195 Comments

1. NahnCee:

“…all of whom have master’s degrees or higher from elite institutions of higher learning like Columbia …”

How many of those degrees are in Art History, or French, or Women’s Studies, or Black Literature, or Educational Policy & Development? Increasingly, the PhD’s I meet all seem to be over-educated idiots who are incapable of changing a tire, loading a rifle, or running a whiskey still, which is why it’s so hard to take them seriously as an enemy if/when the civil war ever does erupt.

Oct 22, 2008 - 9:27 pm 2. Tomorrowist:

Heh, I’m worried about what they can do with a tire iron, not what they can’t do. I’m also worried about their friends from the ‘hood. Especially when the government gives to those friends the vacant house down the street from me.

Oct 22, 2008 - 9:44 pm 3. Fred:

I think pretty much as Wretchard does on this point. Having once been in the company of these kinds of ideologues, nothing would surprise me as to their ad hoc morality. Gradually, in stages, as I shucked away my attachments to the modern versions of the Pelagian heresy, I have also gradually in stages been recovering, in a thoughtful way, the traditional Catholicism I once strove to go beyond. Only when I discovered how flawed, in every way, humanity is did I finally understand that socialism is not the Kingdom of God.

Che Guevara was nothing but a murderer and torturer. He liked having that kind of power. Saw himself as cast in a Messianic role to be a mighty angel to impose Marxism on the masses. What does it say that you currently have a petition going around academia in the U.S. – and they have gathered OVER THREE THOUSAND signatures of professors and educators – declaring that Billy Ayers is no terrorist or murderer. These people have no moral compass. And thousands of their youthful charges wear Che T-shirts or have Che posters in their dorm rooms…

Oct 22, 2008 - 9:49 pm 4. LFMayor:

What kept the Roman’s on top of barbarian hordes for so long? Organization. A professional military vs. a barbarian warrior ethos. Discipline vs. the “big man” concept. They’re dangerous to the individual or to small groups, but a warrior culture will wilt when the big man falls in front of them, or when the tactician behind the scenes ends up out of service. Organize. Remember, you have to be hard enough and hit hard enough to quail them. They talk and think and plot a lot NahnCee, but they don’t ever expect to get their own hands dirty, that’s what the proles are for. When they do actually get into motion, they’re as much a threat to themselves as to anyone else, look at Ayer’s former moll (pretty much validates your thesis). Tomorrowist, are you the only neighborhood resident who’s unhappy about your newest neighbors?

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:04 pm 5. Magna cum laundry | Schools online:

[...] there would be holdouts, plans were made for liquidating the estimated 25 million unreconstructable Source Education – [...]

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:07 pm 6. Dave:

To again reference Paul Johnson: Sartre wound up being the spiritual godfather of the Khmer Rouge. True, he would have been appalled at their mass murder, but it was he who provided them with their psuedo-intellectual justification.

“Takes an education to plot the deaths of millions”? A good summary of (again quoting P Johnson) Secular Millenarism—-the belief that the human mind can engineer utopia. Just as soon as all the lesser mortal disappear.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:14 pm 7. Benj:

Am I right to assume O’s Harvard magna cum laude law degree is sticking in Wretch’s craw? His willingness to cultivate anti-intellectualism finds ready takers here. Think of Peterike mocking me for having more “classics on my shelf” than Sarah P. has heard of…But are there many, ah, classical conservatives who would disdain the best that’s been thought and said? In Sarah’s case, though, at least she knows what she don’t like (and what she’s prefer other people not be allowed to read)…

Mike Rose thinks through the pubs’ latest great refusal of Schooling Out GOP below.l.

I have been thinking a lot these days about the way knowledge or being knowledgeable gets defined in the political moment – in the moment, but affected by a thick web of longstanding American cultural conflicts.
An example is the way the McCain campaign has attempted to diminish Barack Obama’s education at Harvard Law School.
One conflict in play is that of rural America versus the city. This is Sarah Palin’s trump card. The rural versus urban conflict vibrates throughout 19th and 20th century American fiction: Country boy or girl escapes the close-mindedness of the small town to find cosmopolitan liberation in the city – or finds in the city amorality and alienation. Flowing through these story lines are condescension toward country life or, conversely, harsh judgment toward the city and its institutions…like Ivy League universities.
Related to this cultural conflict is the longstanding tension between practical life, experience, and common sense versus schooling, book learning, and intellectual pursuits. “It took a guy with a college degree to screw this up,” the saying goes, “and a guy with a high school degree to fix it.”
Resonant with both of these conflicts are the conflicts of social class. It’s pretty deadly when Obama’s answers to questions are labeled “professorial.” The implication is that he’s aloof, an elitist, out of touch with the common Joe.
It is this long, tangled cultural history that is invoked when members of the McCain entourage say “Harvard” or “east coast” or in some way refer to being in school rather than out in the real world.
John Kerry got a dose of this treatment, but where Obama is concerned, there is one other factor and that is race. By labeling Obama an elitist or haughty and out of touch, you don’t have to say a thing that’s overtly racist to spark in those who are predisposed the sense that the young Obama rose above his station, or was/is too big for his britches.
Another variation here is that, yes, Harvard Law is quite an achievement, but Obama got there because of the color of his skin – or, conversely, if Obama got there, it must not be that big of an achievement after all. As an e-mail rushing around the Internet suggests, if a poor white boy had a similar educational trajectory, he’d be hailed as a huge American success story by the Right.
Embedded within America’s cultural conflicts are legitimate criticisms of knowledge gained through formal education and the resulting professional standing it confers. Such knowledge can be abstract, removed from on-the-ground empirical reality. It can be exclusionary. It can be used to great harm – one of the documentaries on Enron is subtitled “The Smartest Guys in the Room.”
But the conservative attack on knowledge over the last eight years does not emerge from such concerns. Conservatives have not advocated for, say, deep experiential knowledge as a hedge against bookishness. The party that claims it offers new ideas has sacrificed its purchase on ideas. Instead, we’ve had the substitution of loyalty for expertise, feeling for rationality, and the cherry-picking rather than analysis of evidence. All this was done to maintain power and bestow privilege. Nothing new about that.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:16 pm 8. vanderleun:

Seems we’re on the same page today, Richard:

http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/hitchhiking_in.php

Except I’m a little more local.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:29 pm 9. newscaper:

“An example is the way the McCain campaign has attempted to diminish Barack Obama’s education at Harvard Law School.”

FWIW, back in ‘83 a high school classmate of mine (in the same honors & AP classes) spilled the beans on the Ivy League. I know its a cliche but she was the daughter of a very successful Jewish doctor. All of the older siblings went to the Ivy League (she ended up at Dartmouth).

When we were all caught up in the admissions game she basically said that you weren’t getting in at the very top ones unless you were a legacy or otherwise connected, or your family was relatively wealthy — and you had the class markers — upper class sports, serious music etc. in addition to good scores.
Non-elites (and we were in the South) tended not to get in (even with outstanding scores like mine – 99th %ile) unless they were a minority or perhaps white and poor rather than middle class — IOW had something that appealed to their desire to show, in token fashion, how open minded they were.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:36 pm 10. Zeno:

I am far from being an “anti-intellectual”, yet I am quite sure that too much time in the Academia can lead to a loss of common sense. Not always because of rampant marxism; sometimes it’s because of isolation (”ivory tower syndrome”), or because simple explanations for the facts are usually refused by them: common sense explanations are too ordinary, see. Those people prefer more “complex”, “nuanced” truths. I mean, “truths” (”Truth doesn’t really exist”, remember). An inversion of Occam’s razor principle.

In practical issues, I’d prefer a plumber’s advice.

Now, a comment re: Benj.
Obama is smart, no doubt about that. I don’t think his problem is that he is “dumb” or “undereducated” nor that he is “overeducated” and a “snob”.

For me, the problem is that among his friends or mentors you can count almost only people such as: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Khalid Al Mansour, Saul Alinsky, Farrakhan, etc etc – hardly regular patriotic Americans… Now, he might be different from these guys, he might not agree with them and only have used them to go up in politics… Still troubling for me, however.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:37 pm 11. buddy larsen:

“…Actually, it’s easy. What’s hard to imagine is sitting in a room full of plumbers discussing the same thing.”

wretchard, you comic genius, i’m gonna read your book!

(my line borrowed from George C Scott talking to imaginary Rommel just before battle of El Guettar in movie “Patton”)

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:37 pm 12. Steve Skubinna:

What’s amusing (in a horrifying way) is the bland acceptance of these degreed idiots that the sheeplike masses would dumbly submit to their overlordship. So once the cops and the National Guard have been taken out of the picture, how many vets would grab their CMP M1 Garands and Carbines and meet up at Lexington Green to show the Weather Underground (now above ground, but not for much longer) what free citizens can do?

And Benj, brilliant observation that perplexity at a room full of 25 educated people plotting bloody totalitarian takeover and mass murder is “anti-intellectualism.” Fine intellectual friends you have there, laddybuck. And I agree, only an embittered Harvard wannabe like Wretchard would cavil at groups like the Weathermen.

What next? You going to suggest Wretchard opposes collectivism because he has Daddy Issues? Let’s see that scintillating educated brain you’re so justly proud of at work some more.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:42 pm 13. Captain Ramen:

Every nation has elites. Is it inevitable. And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

The problems lies when the interests of the elites and everyone else diverges. The result is a complete lack of trust that the elites have our best interests at heart. ultimately it can possibly lead to an overthrowing of the elites. The supplantation of the authority of the Roman Senate by Roman Emperors comes to mind.

Recently I attended a party where we had a nice lively conversation. Eventually the conversation moved to the cream of the crop of America: mostly episcopalian, went to the best schools, not ridiculously wealthy like a Buffet or a Gates but certainly in possession of great means.

The party hostess spends a lot of her time trying to obtain grant money from these elites. Every time she encounters them she must be formally introduced (even if she remembers them, they sure as hell don’t remember her). They identify one another by speaking french (they speak at least two languages other than English). They have a transnational agenda.

if you asked Joe the Plumber if he thought he had anything in common with these people, what do you think his answer would be? He currently ea

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:42 pm 14. buddy larsen:

There’s only one guy between Alinsky and ACORN –which was founded by an Alinsky lieutenant. Can’t recall his name, but he was as usual for the type an unpleasant-looking red-haired pockmarked pissed-off-looking affair.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:42 pm 15. Lance de Boyle:

Ordinary Americans were taken by surprise by the violence of the late 60s.

