shores—9/11 was only the opening salvo—and which will have real consequences in large numbers of casualties, civil disruption, cultural prostration and economic breakdown.

And it is a war that, in the long term, we may well lose if we do not awaken to the peril which confronts us. It is not by the pricking of our thumbs that some of us fear the imminence of a generations-long tumult but by a sober reading of the historical archive, the absorption of the relevant literature and an informed and common-sense alertness to the current scene. Those of us who are sounding the alarm will naturally be accused by the droves of sleepwalkers shuffling in the public domain of exaggeration and even of war-mongering in our turn. But when these contemporary R.I.P. Van Winkles are finally jarred awake by events, they will likely find themselves living and dying in a very different world from the one in which they fell asleep.

In his introduction to The Best American Essays (2002), entitled “To Open a Millennium,” Stephen J. Gould remarked that, as the 20th century began at the end of World War I, so the 21rst century dawned the day after September 11, 2001. This was the “fateful year” and the meaning of 9/11 was the substantive issue to be addressed. I venture to say he was correct. We are now challenged as never before as the 21st century unfolds toward the seismic event of civilizational conflict between a messianic world-faith and a secular world-view. There are no atoms of compatibility between two such global systems of culture and belief. Let us listen to the music before we have to face it. For the theme song of the Islamic adversary—we have the authority of Hamas chieftain Mahmoud Zahar on this—may be regarded as a modification of the famous Leonard Cohen lyric: first we take Jerusalem, then we take New York.

From Our Canadian Friends at Piddingworth

THE SENSE OF A WOMAN

According to the 'official' feminists and their media mouthpieces, Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska and running-mate of John McCain in the American presidential election, is not an authentic' 'woman'. To quote the former campaign manager for the philandering John Edwards (no kidding), 'Governor Palin doesn't understand the needs of women'. Gloria Steinem has said that the only thing that Sarah Palin has in common with Hillary Clinton are her hormones. Thank goodness for that!

The left-wing are practitioners of 'GroupThink'. Instead of regarding individuals as persons in their own right, they lump every person into an ideological category that is based upon a selected human trait or condition. Each category is defined according to a prescribed collective history, characteristics, and status. Thus, there is for them a 'black community' to which all 'black people' belong because of the colour of their skin. There are, however, some exceptions to such membership. So, if you are Barack Obama, a thoroughgoing liberal, even if he is but half-black, he is a fully-fledged member and now a spokes'person' for the 'black community'. Robert Mugabe is black. Is he a member of that community? Clarence Thomas, the Justice of the US Supreme Court, is a black man, and unlike Mr. Obama, he is the descendant of slaves. Is he a member of the skin-selected community? No. As a conservative, his views counter those of GroupThink, and even with his pedigree, he is excluded from being an 'authentic' member. Like Condoleeza Rice, the brilliant US Secretary of State, also a descendant of slaves, Thomas has been referred to by some of the 'authentic' liberal members as an 'Oreo', i.e., like the famouse biscuit, he may have black skin but inside he's just like a white man. The left frequently resorts to dismissing people by calling them names. Engaging in ideas seems to be anathema to them.

Similarly, the most prominent and liberal brand of feminists reserve the true definition of a 'woman' as a female who believes in what that 'group' believes, i.e., permitting the killing of unborn and partially born children (euphamised as 'Choice'), government oversight of child-rearing (for those children who had the good fortune not to be aborted), e.g., Hillary Clinton's 'It Takes A Village'; the 'equality' of homosexuality with heterosexuality and the promotion of the same in school textbooks for young children; and any government programme that finances and advances their philosophy anywhere, including Africa. They love 'centralised' authority if it is liberal and even crypto-socialist. Governing, to the Left, is managing the lives of citizens according to GroupThink.

Women like the impressive Sarah Palin, are not true members of the 'Woman Community'. As the recent disgusting liberal rants against her and her family have shown, she is villified for having an orthodox Christian belief in the sacredness of human life, as well as a view of the world and of culture that reflects the importance of the 'individual' in their choices, their personal character, and manner of living. For Governor Palin, that includes fighting corruption, cutting waste of people's money, encouraging economic prosperity, being a 'hockey mum', hunting and even participating in a beauty contest.

She has been criticised for having been the Mayor of a small town and Governor of a state with a small population; even though Barack Obama, their hyped-up left-liberal hero, has been mayor and governor of nowhere. Indeed, the only thing he has run, with all his eloquence, is his campaign.