“Black Panthers? What’s that?”

“Weathermen? I already get it on the news.”

“Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. What’s THAT mean?”

Mom and Pop watching it all on the TV, sad and confused.

Not this time.

Too many ordinary Americans remember the 60s; have seen leftism infect every social institution; and are now hearing the same siren call for radical change (the subtext of which is “We are going to take it all, now.”) as we did before.

They think we are weak and ripe for pruning.

But this time, many of us look forward to the raised fists and cheesey berets and the marches and the tough talk and the burning store fronts.

Now we know what there is to lose.

Bring it on Billy.

We’ve been waiting.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:46 pm 16. Captain Ramen:

Every nation has elites. Is it inevitable. Usually it works, for a time. In our case it is completely broken.

The problem lies when the interests of the elites and everyone else diverges. The result is a complete lack of trust that the elites have our best interests at heart. Ultimately it can lead to an overthrowing of the elites and/or civil war. The supplantation of the authority of the Roman Senate by Roman Emperors comes to mind.

Recently I attended a party where we had a nice lively conversation. Eventually the conversation moved to the cream of the crop of America: mostly episcopalian, went to the best schools, not ridiculously wealthy like a Buffet or a Gates but certainly in possession of great means, and all connected in one way or another.

The party hostess spends a lot of her time trying to obtain grant money from these elites. Every time she encounters them she must be formally introduced (even if she remembers them, they sure as hell don’t remember her). They identify one another by speaking French (they speak at least two languages other than English). They have a transnational agenda. BTW she is an ardent Obama supporter and hates W.

if you asked Joe the Plumber if he thought he had anything in common with these people, what do you think his answer would be? He currently earns a hell of a lot more money than most Americans. He wants to become a small business owner, which would put him in a very small club. And yet I sense he has a kinship with someone just starting out at the bottom of the oil industry in Alaska, or someone else earning a fifth of what he makes, starting from the bottom trying to make something of himself.

Can you really say that the analysis found at this site and others like it is brain-stem only? This isn’t anti intellectual. It is anti-elite. The elites (the Senate) and the rest of us (The Populus) are not working towards the same ends anymore. For a republic to thrive The Senate and the People must share the same common interests.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:54 pm 17. Captain Ramen:

Ok i don’t know what safari did to my half baked post (#12) but please ignore/delete it.

Oct 22, 2008 - 10:55 pm 18. Ayers’ Weathermen planned “re-education”, genocide of Americans « Sharp Right Turn:

[...] the summary from Belmont Club and then watch the 2 minute video: Undercover agent Larry Grathwohl discusses the Weather [...]

Oct 22, 2008 - 11:02 pm 19. wretchard:

There are various kinds of elites. Those with little formal education who’ve made billions; those without money but who’ve written immortal poetry or solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. There are the unsung elites, like the couple who live right next door to my parents who’ve been caring for their quadraplegic son these last 20 years. There are elites among Mangyans, even though they’re illiterate, who can hear the music of the spheres that no one else can. There are elites simply because the distribution of human intelligence, moral courage, imagination and charity throughout the length and breadth of world means that extraordinary people will be found everywhere, even among plumbers.

But this is not the definition of “elite” the Weathermen imagine. It is too catholic, too statistical and above all, too apolitical a definition to suit their book. The British used to say there was an aristocracy of men in which membership was readily apparent to another one of the club. You could meet that person on the Northwest Frontier or in a London cab; in Borneo or in the Reform Club. And there would be instant, mutual recognition. The problem was that you have to take such elites as you find them. They are not inductible into some creepy organization like the Weathermen. You cannot issue them an ACORN badge and thereby transform them. You cannot re-educate them into the mold of superiority. You can only degrade them into a kind of mediocrity; beat them down into a level. Because that’s what Ayers and company are, mediocrities whose claim to quality are petty credentials and social advantages and who consequently, have made credentials, political and otherwise, their obsession. The Vanguard of the Proletariat. Do you want to join?

The reason democracy works is because it recognizes that elites exist, but that they exist everywhere; that there is no hereditary aristocracy; not even an institutionally hereditary one. We say that “all men are created equal” because there is no way, a priori, of knowing where the spark lies. Therefore the best policy is to assume it lies everywhere until proven otherwise. That means everyone should get a shot at success, not be shot for success at one of the Weathermen’s planned re-education camps.

Oct 22, 2008 - 11:04 pm 20. davis,br:

Crap. So Fred mentions the Pelagian heresy, and I wiki it …and discover that I’m not even close to 9 for 9 on Augustine’s Council of Carthage c.418 …and maybe a sympathist – of sorts – of Pelagius. Sigh. A bad month just continues to get worse.

Oct 22, 2008 - 11:10 pm 21. truepeers:

>>“…all of whom have master’s degrees or higher from elite institutions of higher learning like Columbia …”

>”How many of those degrees are in Art History, or French, or Women’s Studies, or Black Literature, or Educational Policy & Development?”

A lot of them are in such disciplines. And then there is the Texas Academy of Sciences which cheers a man who wants to wipe out 90% of humanity with ebola.

Evil is everywhere, and always has been. Worth remembering that we got this far notwithstanding…

Oct 22, 2008 - 11:56 pm 22. Leo Linbeck III:

There is a difference between anti-intellectualism and anti-secularism. These are often confused in the minds of pseudo-sophisticates because they cannot accept the complementarity of reason and faith. To them, reason is anti-faith, and therefore believers must be anti-reason. Credo ergo non cogito.

But this position fails the test of elementary logic. Just because I’m anti-secularism doesn’t mean I’m anti-intellectual. Rather, I’m anti-secularism because I’m intellectual. It was through my Great Books undergraduate education – as well as my graduate studies in engineering and business – that I came to see the fundamental flaw in the secular world view. As John Henry Newman put it,

Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; – these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University;

The secular world view takes as the highest calling intellect, taste, a noble and courteous bearing. And these are indeed good things – some BC posters would do well to act the gentleman. Newman says as much:

I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them;

But while necessary, they are not sufficient. Newman continues:

but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless,—pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers, and on the long run;

The secular world view dons the wardrobe of the virtuous gentleman, but, in this case, clothes do not make the man. We are flawed, and the reliance of the secularist on themselves as the universal reference point transforms a cureable disease into a fatal one. Left to our own devices, our pride, our avarice, our appetites, our sloth, our temper, our sexual urges, and our bounded rationality metastasize into evil. Our human nature, unbounded, is a dangerous thing.

Our only hope, then, is to abandon the essential narcissism of the secular world view, and accept the fact that there is more to this universe than us. There is Him. And His gifts, first of reason, then of Himself.

Faith, then, is does not overthrow reason; it perfects it. Athens and Jerusalem were made for each other. And it is only the two working together that can keep man from destroying himself. Newman concludes:

Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.

Man’s passion and pride: knowledge and reason alone have no hope against them. This fact is hard to accept if your life is spent in the world of knowledge and reason, the world of the University or the literary magazine; but it’s pretty damn obvious if you spend much time with plumbers or commercial fishermen. To quote Orpheus: there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

That is why I encourage all my MBA students at Rice and Stanford to spend some time working with their hands. It’s a great prophylactic against secularly-transmitted diseases.

L3

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:06 am 23. James:

Wretchard,

I have to say that I somewhat disagree with your assumption that a rejection of Christ leads to (or led to) the ideologies of the late 19th century which found their conclusion in the early 20th century.

I see it more like the 18th Century Enlightenment being a rejection of much of the church and then Romanticism being a rejection of the Enlightenment. With most aspects of the left, the contemporary American intellectual, the worst aspects of the environmental movement, and so forth all springing forth from Romanticism.

To the extent that the modern left is secular is somewhat incidental, in my opinion. To be secular is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the western academic left. The rejection of the church seems, at least to me, to have little to do with anything at all other than the left’s rejection of the western tradition itself. Put another way, it’s not merely Christ nor is it because of any doctrinal aspects of Christ that they are rejecting. Everything is to be rejected.

Even the charge made by some Creationists that the horrors of nazism and communism are the inevitable result of Darwinism aren’t very moving. Much leftist thinking is inherently anti-Darwin in its orientation, as the persecution of E. O. Wilson by the academic left illustrates.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:21 am 24. Pascal:

The reason democracy works is because it recognizes that elites exist, but that they exist everywhere; that there is no hereditary aristocracy; not even an institutionally hereditary one. We say that “all men are created equal” because there is no way, a priori, of knowing where the spark lies. Therefore the best policy is to assume it lies everywhere until proven otherwise. That means everyone should get a shot at success, not be shot for success at one of the Weathermen’s planned re-education camps.

This evocation demonstrates why cynics like Benjy, the mineral kid, and the plastic explosive demonstrate various degrees of unhingedness on your site. Demonstrating sentimentality for the many, including the seemingly lowliest of humans, is simply viewed with contempt by elite worshipers. One so much that he’s driven to retching repeatedly.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:14 am 25. agajeenian:

I have a PhD in APplied Linguistics from UCLA, speak English as my first language and Italian and French as fairly decent second languages. It was at UCLA that I learned that a person could be an extraordinarily creative thinker in his or her own field, even in several, but still be a total sheep intellectually in others, following wherever the mob led. It a very depressing sight.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:22 am 26. Steve Skubinna:

It was G.K. Chesterton who said that when a man stops believing in God, it isn’t that he believes in nothing, it’s that he will believe in anything. I think man requires belief, and it does not have to be religious. How else to explain the increasingly hysterical actions of the Church of AGW, as the wheels continue to come off? How else to explain the bizarre evangelical trance state of some (by no means all, or even most) Obama devotees? How else to explain the dogged determination of leftists everywhere, from vile terrorists such as Ayers to innocuous cranks such as Chomsky, to stay the collectivist course and redouble their faith, in the face of total disaster brought upon every sad population unfortunate enough to fall under their theories?

Faith can move mountains, or it can induce one to bash his head repeatedly against them.

James, I think you are at least partially right. I have long classed Rousseau as one of the three most dangerous philosophers of all time. I rank him above Neitzsche and below Marx.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:22 am 27. Manny C:

It was Ravi Zacharias that said:
“If God is dead then your first choice will be to make Man God. And if you make Man Go, you can be sure that it will not remain an abstraction like “Man is God”. It will become some Men becoming God: either Hitler or Hugh Heffner.”

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:02 am 28. Manny C:

Sorry the second sentence should read:
“And if you make Man God, you can be sure that it will not remain an abstraction like “Man is God”.

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:05 am 29. Peter Boston:

What has been lost is our appreciation of the elegance of the Ancient Wisdom. What is the Hebrew Bible if not a blueprint for civil society?

Preserve the family. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not falsely accuse your neighbor or consort with his wife.

What could be more simple?

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:08 am 30. wretchard:

One of Saul Alinsky’s maxims was that it was advantageous to turn familiar forms to new and if possible, revolutionary uses. But the idea was not original to him. The history of religion and belief is the story of adapting old concepts to new uses. In Latin America and in the Philippines, many pre-Christian customs were simply converted to new uses.

Despite its pretensions to “scientific socialism” the Left really behaves like a religion. And it is a master of adopting Christian forms — witness Liberation Theology — or even scientific forms — witness AGW — to its underlying purpose. To that extent, the Left isn’t essentially secular with respect to traditional religion. It is, as James said, incidentally secular. But the Left is essentially a deism, even when it adopts a secular skin. It’s hidden god is power. Power over man is its ultimate goal.

In the classic encounter between Winston Smith and O’Brien in Room 101, Winston Smith challenges the Party’s claim to absolute power. He observes that O’Brien himself is aging and will die like other men, so where is the Party’s power over reality? But O’Brien replies that the Party, can by torment, coercion and lies, make people believe anything it wants — even that it can set aside death. It is power over man, not nature, that it craves.

The god of the Left is at once surpassingly petty and monstrously large. As soon as I saw it for what it was, I began to suspect that it was really so akin to the ancient conceptions of evil that various cultures have had — the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, the Light Bringer — that it was the same thing. Just as people through history have come to a common perception of what good is, there was something about the god of the Left that resembled the thing we universally fear. And so it morphs again; and will continue to shift its shape again long after we think it is vanished. The god of the Left didn’t begin with Rosseau; and it will live on long after the Left itself is a discarded husk.

It wants power; for nothing in particular. Simply to gnaw upon it, as on a dry bone.

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:16 am 31. gokart-mozart:

benj: “An example is the way the McCain campaign has attempted to diminish Barack Obama’s education at Harvard Law School.”

Oh puh=leez! A “Harvard Law School education”? How many presidents of the Harvard Law Review have there been who never published anything, even in their own journal? For that matter, how many amotivational drug users in danger of flunking out of high school go to Columbia?

Anybody with an IQ >110 who isn’t already in the tank for Obama knows why he was at Columbia, and Harvard – and anybody who has been in either of those places who deserved to be there knows lots of other Obamas.

You may be able to fool some of the people with Obama’s fake degrees and intelligence-by-brand identity, but the success of the con doesn’t make it true.

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:31 am 32. MrPete:

In India, I once asked an older, wiser man why, with all their educated professionals, India could not produce clean water for its people.

I’ll never forget his answer. It nicely sums up the problem of Marxism, of Socialism and yes, of this election.

“Why? Because an educated scoundrel is still a scoundrel.”

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:09 am 33. outa my league:

Wretchard,

Speaking of snakes, These 83 “admissions” filed by Democrat lawyer Philip Berg don’t leave Obama and the DNC a whole lot of “wiggle room.”

Enjoy! After all, where theys smerk theys fire.

****************

Obama & DNC Admit All Allegations of Federal Court Lawsuit – Obama’s “Not” Qualified to be President
Obama Should Immediately Withdraw his Candidacy for President
For Immediate Release: – 10/21/08 – Complete contact details and pdfs of this press release and motions filed by plaintiff Berg today are at the end of this article

(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 10/21/08) – Philip J. Berg, Esquire, the Attorney who filed suit against Barack H. Obama challenging Senator Obama’s lack of “qualifications” to serve as President of the United States, announced today that Obama and tbe DNC “ADMITTED”, by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions, all of the numerous specific requests in the Federal lawsuit. Obama is “NOT QUALIFIED” to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate. The case is Berg v. Obama, No. 08-cv-04083.

Berg stated that he filed Requests for Admissions on September 15, 2008 with a response by way of answer or objection had to be served within thirty [30] days. No response to the Requests for Admissions was served by way of response or objection. Thus, all of the Admissions directed to Obama and the DNC are deemed “ADMITTED.” Therefore, Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President.

OBAMA – Admitted:

1. I was born in Kenya.
2. I am a Kenya “natural born” citizen.

3. My foreign birth was registered in the State of Hawaii.
4. My father, Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. admitted Paternity of me.

5. My mother gave birth to me in Mombosa, Kenya.
6. My mother’s maiden name is Stanley Ann Dunham a/k/a Ann Dunham.

7. The COLB [Certification of Live Birth] posted on the website “Fightthesmears.com” is a forgery.
8. I was adopted by a Foreign Citizen.

9. I was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, M.A. a citizen of Indonesia.
10. I was not born in Hawaii.

11. I was not born at the Queens Medical Center in Hawaii.
12. I was not born at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Hawaii.

13. I was not born in a Hospital in Hawaii.
14. I am a citizen of Indonesia.

15. I never took the “Oath of Allegiance” to regain my U.S. Citizenship status.
16. I am not a “natural born” United States citizen.

17. My date of birth is August 4, 1961.
18. I traveled to Pakistan in 1981 with my Pakistan friends.

19. In 1981, I went to Indonesia on my way to Pakistan.
20. Pakistan was a no travel zone in 1981 for American Citizens.

21. In 1981, Pakistan was not allowing American Citizens to enter their country.
22. I traveled on my Indonesian Passport to Pakistan.

23. I renewed my Indonesian Passport on my way to Pakistan.
24. My senior campaign staff is aware I am not a “natural born” United States Citizen.

25. I am proud of my Kenya Heritage.
26. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.

27. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.
28. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.

29. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.
30. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.

31. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.
32. The document identified as my Indonesian School record from Fransiskus Assisi School in Jakarta, Indonesia is genuine.

33. I went to a Judge in Hawaii to have my name changed.
34. I went to a Senator and/or Congressman or other public official in Hawaii to have my name changed.

35. I had a passport issued to me from the Government of Indonesia.
36. The United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.

37. I am ineligible pursuant to the United States Constitution to serve as President and/or Vice President of the United States.
38. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Indonesia.

39. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Kenya.
40. I am an Attorney who specializes in Constitutional Law.

41. Kenya was a part of the British Colonies at the time of my birth.
42. Kenya did not become its own Republic until 1963.

43. I am not a “Naturalized” United States Citizen.
44. I obtained $200 Million dollars in campaign funds by fraudulent means.

45. I cannot produce a “vault” (original) long version of a birth certificate showing my birth in Hawaii.
46. My “vault” (original) long version birth certificate shows my birth in Kenya.

47. The only times I was to a Hospital in Hawaii was for check-ups or medical treatments for illnesses.
48. Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.

49. Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.
50. I was born in the Coast Province Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.

51. I represented on my State Bar application in Illinois that I never used any other name other than Barack Hussein Obama.
52. I went by the name Barry Soetoro in Indonesia.

53. My Indonesian school records are under the name of Barry Soetoro.
54. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when admitted to the State Bar of Illinois to practice Law.

55. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when I was Sworn into my United States Senate Office.
56. I hold dual citizenship with at least one other Country besides the United States of America.

DNC – Admitted:

1. The DNC nominated Barrack Hussein Obama as the Democratic Nominee for President.
2. The DNC has not vetted Barrack Hussein Obama.

3. The DNC did not have a background check performed on Barrack Hussein Obama.
4.The DNC did not verify Barrack Hussein Obama’s eligibility to serve as President of the United States.

5. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya.
6. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama is not a “natural born” United States citizen.

7. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii.
8.The DNC admits they have not inquired into Barrack Hussein Obama’s citizenship status.

9. The DNC admits they have a duty to properly vette the Democratic Nominee for President.
10.The DNC admits Lolo Soetoro, M.A., an Indonesian citizen adopted Barrack Hussein Obama.

11. The DNC admits the Credentials Committee has been aware of this lawsuit since August 22, 2008 as the lawsuit was faxed to our Washington D.C. Office on August 22, 2008.

12. The DNC admits their Credentials Committee failed to verify and/or inquire into the credentials of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as the President of the United States.

13. The DNC admits their Credential Committee’s Report failed to address the issues of Barack Hussein Obama’s ineligibility to serve as President of the United States.
14.The DNC admits Howard Dean, Chair Person has and had knowledge Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as the President of the United States.

15. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all Democratic citizens of the United States have been personally injured as a result of not having a qualified Democratic Presidential Nominee to cast their votes upon.
16. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional Right to vote for the President of the United States and to have two (2) qualified candidates of which to choose from.

17. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional right to have a properly vetted Democratic Presidential Nominee of which to cast their vote.
18. The DNC admits an FBI background check is not performed on the Presidential or Vice Presidential Candidates.

19. The DNC admits the United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.
20. The DNC admits they collected donations on behalf of Barack Hussein Obama for his Presidential campaign.

21. The DNC admits Plaintiff and Democratic citizens donated money based on false representations that Barack Hussein Obama was qualified to serve as the President of the United States.
22. The DNC admits if Barack Hussein Obama is elected as President and allowed to serve as President of the United States in violation of our Constitution, it will create a Constitutional crisis.

23. The DNC admits Barack Hussein Obama took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution.
24. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to due process of law in violation of the United States Constitution.

25. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to Equal Protection of the laws in violation of the United States Constitution.
26. The DNC admits the function of the DNC is to secure a Democratic Presidential Candidate who will protect Democratic citizen’s interests, fight for their equal opportunities and fight for justice for all Americans.