The left, especially the media, are even attacking her for having a yet-to-be-married 17 year old daughter who is five months pregnant.

If there was any doubt of the amorality of the media jackals' who are disgustingly feasting on Sarah Palin's family life, surely it is blatantly obvious now as they demonstrate the profound betrayal and vulgarity that has, in the past two decades, so overtaken their once-noble purpose. The paucity of fairness, integrity and balance has become predictably the norm. If there is any doubt of the left liberal loathing for women who embrace and live lives based upon the ancient foundation of faith and culture it has been made obvious.

There is no doubt that Sarah Palin was chosen by the legendary John McCain (who, unlike Obama, lacks the extensive experience of a 'community organiser') in part, because she is a woman; with the hope of attracting voters who would vote for her because she is a woman. But after Sarah Palin's remarks to the Republican Party on Wednesday evening, it is overwhelmingly obvious that the greatest reason he picked her is because of her personality, character, public record and personal beliefs; all of which came through brilliantly, with a mixture of wit, courage, determination, conviction and a common sense that reflects a knowledge of the common good and the legacy from which her country has been so blessed. Margaret Thatcher, also a woman, achieved her place in government and history because of who she was and what she believe in at the core. It is doubtful that many voted for her or her government because she was a female.

Joe Biden, her Democratic Party Vice-Presidential opponent has reportedly said that he thinks that Sarah Palin is 'a good looking woman'. Yes, indeed, she is. But the shallowness of the left, with it's dishonest obsession with race, gender, and sexual license does not apply to Sarah Palin...and they will increasingly discover as the election campaign continues that the ordinary citizen, by common sense, is drawn to a person more for who and what they are and stand for than what they look or sound like...or what 'group' they represent.

Sarah Palin is an inspiration and one can see it's magic as the enthusiasm for her and her heroic running-mate rapidly grows. Her femininity will add to the quality of her words and deeds and bring a fresh perspective to the issues of the day, but the simple fact of being 'female' in itself, is or ought to be, irrelevant.

One can easily respect and enjoy the sense of this wonderful and extraordinary woman!

If I was an American I would gladly support her and the old maverick John McCain.

Written and originally published by Piddingworth

A New Birth of Freedom

"Barack Obama and his minions are indeed persuaded that public sentiment does not matter. They could not care less that the citizens do not consent, and they believe that what they have done cannot be undone. “Yes, we can,” they chant. But the truth is they can’t, for they are wrong."

You may have heard Rush Limbaugh talking about this hopeful and important column by Hillsdale professor Paul Rahe. With the Tea Party Express crossing the heartland, with state governors and attorneys general defending their states in the courts, and with the overwhelming rejection of the tyrant's agenda by voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, this may indeed be America's "finest hour."

By Paul A. Rahe

Back in November, when Peter Robinson interviewed me for Uncommon Knowledge, he waited until the last segment to throw down the gauntlet, asking me bluntly why I was so much more sanguine regarding the future than was the estimable Mark Steyn. My reply, which caught him off guard, was what he jocularly called “a low blow.” For I said something like this: “Mark Steyn is a Canadian. What would you expect? I’d be a pessimist myself if I were a Canadian.”

I would not want to deny that my ad hominem argument struck a bit below the belt, but I nonetheless thought it apt, and I have not in any way changed my mind. Mark is a man of keen understanding and quick wit, and he bears comparison with George Will and Charles Krauthammer, the very best of our pundits. Moreover; as a Canadian who has lived in Great Britain, he has firsthand experience of the profound damage done by what I, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, termed soft despotism in my recent book. When he writes, in a recent post, “ it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished,” he is surely right. Indeed, I agree with almost every word in the following:

Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: . . . the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers” in any meaningful sense of that term (i.e., evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon.

Mark’s ruminations make for a depressing read, as does the longer version that originally appeared in the pages of National Review, but what he has to say comes close to being on the mark. If the program passed in the House of Representatives on March 21st and signed into law thirty-six hours thereafter is fully implemented and left in place for any considerable length of time, it will complete the project begun by the Progressives when they first took control of the federal government in 1912. We will, as Mark argues, be indistinguishable from the Canadians and the Europeans; our character as a people will change; we will be transformed into subjects and wards of the state, and we will no longer be citizens; our economy will stagnate; and we will have neither the resolve nor the resources with which to defend our country and its way of life. If we acquiesce, we really are doomed.