27. The DNC admits the Democratic National Committee has been promoting Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential election knowing he was ineligible to serve as President of the United States.
Our website obamacrimes.com now has 50.7 + million hits. We are urging all to spread the word of our website – and forward to your local newspapers, radio and TV stations. Berg again stressed his position regarding the urgency of this case as, “we” the people, are heading to a “Constitutional Crisis” if this case is not resolved forthwith.
Philip J. Berg, Esquire
555 Andorra Glen Court, Suite 12
Lafayette Hill, PA 19444-2531
Cell (610) 662-3005
(610) 825-3134
(800) 993-PHIL [7445]
Fax (610) 834-7659
philjberg@obamacrimes.

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:16 am 34. Gary Ogletree:

Many people live their whole lives based on false assumptions they adopted as adolescents. Not all of them discard their moral compass like Dear Leader and Friends.

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:17 am 35. Doug:

For Buddy,
Austin Idjiots:
New Zeal Obama File 31 Grey Power! Ageing Texan Radicals for Obama
—
This site has an EXTENSIVE bunch of articles on Barry’s ties with Ayers, Dohrn, Davidson, Klonsky, and etc.
—
From Underground to de rigeur.
Stormy – The Weather Underground

This one has the Ayers/Dohrn Videos.
New Zeal Obama File 30 Former Terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Involved in Key Pro-Obama Organisation

In the series of 9 Videos on YouTube, number Six has the greatest number of bombings documented, but a small fraction of the EIGHT HUNDRED bombing between 1969 and 1971.
Once Sleepy Santa Barbara alone had two deaths related to the Terror Underground.
—
The Ayers LIE about the extent of their involvement and their bogus claim to never to have planned for and CAUSED Deaths.

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:25 am 36. Richard:

The thing I find most dangerous in the comments to this post (and others like it in other places) is the easy “bring it on,” “let them try it” response from posters. One example from several above is this:

“What’s amusing (in a horrifying way) is the bland acceptance of these degreed idiots that the sheeplike masses would dumbly submit to their overlordship.”

Fact is, however insane their belief in an earthly utopia, and however ignorant they are about almost everything outside their own belief system, Ayers and co. are tireless and capable organizers. And that (with heartlessness) is mainly what it takes to take over a country and run it by terror. Ayers’ meetings would be to the point and constructive and would end with an action agenda containing assignments for everyone. His death machine would roll over the unorganized masses, including the would-be rebels posting in these comments. That’s why its important to never give Ayers and friends the chance to show what they can do.

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:49 am 37. Doug:

Maoist Hardliner & Ayers Associate Comes to Obama’s Defense
—

To be clear, as it seems always necessary to repeat when Obamaniacs, in their best Saul Alinsky tradition, shout down the opposition:

This is not about guilt by association. The issue is not that Obama knows Klonsky … or Ayers … or Dohrn … or Wright … or Rashid Khalidi …

The issue is that Obama promoted and collaborated with these anti-American radicals. The issue is that he shared their ideology.

…When Obama and Ayers collaborated together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) education-reform project, with Obama chairing the board that oversaw funding decisions, CAC underwrote the Klonsky/Ayers Small Schools Workshop with a whopping $1,056,162. And that’s not all. Nearly another million dollars was steered to the Small Schools Workshop by the Joyce and Woods Funds when Obama sat on their boards. The grand total comes to $1,968,718.

No wonder the Maoist thinks so highly of Obama.

McCarthy has much more on the Maoist.
It is a good read.

Remember– Old Maoists and terrorists never die… They just teach.

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:51 am 38. Dishman:

Faith of some form is absolutely required. The alternative is to apply doubt to absolutely everything. I have some experience with this. At some point, some form of faith must be applied to keep all the questions from unravelling everything.

It’s like pulling a loose thread, except that each meme is tied many other memes, and the unraveling allows further unravelling until it exceeds the mind’s ability to process.

Some form of faith acts as a glue to hold the whole thing together, and give it some solidity, some basis for which to form patterns.

… and then, for any faith, there will be the zealots. I think that a combination of being Human and social Individuation. I think that Individuation is probably too deeply rooted in biology (down to the cell level) to be eliminated except through total eradication.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:05 am 39. Garrett:

I have been dreading the coronation of Obama for some time now. Though thin, I have found some solace in that there could be no Reagan without Carter.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:29 am 40. ledger:

Grotesque.

Colin Powell projected a veneer of strength against our enemies.

And, to think Colin Powell, one of our highest military leaders would essentially endorse such a group of thugs is sickening.

I will not leave a long post about the self-serving comments from Powell but I will leave some dark humor on the situation.

[Liberal Larry]:

“Transformational, indeed! Saturday night, Powell was a still just a lapdog of the Bush Junta, a lying liar who lied about WMD’s in Iraq, and had blood on his hands for the millions of innocent Iraqis that Bush murdered so he could steal their oil. But on Monday morning, Powell crawled out of his bed a “man of courage”, a “true patriot”, and a “great American”. That’s quite a transformation. And all he had to do to cleanse himself of his past sins was declare his unconditional love for Obama.”

“When it comes right down to it, blind devotion is all Obama really asks of any of us. In return, he annointest us with hope, change, and free health care until our cup runneth over. Even DicKKK Halliburton Cheney, Rummy RumselKKKd, and KKKarl Rove can be absolved of their crimes – and cured of various maladies ranging from male-pattern baldness to racism – if they simply drop to their knees and declare fealty to our future President, Barack Obama. And he will be our president, as long as the superstitious, bible-clinging evangelical nutjobs of the GOP don’t get in his way.”

See: Colin Powell

http://blamebush.typepad.com/blamebush/2008/10/colin-powell-a.html

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:32 am 41. ADE:

W
25 Masters degress V 25 Plumbers: the only difference will be the vocabulary. Multiply the numbers by 1000 and then take an average: the proportion wanting to burn witches will be equal.

Benj
Other than your opening two paragraphs, there is a large element of truth in what you are saying. I think Shakespeare summarised it best: To be or not to be.

L3
You are rapidly on your way to becoming another W. I was going to challenge you on Credo ergo non cogito and its related Cogito ergo sum with my standard response: Classic French bullshit that they got the wrong way around (being elites, of course); it should be I think therefore I doubt and I am, therefore I think. However, you already knew this.

So my challenge is on Faith, then, is does not overthrow reason; it perfects it. Again, classic French bullshit.

As you know it takes only one counter-example to disprove a theory. My counter-example is Islam.

So what am I for? Humility, Listening, Constancy, Change your mind, which is my definition of Faith.

ADE

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:46 am 42. New Paltz Journal » Blog Archive » Nothing is more dangerous than the intellectual in power:

[...] that YouTube link from Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club, who writes: The most interesting moment of the video comes when Grathwohl asks the viewer to [...]

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:48 am 43. Unsk:

There has long been a characterization by the masses of the egghead intellectual as a person who is socially and emotionally deficient. The term ” egghead” implies a certain emotional disconnect from everyday life. A person who tries to hide his lack of social aptitude behind his intellectual knowledge. I think there is more than a grain of truth to that characterization.

Might the destructive intellectualized marxism of our University and over educated elite be somehow a jealous rage filled payback to all people who ridiculed and mocked our now powerful eggheads as children?

What strikes me most of Michele and Barack and many of our elite like them is their envy, resentment and anger. Many people have asked ” why do people who have now so much, still have so much resentment ?

Could it be that their childhood social inadequacies are fueling this anger? If not that, what is fueling their rage?

Barack and friends only have compassion and empathy for the
common man in the abstract. The One in reality despises the common folk – those bitter clingers, and all those social institutions that support them. There is no empathy for the damage to lifestyle of the ordinary man in Barack’s plan for this nation. The drastic changes brought by his fascist control freaks, his high taxes, his Universal Health Care and his ruinous environmental policies will leave millions of families in a pitiful position. He doesn’t seem to care and neither do his elite supporters.

In the Grathwohl interview the same lack of empathy and compassion stands out. What is a priority to Ayers and his comrades is not providing for the masses, but controlling the
masses to the point of killing them if necessary.

Grathwohl: “I brought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer.
No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.”

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:11 am 44. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Thursday Highlights:

[...] ideas, of killing Americans,, snuggling up with Papa Joe, and [...]

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:18 am 45. Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e37v4:

[...] ideas, of killing Americans,, snuggling up with Papa Joe, and [...]

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:20 am 46. slade:

Common Sense versus intellectualism has an analogue in econometrics, actually any profession that uses mathematical simulation models:

The Lie Behind LIBOR:

But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men’s urge for mathematical masturbation.

Economists ought to admit that we do not know much about what is going on today. Neither do the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary. Of course, the market demand is for “strong” leaders and for “strong” economists, who can fool the public into believing that they have great knowledge. The ones who do this best are those who have fooled themselves.

It seems to me that “young men” are the enduring problem.

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:34 am 47. slade:

Magna cum Libor

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:36 am 48. Leo Linbeck III:

ADE,

You are rapidly on your way to becoming another W.

Thank you for the compliment.

So my challenge is on Faith, then, is does not overthrow reason; it perfects it. Again, classic French bullshit.

Out of context, perhaps it is merde. But within the context of a post quoting Newman and refering to “Him,” I didn’t expect to be mistaken for Zawahiri.

I like the elements of faith that you describe, realizing of course that it is only a partial list. I guess my points about faith and reason are these (notice the difference in brevity between late night and early morning posts):

1. There are true statements that cannot be proven. Reason itself has identified this limitation. To know these unprovable truths requires faith.

2. Reason can tell us what is right, but cannot tell us why we should act rightly. Thus knowledge is one thing, virtue another. Because actions count, we need faith, both ourselves and for society.

3. At the end of the day, faith and reason cannot be incompatible. That is why reason is our most important tool for distinguishing between true faiths and false ones, and why the abandonment of reason by “submission” to some creed is the favorite gambit of false prophets.

Maybe this helps, maybe it doesn’t. But there’s very little about it that’s French.

Latin, maybe.

L3

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:42 am 49. Benj:

As per Wretch – “There are elites simply because the distribution of human intelligence, moral courage, imagination and charity throughout the length and breadth of world means that extraordinary people will be found everywhere…”

As Obama’s rise proves!

As per Wretch “But this is not the definition of “elite” the Weathermen imagine.” [Imagine? Think on W.'s use of the present-tense here - the WHOLE point of Wretch's post is to give currency to his fear-mongering re O - the Weatherman IMAGINED many evil/stupid scenarios - But that group is dead dog dead. And not missed by anyone outside of the deeply marginal world of left sects and a few scholar-squirels...Even those ex-W's who still remember with advantages their fugitive days have expressed half-awareness of their own perfidy (and narcissism).]

A Clubber expressed certainty that O went from H.S directly to Columbia because O was Black…He didn’t go directly to Colum. He went to a Cali College for two years before transferring to Columbia…There was also more dissing of O’s record at H. Law School…Here’s an interview with conservative Bradford Berenson re O’s time as Law School Ed…Doesn’t sound like O had much in common with Weatherman who once looked forward to the Year of the Fork.

Bradford Berenson Harvard Law, class of ‘91; associate White House counsel, 2001-’03

The law school generally at that time was riven ideologically, and not just in terms of Republican/Democrat partisan politics, but there were contending schools of legal thought at the time, represented on the faculty, that really polarized both the faculty and the student body. There was a far-left group of professors who adhered to what was known as critical legal studies, and then there were a handful of conservative professors, like Charles Fried, who had served in the Reagan administration. There were intense debates over affirmative action and race issues. This is, after all, just a few years after the end of the Reagan presidency. …

That doesn’t mean that, day to day, people weren’t friendly to one another, but the classroom was very politicized. The debates and discussions of the law and of cases frequently pit conservatives in our class against liberals in our class, and the discussions often got quite heated. I would say the environment at Harvard Law School back then was political in a borderline unhealthy way. It was quite intense.

… Interestingly, race was at the forefront of the agenda. There were intense debates over affirmative action that sometimes got expressed through fights over tenure decisions relating to junior faculty at the law school. There were women professors and minority professors who either had come up for tenure or were coming up for tenure, and there were big fights, on the faculty and in the law school at large, over whether they should receive tenure, whether the quality of their scholarship merited that. …

[A]fter [Obama] became president of the Review, he was under a lot of pressure to participate and lend his voice to those debates. And he did, I think, to some degree. But I would not have described him as a campus radical or a campus political leader. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review, the leader of that organization. But, in that role, his job was to manage, in essence, a publication, and the editors who brought it forth and to do a lot of close editing of academic legal articles. …

You don’t become president of the Harvard Law Review, no matter how political, or how liberal the place is, by virtue of affirmative action, or by virtue of not being at the very top of your class in terms of legal ability. Barack was at the very top of his class in terms of legal ability. He had a first-class legal mind and, in my view, was selected to be president of the Review entirely on his merits.

… I never regarded him as kind of a racial special pleader, or a person looking for race-based benefits, either for himself or others. I think as a policy matter, he supported affirmative action and believed in the arguments for it. But unlike many people on the left, he was also willing to acknowledge that it had costs, and he could at least appreciate the arguments on the other side. …

Just in a political sense, what kind of a person were you looking for [to serve as president]? …

The block of conservatives on the Law Review my year I think was eager to avoid having any of the most political people on the left govern the Review. I mean, the first bedrock criterion, I think for almost all of the editors, was to have somebody with an absolutely first-rate legal mind who would be able to engage competently with the nation’s top legal scholars on their scholarship and on these articles, and who would provide the intellectual leadership for the Review that it always needed. That was non-negotiable for almost everybody right or left.

But there were a number of people that would have met that criterion. There were at least a large handful who probably had the intellectual and personal characteristics to be good leaders of the Review. From among those, the conservatives were eager to have somebody who would treat them fairly, who would listen to what they had to say, who would not abuse the powers of the office to favor his ideological soul mates and punish those who had different views. Somebody who would basically play it straight, I think was really what we were looking for.

Was that hard to find?

It was very hard to find. And ultimately, the conservatives on the Review supported Barack as president in the final rounds of balloting because he fit that bill far better than the other people who were running. …

We had all worked with him over the course of a year. And we had all spent countless hours in the presence of Barack, as well as others of our colleagues who were running, in Gannett House [the Law Review offices], and so you get a pretty good sense of people over the course of a year of late nights working on the Review. You know who the rabble-rousers are. You know who the people are who are blinded by their politics. And you know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views. And Barack very much fell into the latter category. …

[After Obama is selected,] he does a very able job as president. Puts out what I think was a very good volume of the Review. Does a great job managing the difficult and complicated interpersonal dynamics on the Review. And manages somehow, in an extremely fractious group, to keep everybody almost happy.

Some of the people who are not as happy as others, I think much to their surprise, are some of the African American people who believe that now it’s their turn.

Absolutely right, absolutely right. I think Barack took 10 times as much grief from those on the left on the Review as from those of us on the right. And the reason was, I think there was an expectation among those editors on the left that he would affirmatively use the modest powers of his position to advance the cause, whatever that was. They thought, you know, finally there’s an African American president of the Harvard Law Review; it’s our turn, and he should aggressively use this position, and his authority and his bully pulpit to advance the political or philosophical causes that we all believe in.

And Barack was reluctant to do that. It’s not that he was out of sympathy with their views, but his first and foremost goal, it always seemed to me, was to put out a first-rate publication. And he was not going to let politics or ideology get in the way of doing that. …

He had some discretion as president to exercise an element of choice for certain of the positions on the masthead; it wasn’t wide discretion, but he had some. And I think a lot of the minority editors on the Review expected him to use that discretion to the maximum extent possible to empower them. To put them in leadership positions, to burnish their resumes, and to give them a chance to help him and help guide the Review. He didn’t do that. He declined to exercise that discretion to disrupt the results of votes or of tests that were taken by various people to assess their fitness for leadership positions.

He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review. …

It confirmed the hope that I and others had had at the time of the election that he would basically be an honest broker, that he would not let ideology or politics blind him to the enduring institutional interests of the Review. It told me that he valued the success of his own presidency of the Review above scoring political points of currying favor with his political supporters.

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:04 am 50. Jim Nicholas:

agajeenian #25

Many years ago an elderly insurance salesman said to me, ‘Jim, I have met a lot of brilliant persons in my work; and it seem to me that the higher one climbs in his own profession, the less he knows about other things.’ As the years have gone by and I have reached the age from which he made his observation, I have come to share his conclusion.

I suppose it is understandable, maybe inevitable. Even the brightest have only limited time, energy, and intellectual capacity; these resources can’t be invested everywhere. As a result, a person who is among the elite in one field is among the masses in most others.

And so I place little confidence in position statements by groups of experts, even Nobel Prize winners. A prize winner in medicine or economics may have only a limited knowledge of that very field, let alone wisdom about the rest of life’s problems.

Distressing to have to be responsible for thinking for myself. But nice to have a site like BC, where others are trying to do the same.

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:39 am 51. peterike:

Benj: Think of Peterike mocking me for having more “classics on my shelf” than Sarah P. has heard of…

That’s right Benj. And guess what? I have more classics on my shelf too. The difference is that you think it makes you a better human being, or at least makes Sarah Palin a worse one whom you can dismiss as an ignoramous.

And it’s laughable to pretend that people in the Ivy’s these days are learning “the classics.” Well they are, in fact, learning them. They are learning that they were written by Dead White Males imposing hegemony on noble indigenous peoples. They are learning every “text” is nothing but a play for power by the White Male Overlords, and that the world is composed of two groups: Evil White Men and oppressed women, blacks, hispanics, Asians, homosexuals, lesbians, transgenderds, boll weevils and spider monkeys.

In grad school I was exposed to enough of these Ivy-educated post-structuralist imbeciles to fully understand Woody Allen’s quip from “Annie Hall” that you can be “absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”

Harvard Law School is nothing more than the post-structuralist academy of legal thinking. Identity politics, fanatical green-obsession, class warfare, Marxism — that’s what these “educated elites” learn. They are not educated, they are mis-educated, and they come out far stupider than they went in. A box full of turds is a lot worse than an empty box.

if a poor white boy had a similar educational trajectory, he’d be hailed as a huge American success story by the Right.

Except the parallel wouldn’t fit, because Obama was not “poor” by any stretch of the imagination. Nor was he raised “black” or in the hood. And the poor white boy would have had much less chance of ever getting into Columbia in the first place, because for all their obsession with “diversity,” it somehow doesn’t include poor white boys.

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:47 am 52. Unsk:

Upon further reflection, whatever the cause for the grievances our betters in Academia share, our Universities have become a great and useful refuge for grievance filled victim. All the various victim classes are enshrined and their grievances promoted to the nth degree.

Our Academics purpose seems to use intellectual thought only to punish society, particularly the segments of society aligned with traditional conservative values, and not to use intellectual thought to promote the common good. Intellectual thought at these places
of so- called learning and reflection has come to be strictly limited only to that that serves the destructive radical left.

Just as the word “liberal” has come to mean something very ill-liberal, I think the term “intellectual” has come to mean someone intellectually dishonest.

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:56 am 53. Derek:

The willingness to blithely dispose of people for political interest is illustrated in Canada’s socialized medical system.

The ‘waiting list’ for hip replacement surgery in BC now is 2 years. The wait for angioplasty is 6 months.

The justification for the waits are lack of resources.

How does having someone wait these periods of time save money? In either case the situations get worse.

They die.

You don’t have to treat them.

You save money.

The best medical system in the world, that defines how compassionate Canadians are.

Derek

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:57 am 54. Konyok:

Color me skeptical.

I rather doubt that the weathermen spent much time pondering the logistics of post revolutionary governance. They were pretty caught up in the “urgency of now;” trying to create the revolutionary condition, rather than managing it.

The whole rationale for the “New Left” was combining radical resistance to Capital while rejecting Soviet style bureaucratism. This entailed absorbing a lot of Syndico-Anarchism, the greatest of heresies to Marxists. These people did not join the CPUSA precisely because their intention was to rush past the dictatorship of the proletariat and get on with the withering of the state.

I really find it hard to believe that radical intellectuals of the period would sit around and talk about precisely the stuff they found objectionable about the official Communist party.

Methinks it be a canard.

However, that isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of bare butt stupidity among the educated elite. AGW is the richest mother lode today.