This is what gives me hope. For we are not yet a people apt to acquiesce in dictates handed down by our lords and masters. When Britain and Canada drifted into socialism, there were no tea parties spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens to buck the trend. The British and the Canadians lacked the spirit of resistance – though, to be fair, it lived on in the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

We Americans are made of sterner stuff. During the Cold War, we defended the Free World. In our absence, I am convinced, everyone else would have given way. I do not mean that we are everything that once we were. The public school system, the welfare state, the consumer culture, the sexual revolution, social security, and Medicare have sapped our sense of self-reliance, our energies, and our strength. After Pearl Harbor, entire fraternities marched into town to join the armed forces. On 9/11, I was teaching a class at the University of Tulsa entitled Historical Studies in the Origins of War. That evening my students interrupted my lecture to ask that I speak about what had happened that day. When I told them that we were at war and asked how many of them intended to enlist, not a single hand went up. We are, sadly, less instinctively apt to insist on looking after ourselves than were our forebears.

But, Mark Steyn to the contrary notwithstanding, we have not yet entirely lost the American spirit. What happened at the town halls in August, what took place in Virginia, in New Jersey, and, most dramatically, in Massachusetts proves the contrary. Barack Obama and his minions are indeed persuaded that public sentiment does not matter. They could not care less that the citizens do not consent, and they believe that what they have done cannot be undone. “Yes, we can,” they chant. But the truth is they can’t, for they are wrong.

Never, in the history of the United States, has a political party dared, in the face of public opinion fully formed and fiercely adverse, to carry so ambitious a bill without a modicum of cover from the opposition. What the Democrats have done is a breathtaking expression of contempt not just for public sentiment as revealed in the polling data but also for the verdict handed down by the people of Massachusetts at the polls in January. What they have done would never have been attempted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had a healthy respect for public opinion. What Barack Obama calls the audacity of hope is reckless in the extreme.

As I have argued in a recent post, Abraham Lincoln was right when he wrote, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” What this means in the present circumstances cannot be overestimated. The Republicans, if they seize the occasion, will have the rapt attention of their compatriots. If they expose fully the tyrannical ambition at the heart of the healthcare bill, they not only can, they will prevail. All that they then have to do is to restate in contemporary terms what FDR said with an eye to Herbert Hoover and the business progressives of the 1920s and the early 1930s: that “a small group” of his fellow Americans was intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives,” for, as is perfectly obvious, that is precisely what Barack Obama and his minions are attempting to do.

This is, as Mark Steyn insists, a very dangerous time. In my judgment, however, it is also a time of almost unprecedented opportunity. We have options that have not been vouchsafed to the friends of liberty for more than sixty years. For, if the Republicans manage to articulate, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the rationale for limited government as that rationale is pertinent to the healthcare bill, they will at the same time have articulated the grounds for doing away with the administrative state, and everyone will recognize the consequences.

The larger danger – which I analyzed in detail in Montesquieu & the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift – has never been that we Americans would succumb to socialism as a consequence of a coup d’état of the sort being attempted by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and their acolytes. The larger danger has always been what Tocqueville feared: that the citizens of liberal democratic republics would gradually and unobtrusively come to depend on centralized administration for help in every aspect of their lives. Our propensity to drift in the direction of obliviously surrendering our liberties one by one in search of a security that no government can really guarantee has always been where the greatest peril lay.

Like Mark Steyn, I view Barack Obama as “one of the most consequential presidents in history,” but not for the same reasons. In my view, he and today’s Democratic Party represent the last gasp of the Progressive impulse. The tyrannical ambition hidden at the heart of Progressivism’s quest for what Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed “rational administration” Barack Obama has made manifest; and to all with eyes to see, the danger that we have temporized with for nearly a century is now perfectly visible. As Obama himself has insisted in speech after speech, the moment in which we now live is a “defining moment.” What is required in what he calls “this defining moment” is what Abraham Lincoln once called “a new birth of freedom.” The period we just entered could be our finest hour.

Dr. Paul A. Rahe is a noted historian of political philosophy, Professor of History and Political Science at Hillsdale College and author of the renowned study Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution.