Here’s Lord Monckton on the adventures of Steve McIntyre with the educated idiots:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/monckton_what_hockey_stick.pdf

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:20 am 55. fred:

L3, #22 – That post was a real treat. Enjoyed it very much. Pride is the worst deadly sin, and the antidote to pride is reality, as in the kind that Joe the Plumber encounters every day he’s at work. The proud person lacks the truly jarring understanding of his own mortality and the necessity of learning to love something Greater Than himself. The proud look down on other human beings and see them only as objects present to consciousness, to be used and discarded. It’s only a short leap of logic to the re-education camps.

All of the seven deadly sins spin out of our wounded, flawed human condition. We need something else to fill in the gaps where the pain opens up to consume us. For the Christian, grace is the balm. We are not gods unto ourselves, which is what the proud person wants to be. The Divine is the Source of the compassion, empathy, forgiveness, freedom, and healing that makes being proud so unnecessary.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:42 am 56. David M:

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 10/23/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:56 am 57. peterike:

“intellectual” has come to mean someone intellectually dishonest.

“Intellectual” is the only one-word oxymoron in the English language.

Konyok: I rather doubt that the weathermen spent much time pondering the logistics of post revolutionary governance. They were pretty caught up in the “urgency of now;” trying to create the revolutionary condition, rather than managing it.

That’s probably mostly true. But Agent Grathwohl wasn’t talking about what they spent “most” of their time doing. He was talking about a particular meeting.

I can absolutely believe these idiots were sitting around enjoying the heady frisson of imagining themselves as the new SS guards in the Amerikan Extermination Camps. Just like that witch B Dohrn found the Manson killings so thrilling (what an absolute moral degenerate she is). These folk lust mightily for blood.

If you watch this video, about halfway through you will see clips of Ayers. With his granny glasses, his “man of the people” vest, earrings in both ears, he is the very picture of the vitiated intellectual, a person beyond useless because he’s an active poison in the world. When Susan Sontag called the white race a cancer, she was right. Except she forgot to qualify that it was only the sort of white people she hung around with that fit the description.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xBlTdsnOh8

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:13 am 58. cfbleachers:

The Weathermen’s plans included putting parts of United States under the administration of Cuba, North Vietnam, China and Russia and re-educating the uncooperative in camps in located in the Southwest. Since there would be holdouts, plans were made for liquidating the estimated 25 million unreconstructable die-hards.

The most interesting moment of the video comes when Grathwohl asks the viewer to imagine what it’s like to be in a room with 25 people, all of whom have master’s degrees or higher from elite institutions of higher learning like Columbia, listening to them discuss the logistics of killing 25 million Americans.

Richard, these two paragraphs remind me of a movie called “Conspiracy” about the Wannsee Conference, in which Stanley Tucci plays Adolf Eichmann and Kenneht Branagh plays Reinhard Heydrich.

Fine wines, discussions of Wagner’s style of composing, sumptuous food, elegant crystal, placards and silverware…all to discuss how to exterminate a race of people.

One can easily imagine the Ivy League cottage replacing the lakeside Berlin suburban villa, while a group of cultured voices discuss the “American” question. And the final solution.

It would not be nearly as chilling, nor in my opinion as effective…if Branagh had played Heydrich as loud, raging and bombastic. It was far more frightening to watch the methodical, cool, composed, and unflappable exterior…slowly reveal the inner demon.

I suppose the unasked question by Gratwohl, is what if an American Mossad-like group came and asked you to assist, would you give up your present life and enlist? Would you be one of the 25 million who were part of the die-hard resistance? Or would you fall in line, in order to stay alive? Tough questions.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:28 am 59. Holdfast:

Derek – still 2 years huh? Well, at least it has not gotten worse since I left. When I explain the Canadian system to my leftie friends here in NY they are either horrified or assume that I am lying. Most of them seem to want a state system as a backstop, but very few actually want something like the Canada Health Act banning all private treatment. The dual systems seem to sort of work in Australia, less so in the UK – not sure why though I could make some guesses based on stereotypes. I think the experiment in Hawaii proves that Americans will take the “free” stuff when offered, even at the cost of leaving their higher-quality private coverage.

What lefties don’t realize is that state healthcare is really just corporate welfare.

As Bev (McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada) said “access to a waiting list is not access to heathcare”.

Those 40 million unisured Americans (including those illegal non-American Americans, presumably) may not know how good they have it.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:35 am 60. Ex-fetus:

Being the village idiot, I have nothing to add.
I can google. The idiot from the next village over taught me how.

(Good link to an interesting site. But I can’t let the link stay on this site. Regards — W)

Have a nice day!

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:37 am 61. Mel Williams:

http://new.goldmau.com/article.php?id=667

In the context of economics, but this link provides a lively contrast between a thinking man and a street smart guy.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:42 am 62. Peter Boston:

Dennis Prager talked about this on this show and a casual run through several online newspapers confirms that unprovoked violence against conservatives is escalating to unseen before levels.

Senator Coleman’s house in Minnesota was vandalized. The Republican congresswoman who appeared on CNN criticizing Dems also had her house vandalized. A regular Joe in Florida who put McCain signs on his lawn had his house blasted with shotgun pellets. Cars with Nobama stickers are being trashed and not just keyed.

The social mood is ugly indeed. Conservatives have been called Nazis by the wignuts for the past 8 years. Now the same level of irrationality is coming from the MSM which routinely calls McCain-Palin rallies “hate fests.” The Secret Service accompanying McCain has debunked this but it does not matter anymore.

Anybody who does not pledge allegiance to Obama is being branded as an enemy of the state. Metropolitan police forces are openly pereparing for civil unrest (riots) on November 5. The consensus is that the preparation is for an Obama defeat. They’re wrong. The violence will be much greater and last much longer following an Obama victory.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:43 am 63. ElMondo:

I agree that modern, western higher education is mired in ideology and lunacy, but I’m loath to take it to the degree of blaming the education itself. Rather, in my view, it’s the choices too many make in what they study and what they choose to believe in.

Remember, Wretchard, that the first ones targeted in the Cambodian “Year Zero” purges and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were the intellectuals. The real deniers of freedom were the hoi-polloi of that society. The impulse driving them was ideology, not education. Ideology is what’s driving the same deniers today; it’s just that they happen to be the educated this time around. Having a higher education in and of itself doesn’t necessarily turn a person into an enemy of freedom; it’s the ideological lake the person chooses to swim in that does. And that lake just happens to be in the universities right now.

Take a look at much of the anti-intellecutalism in militant, radical Islamicism nowadays for a current example.

Educated radicals are the mistakes, not the unavoidable results, of higher education. In US history, it was the intellectuals teamed with what Communists so cutely term the “proletariat” who took the US to its present position; it took both educated advances in technology along with blue collar labor and willing “grunts on the ground” to win WWII, for example, and it was that combination that allowed the US to become the production and economic superpower that it is today. The failure of the higher education elite to avoid efeteness and descend into intellectual vapidity is a symptom of success and comfort being susceptible to ideology; it’s also a symptom of intellectual laziness, as critical thinking subsides. It’s not the fault of education itself, merely of the system as it stands today. The real lesson here is that ideology in universities is what needs a harsh light shone on it. A proper, well versed, and critically thinking education that’s not isolated in the ivory towers, but well grounded in real life and modern realities is what’s needed.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:47 am 64. Jay:

Years ago I attended a party where a Marxist killer from Cuba told the young American universit8y students how he personally shot “enemies of the people” in a Central American country. A LOT of the females were obviously sexually excited by the killer’s stories.
Since I witnessed a kid stabbed to death in my junior high school and know a number of combat vets whom I could manage to get to talk about the horrors of war, I realized that there is a repressed killing instinct in a minority of otherwise sane young people.
The Serbs and Croats armed their young men, gave them an ideology to kill and the young women approved. The rest is recent history.
I expect the Obama team to keep the combat troops in Iraq so that they can eventually release them from the service and disarm them and us.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:48 am 65. Benj:

Nope Peter – won’t do – I didn’t piss on Palin for not knowing classics. Didn’t bring the subject up. You did. I just pointed out the mindlessness of a self-professed conservative going out of his way to trash me for having classics in the house.

Might try the NR piece on Palin’s history with Ivy-ish types whom she was once tight with in Wassila. Clearly not a match made in heaven. My guess is there was blame enough to go around. Try the Crunchy Con Rod Dreher too – he was in love with Palin after the Convention, but lost the feeling after the interviews. He was particularly upset by her expressions of contempt/ressentiment for world-traveling twenty-somethings. She could have handled the questions about her own relative unworldlienss differently. Even made a strong point about her own lack of privilege. But, instead she cultivated incuriosity and ressentiment, choosing to be the (latest) proud voice of American provincialism. It’s just the flip side of standard European anti-Americanism. Both are b.s.

Hey look – anyone who loves American music – and I’m guessing you do Peter – knows there’s more to be said for deep roots than cultural tourism. I’m more taken with the culture of Blues and country people than with the faux-cosmpolitanism of students up the block from me at the Manhattan School of Music. Don’t really see the urgency of becoming maestros of the other continent’s music. But. Sarah isn’t making a case for America’s common culture – the one that hooks the Delta up to the City – Nashville and NYC and “North Toward Alaska.” Nor is she speaking up for the claims experience vs. bookishness, things over abstractions – the red wheelbarrow or those plums. She’s just making an alternately pathetic and canny case against the idea of Deliberation, of “liberal-mindedness.”

I think the Mike Rose thingy above gets pretty close to the bone re conservative populism and Mind in America. Though I’d be more intent on separating out intellecualism from academia (for some of the reasons you invoke in your post). Not an academic myself and (as you’ll recall from past posts) not a fan of P.C approaches to the Cannon or the past. (Not a fan of dimmer brands of American triumphalism either.)

Hey, why don’t agree to agree on Gypsy Blood and Howling Wind…

PS Konyoke is right re the provocateur. Wretch’s link here is probably further eviedence of his relative cluelessness when it comes to reading American movements of mind (and history). If you’re born and raised and now live thousands of miles away from the USA, you just can’t get it all from the internet. Most intelligent people know what they don’t know. Not Wretch…

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:53 am 66. starling:

@ Benj: Am I right to assume O’s Harvard magna cum laude law degree is sticking in Wretch’s craw? His willingness to cultivate anti-intellectualism finds ready takers here.

In short, no. The Belmont in “Belmont Club” is a reference to a suburb of Boston and Cambridge where, I believe, Wretchard lived when he attended Harvard. I think it was the Kennedy School of Government. If you detect anything stick in his craw, maybe its a Harvard thing,an intramural game.

As for the broader current of anti-intellectualism that you think you find here, I’ll take issue once more. It’s highly unlikely that I am the only college professor or PhD on this forum. In fact, one self-identified in an earlier comment. Among the regular readers and commenters there surely are countless graduates of the nation’s finest universities and professional schools. But, and here’s the most interesting part about the regulars here, I rarely if ever see anyone flaunting their degrees, education level, or institutional affiliation. So again, there are plenty of smart, educated people here, but not much in the way of anti-intellectualism and not much in the way of education-worship either.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:54 am 67. Tamquam Leo Rugiens:

Wretchard: “Left is essentially a deism, even when it adopts a secular skin. It’s hidden god is power. Power over man is its ultimate goal.”

Classical Marxism inveighs against Capital, and where the theory was applied, removed distributed Capital from the people and concentrated it in the hands of the State. And elites guide the State. Classical Marxism having been discredited by its failures is seldom promoted as such. Today, it seems to me, that Marxist theory has replaced Capital with Power. The critique is no longer about who controls the means of production, but who controls. Now Power is criticized with a view to stripping it from the people and concentrating in the hands of the State. And still elites guide the State. One way to do this is to exchange the broad ’spiritual’ Rights found in the Bill of Rights for more circumscribed rights. Eg. the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is exchanged for the more limited ‘right to choose.’ Thus by a series of small exchanges the Power of the man in the street is diminished and the Power of the elites through the State is enlarged.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:57 am 68. Demosophist:

It isn’t possible to be “un-French” or “un-Bristish” (although there’s a famous cartoon of Jefferson laboring over the Declaration of Independence with various trial opening phrases, leading off with “We, the un-British…”). But the point is that to be un-American you have to first be American. Osama isn’t un-American. Chomsky is. Ayers and other Weathermen belong to a type of revolutionary that’s essentially American, albeit a monstrously distorted version. It’s the extreme version of a “recessive” strain that has existed for as long as we’ve been a country. “American Exceptionalism” is a double-edged sword. I don’t think the term “anti-American” quite captures the tortured and twisted nature of what Ayers and his fellows are. Perhaps Hitchens’ term “domestic masochists” is more like it.

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:03 am 69. Whitehall:

It is true that all societies have and need elites. They are a natural social phenomenon.

The great achievement of the American Revolution and the US Constitution was to create a lasting process for the turnover of political elites. In most other societies, the only way to displace an elite is to cut off their heads or otherwise kill them.

We’ve also made progress in keeping society fluid enough that elites not directly holding political power can be prevented from acquiring too much legal protection. Free speech and economic competition allows us to displace, albeit slowly, the dominant New Yor Times and their controlling family. TV networks had a legal basis for their oligopoly in FCC broadcast licenses.

The fight ahead is to keep those elite turnover mechanisms effective and active.

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:05 am 70. Whitehall:

I should add that another active front needs to be the destruction of the tenure system in higher education. Note that Obama and the Democrats keep pushing a college education as the key to future respectablity and higher incomes. That’s just creating more demand for what is increasingly a poor investment in higher education.

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:08 am 71. Agoraphobic Plumber:

“As for the broader current of anti-intellectualism that you think you find here, I’ll take issue once more. It’s highly unlikely that I am the only college professor or PhD on this forum. In fact, one self-identified in an earlier comment. Among the regular readers and commenters there surely are countless graduates of the nation’s finest universities and professional schools. But, and here’s the most interesting part about the regulars here, I rarely if ever see anyone flaunting their degrees, education level, or institutional affiliation. So again, there are plenty of smart, educated people here, but not much in the way of anti-intellectualism and not much in the way of education-worship either.”

Hey, there’s also us small-town hicks. Well, okay, I’m college educated, but I don’t count that as one of my finer qualities and it wasn’t at a prestigious school. At any rate, I hope soon to buy or start a small business and never need my degree again.

Whatever the case, I also have rarely seen here any of the kind of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism that you find at some other sites. I’ve been reading here for years primarily because it’s one of the more dispassionate, thought-provoking sites I’ve come across, ever.

I just really would like the opportunity some day to pick Wretch’s brain for an evening. But then, I’d like to have dinner with Jesus, Karl Marx, Abe Lincoln, Plato and Sun Tzu, too. Ah, well.

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:21 am 72. Benj:

@ Starling – I’ve addressed Wretch’s Harvard thingy in the past here. He’s played fast and loose with all that – once invoking Bush’s Ivy B-School degree as an “achievement” w/o irony but later refusing to give an inch to OBama’s academic excellence…

BTW – re Wretch’s Harvard cred – I do recall an occasional Poster being way impressed by Wretch’s Harvard connection. Though I am happy to agree that the Club is relatively free of academic pomposity. It’s one of the best thing about this joint. I should probably add that I’m guessing W. would allow that in the groves of academe, post-grad (?) work at the Kennedy School isn’t in the same league as graduating MCL from Havard Law. Or even graducating from Harvard College. Though I don’t know the details of Wretch’s academic career…

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:41 am 73. peterike:

Benj, first let me apologize. I sometimes tend to use you as a whipping boy for the anger I have toward the Obamanauts, and I treat you with less respect than you deserve. I think you’re far more nuanced than most of them, and more independent minded. While I think your man-crush on O is blinding you to a lot, I also think that you would be among the first to voice anger if O and the Dems try to shut down the Belmont Club. And I also think you’re in for some major heartbreak from your guy.

But anyway. I still think you’re missing the point with Palin. You write this:

Sarah isn’t making a case for America’s common culture – the one that hooks the Delta up to the City – Nashville and NYC and “North Toward Alaska.” Nor is she speaking up for the claims experience vs. bookishness, things over abstractions – the red wheelbarrow or those plums.

What you’re doing here is expecting Palin to talk in the vocabulary of, for want of a better word, “intellectuals.” To speak in abstractions and concepts. She will never speak that way because she doesn’t think that way.

For one thing, I don’t think she’s ideological at all, though she is certainly grounded in certain key beliefs. She doesn’t think in political terms or academic terms, and she does terrible when faced with questions that demand that kind of a response. But she has a different strength.

Ultimately, what Palin has proven herself to be — by actions, not pretty words — is someone who gets things done, someone who succeeds at everything she tries, and who has succeeded at increasingly higher levels. Is she perfect and pure as snow? Of course not, though the media holds her to precisely that standard. Oh my, she didn’t cut every single earmark! Oh my, she changed her position on the Bridge to Nowhere! Oh my, she pushed her authority a little in firing a few jackasses! (And Benj, you again alluded to Palin’s book banning — this is a lie, you should stop bringing it up.)

Palin is not a political geek like most of us at BC, and she’s not intellectually curious about the world. And why? Because she’s too busy raising a family, running a business, running her state, and succeeding at task after task. She’s a doer, not a talker. Doers tend to make a lot of talkers uncomfortable and even envious, so the talkers take the easy route of labeling the doers as boobs and dimwits. Yet take away the doers and the entire world collapses in a minute. Take away the talkers and things will roll along quite nicely for decades.

She’s shown herself to be a quick study, and to have held up under a relentless, hysterical and vicious coordinated attack campaign that would crush almost anyone.

Is she qualified to be President? If you think that means talking a good talk, then no. If that means citing Supreme Court cases, then no.

For me, what I want in a President is a strong grounding in values, honesty, forthrightness, courage, eloquence if I can get it, and a clear and obvious love for America and American freedom. Palin has all of this in spades. As President, she would have access to all the information in the world and could get it when she needed it. (During the Cuban missle crisis, the vaunted JFK was paralyzed with fear to act at first. So he brought in advisers, got everyone’s take, and then relied on one of his best qualities, which was a firm belief in America’s goodness and in the evil of Communism.)

No President needs to respond to a crisis in a split second, nor would you want them to. I have no doubt that Palin could assemble the right people, keep them in line (I bet she is great at running a meeting), get the best advice, and then process it through the simple filter of “what is best for America.”

That filter would never include “what will the NY Times say?” or “how will this play in the court of world opinion?” the way it would with Obama. And her filter does not begin with the assumption that America is a force of evil in the world. That is the assumption of most of Obama’s mentors, cronies and hangers-on, including his wife, and very likely Obama himself, though he takes pains to say otherwise.

Palin brings with her a history of success. Obama brings three elections won by dubious, unethical means (I’m including his stolen caucauses vs Hillary), a bunch of decrepit housing stock, and the ability to toss millions of dollars to America hating educational crackpots.

I wouldn’t let Obama run a candy store. But I would happily put Palin into the CEO seat of any company in the world knowing that within a few months she would be making things better.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:06 am 74. buddy larsen:

Agoraphobic Plumber, pray tell, what do you do once your own dwelling is fully plumbed?

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:12 am 75. peterike:

I left out an important item in Obama’s great resume of success. He managed to have a multi-year academic career that didn’t produce a single page of bylined writing. Though he did of course write those two books…. about himself.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:14 am 76. Cyber Johnny:

I imagine the elites would find a good percentage of the 25 million unreconstructable die-hards down here in Texas. Us die-hards also probably own about half of the guns and ammo in the whole country. Those elites guys better pack a really big lunch before they come down here to mop up.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:15 am 77. Eggplant:

Agoraphobic Plumber said:

“I just really would like the opportunity some day to pick Wretch’s brain for an evening. But then, I’d like to have dinner with Jesus, Karl Marx, Abe Lincoln, Plato and Sun Tzu, too. Ah, well.”

Wretchard is arguably the brightest guy on the web (he’s got stiff competition from people like V. D. Hanson). If you could ever organize that dinner, I wouldn’t mind being there, listening intently and trying to keep my mouth shut.

Richard said:

“Fact is, however insane their belief in an earthly utopia, and however ignorant they are about almost everything outside their own belief system, Ayers and co. are tireless and capable organizers. And that (with heartlessness) is mainly what it takes to take over a country and run it by terror. Ayers’ meetings would be to the point and constructive and would end with an action agenda containing assignments for everyone. His death machine would roll over the unorganized masses, including the would-be rebels posting in these comments. That’s why its important to never give Ayers and friends the chance to show what they can do.”