John Paul II and the Cold War’s Decisive Moment

From The Catholic Herald

By Father Raymond de Souza

Forty years ago the communists got what they wanted, and lived to rue the day.

When Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków was elected Pope John Paul II in October 1978, the question arose of how Moscow and Warsaw would deal with a potential papal visit to his homeland. The communists wanted no part of a pope behind the Iron Curtain. St Paul VI had accepted the invitation of the Polish bishops to visit for the millennium of Poland’s baptism in 1966, but the Polish regime and its Soviet overlord refused to permit the Holy Father to come.

The wily “Primate of the Millennium”, the now Venerable Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński went ahead with the Mass marking the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Poland at the shrine of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa, concelebrated by Archbishop Wojtyła and the entire Polish episocopate. At the centre of the celebration was an enormous vacant chair, upon which the cardinal placed a portrait of St Paul VI. Everyone got the message.

In 1979, the aging tyrants in Moscow advised their Polish subordinates to close the border to John Paul, as they had to Paul VI. Warsaw knew better; it was simply impossible to refuse the Polish pope entry to Poland, perhaps the world’s most devout Catholic country. So they tried to do the best they could. St John Paul II asked to visit “my beloved Kraków … where every stone and brick is dear to me” for two days in May 1979. He would come for the 700th anniversary of the martyrdom of
St Stanisław, the 11th-century bishop of Kraków, murdered by King Bolesław the Bold himself during Holy Mass. The Polish communist party was aghast; the Polish pope returning to commemorate the anniversary of the state killing his predecessor was simply impossible.

So they refused the proposal for two Stanisław-focused days in May, and offered instead nine days in June. John Paul accepted the “compromise” and announced the nine-day pilgrimage for June. The Polish bishops then decided to transfer the celebration of St Stanisław’s feast to June.

Thus outmaneuvered before the apostolic visit even began, the Polish regime, at best, could only attempt to limit the damage. They clumsily directed Polish state television, for example, not to show any scenes of the massive crowds. Yet they did not manage to get through the first day before suffering a lethal blow.

Landing in Warsaw on June 2, 1979, John Paul made a triumphal entry to the capital city, entering Victory Square, with its tomb of the unknown soldier, for the Mass for the vigil of Pentecost. With a million people packed into Warsaw’s rebuilt Old City, he preached the most important sermon in the thousand-year history of Poland. He began by pointedly recalling that God had seen to it that a pope would visit Poland, even after the refusal of 1966. The words were diplomatic and pious, but there was no subtlety in the message: God had won, the Church had won, the Polish people had won.

“Together with you I wish to sing a hymn of praise to Divine Providence, which enables me to be here as a pilgrim,” he began. “We know that the recently deceased Paul VI, the first pilgrim pope after so many centuries, ardently desired to set foot on the soil of Poland… To the end of his life he kept this desire in his heart, and with it he went to the grave. And we feel that this desire – a desire so potent and so deeply rooted that it goes beyond the span of a pontificate – is being realised today in a way that it would have been difficult to foresee.”

“Difficult to foresee” – perhaps the greatest understatement in the history of papal rhetoric. But John Paul clearly saw what was at stake. It was the same question that led to the martyrdom of Stanisław: would Poland remain free, or would the Polish state claim the things of God?

He continued: “My pilgrimage to my motherland in the year in which the Church in Poland is celebrating the ninth centenary of the death of St Stanisław is surely a special sign of the pilgrimage that we Poles are making down through the history of the Church.”

The witness of Poland, “from Stanisław to Maximilian Kolbe”, could not be understood without reference to Christ and the nation’s Christian faith, John Paul insisted. There could be no justice in Europe without a free Poland on the map, and there could be no just accounting of Poland’s identity and mission without including its faith in God.

As the homily went on, John Paul was repeatedly interrupted, sometimes for minutes on end, by a rhythmic chant of the vast congregation: “We want God! We want God!”

By the end of the homily, only hours after his arrival, the historical moment was already clear. The contest was over between a free Catholic Poland and the communist tyranny that had been imposed upon it from Moscow in 1945. It would take another 10 years to work out the details, but it was not in doubt who would win, and why.

The end of the Cold War cannot be understood apart from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev and the geopolitics of the 1980s. But the decisive moment was on June 2, 1979 in Warsaw, not on a battlefield or in a chancellery negotiation, but at the Mass for Pentecost.

Fr Raymond J de Souza is a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of convivium.ca