Marxist belief systems are nonsense almost by definition. However Marxists are good at organizing (that’s why they’ve survived all these decades). Marxists also tend to kill lots of people before they are finally driven from power. The election of the Chosen One ***will*** give Ayers and friends the chance to show what they are capable of (Who do you think was behind the Chosen One’s political success?).

The system is malfunctioning. Electing McCain was probably our last chance to avoid a major breakdown. After the Chosen One is elected, we will go into free-fall. From that point on, anything can happen…

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:23 am 78. Konyok:

My wife will graduate in the Spring from a highly regarded 2nd tier private university with a degree in Cognitive Neural Science. Originally, she sought a degree in Communications. During her freshman year she took a course titled “Gender and Communication.” She was excited, thinking that it would explore the different communications styles used by the two genders and issues in communications between the two genders. Imagine her surprise when she learned that it was a critical hermeneutic analysis of the methods used by the patriarchy to marginalize the five genders. As a forty-something “non-traditional student” she found it all rather odd. The keystone of the class was a three week deconstruction of the Mary Tyler Moore show. (Short synopsis: Mary was actually a gender traitor because she sometimes made coffee for Lou.)
This was Fall of 2004. Although she was a good John Kerry voting Democrat, my honey just couldn’t understand why, if this was an “oppression studies” class, a 30 year old TV show was so much more important than honor killings, female circumciscion or the spread of shariah law in family law courts in western countries. Silly her. Despite fine, well researched writing, she received a “D” in the class because she spoke up. (Yes, fred, that IS the chance that we take, but we must take it … ) This year she is swallowing her pro-choice pride and voting McCain.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:39 am 79. Giya:

From Ledger’s post:

“if they simply drop to their knees and declare fealty to our future President, Barack Obama.”

A modern day Xerxes asking Ephialtes to betray his fellow Spartans. Leonidas was cruel and required his men to stand. Xerxes was kind – he required Ephialtes only to kneel. Obama the God King.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:52 am 80. steveaz:

Unsk, #50,
“Upon further reflection, whatever the cause for the grievances our betters in Academia share, our Universities have become a great and useful [...]”

Not often noticed, too, is the role Ivy’s and state Uni’s play in our nation’s international relations. Taken together, they churn out tens of thousands of Indian, Saudia Arabian, Sri Lankan and Chinese grads. The ramifications of spreading an institutional ethos whose merits are becoming more and more dispensable to professional achievement are beyond my ken.

Also impacting the international stage are such things as Federally-directed college-admissions quotas based on a foreign nation’s “relations” with us. As 911 and first World Trade Center bombing surely taught us, an ill-conceived Federal student-visa program will produce effects downstream at the state level.

Another fluke of our Uni-system is its inadvertent recruitment of illegal immigrants, usually rationalized in-house as increasing “diversity on campus.” Where paid scholarships and low-interest student loans are hard to come by, these immigrants are beiing shunted into a zero-sum game where their applications compete with American citizens’ for the scant financial aid.

It ain’t pretty. Not sure what the fix is, though.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:58 am 81. MJ Isaacs:

Nasty complaints abound about people who are sneering at Obama’s Harvard “education” — but let me recall, weren’t these complainers the same people who snickered at George Bush’s pitiful IQ and hokey ways? I am no Bush supporter, but what about his Yale MBA? Obama, smart; Bush dumb? — never mind they both achieved the same level of education. I can speak first hand about the intellectual snobbism and the feet of clay of those possessing advanced degrees and living like parasites within the halls of Academe. Just reread the post by Konyok — I can relate! I know a few of them –and not a one of them can do anything useful like change a tire or unplug a drain. I am not impressed with degrees. I have three, including a Ph.D. Ho hum…

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:06 pm 82. Nine-of-Diamonds:

Steve Skubinna did an excellent job pointing out Benj’s immorality.

A presidential candidates’ mentors casually discussed liquidating 25 million people. On several occasions these mentors actually DID kill. Although 0bama was not personally responsible for Ayers’ crimes he has abetted his ideological campaign through the Annenberg Challenge scam -moreover, 0bama continues to lie about the extent of his relationship with radical groups.

Given these facts, what is our resident Commissar’s primary concern? That Wretchard is being unfair to the Teleprompter Jesus-Negro because of an inferiority complex.

Envying the intellect of a Bill Ayers disciple is like envying the organizational skills of Beria. No truly intelligent man envies another’s talents if they’re not tempered by a personal moral code.

Come to think of it, can 0bama even be described as a scholar? (Where are those transcripts, BTW?) The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that this harping on 0bama’s intellect is so much misdirection. Based on my experience in the Ivies I concur with those who take a dim view of their “pedigree”. The post-modernistic witches’ brew that I and others endured does not make for well-rounded graduates. And then there’s the whole racial issue – conspicuously avoided by 0’s followers. Their affirmative-action Messiah was a nonentity as a “con-law professor” and rarely opened his mouth in the teachers’ lounge – presumably for fear of embarrassing himself. His classroom dialogues generally focused on multi-culti mush about “race theory” and “class consciousness”. When asked on the campaign trail about basic con law precedents he flounders. Kind of sad, but that’s what you get when advancement in academia is melanin-based – not merit based.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:12 pm 83. Peter Boston:

What shall become of the Belmont Club before the time that today’s toddlers enter the indoctrination system?

Soon enough we will see good-looking, well dressed people with finely modulated voices telling us that the internet is too shrill, too divisive for the New Society. ISPs will be charged with responsibility for policing those sites that permit disparagement of others because of their political views. Daily Kos will be deemed to engage in intelligent, scholarly discussion.

I always wondered what Fritz thought about what was going on around him in the 30s. Now I know.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:20 pm 84. Storm-Rider:

Wretchard: “Despite its pretensions to “scientific socialism” the Left really behaves like a religion.”

Yes, Marxists the world over have made a religion out of their ideology; and it is a jealous and evangelical religion, and a religion more than willing to commit mass-murder on a far greater scale than the perversions of Christianity.

“The religious aspects of socialism may explain the extraordinary attraction of socialist doctrines and their capacity to inflame individuals and to inspire popular movements. It is precisely these aspects of socialism which cannot be explained when socialism is regarded as a political or economic category. Socialism’s pretensions to be a universal world view comprising and explaining everything – from the transformation of a liquid into steam to the appearance of Christianity – also make it akin to religion. A characteristic of religion is socialism’s view of history not as a chaotic phenomenon but as an entity that has a goal, a meaning and a justification. In other words, both socialism and religion view history teleologically. Bulgakov draws our attention to numerous and far-reaching analogies between socialism (especially Marxism) and Judaic apocalyptics and eschatology. Finally, socialism’s hostility toward traditional religion hardly contradicts this judgment–it may simply be a matter of animosity between rival religions.” Igor Shafarevich

“It is certainly true that socialism is hostile to religion. But is it possible to understand it as a consequence of atheism? Hardly, at least if we understand atheism as it is usually defined: as the loss of religious feeling. It is not clear just how such a negative concept can become the stimulus for an active attitude toward the world (its destruction or alteration) or how it can be the source of the infectiousness of socialist doctrines. Furthermore, socialism’s attitude toward religion does not at all resemble the indifferent and skeptical position of someone who has lost interest in religion. The term “atheism” is inappropriate for the description of people in the grip of socialist doctrines. It would be more correct to speak here not of “atheists” but of “God-haters,” not of “atheism” but of “theophobia.” Such, certainly, is the passionately hostile attitude of socialism toward religion. Thus, while socialism is certainly connected with the loss of religious feeling, it can hardly be reduced to it. The place formerly occupied by religion does not remain vacant; a new lodger appeared.” Igor Shafarevich

“World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them–all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis…. The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct–also laid bare by Shafarevich–these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach…. The author also convincingly demonstrates the diametrical opposition between the concepts of man held by religion and by socialism. Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity…. It could probably be said that the majority of states in the history of mankind have been “socialist.” But it is also true that these were in no sense periods or places of human happiness or creativity.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:31 pm 85. Benj:

Peter – I take your point re my over-reach when it comes to Palin’s habits of mind/expression. I’m asking for too much. But – what can I say – I think you nail it for all time when you allow “she’s not intellectually curious about the world.” For me, that’s a heavy demerit for someone who wants to be pres of the world’s indispensable nation. I think you’re basically right on about her anti-ideology. And Lord knows there’s something to be said for her resistance there. Uufortunately the incuriosity should be a deal-breaker for the American people even if it didn’t come with a shot of resentment toward folks who are more worldly. BTW No lies about Palin’s ceonsoriousness – I just read a convincing graph in that NR piece on Palin’s interactions with the Wassila librarian – It was a book about gays that bothered Palin bigtime and moved her to make enquiries about removing it from the library. Always knew the later lists of “censored” books that floated round the internet were jive, but the basic story re Palin and librarian is all true. As for Palin’s own back-tracking there, can’t truss it.

Palin’s own will-to-power seems to come with a powerful will to fib her way forward. Just look at her response to that Report condemining her ethical lapses. No prob if she defends herself – says the report is unfair or untruthful. But nope – she just asserted that the report cleared her! We’ve had a quite a bit of doers who make their own reality lately. And it aint worked out too tough. Sarah shares a lot with Ivy W…

The two books OBama wrote are NOT chiefly about himself. Especially (obviously) #2. And O’s capacity to write for a GENERAL as opposed to an academic audience is a sign of genuine intellectuality. Which shouldn’t be confused with scholarship. Though they’re not mutually exclusive…

Here’s a beautiful short piece on the response to 9/11 from a FIRST OF THE YEAR: 2008 that addresses the dangers of P.C. bookishness and elitism on the academic left. Doubt you’ll be able to resist it but when it gets to the closer, think back on your (implicit) defense of “incuriosity.” – You’re surely RIGHT that it’s no sin – but no-one as intelligent as you should be SO skeptical of those who believe the point of life is to convert as much experience as possible into consciousness…

Bliss

By Charles O’Brien

Excerpted from a 2004 analysis of (what the author termed) “the foreswearing of argument” by those who equate criticism of Arab cultures with “ignorance” and/or “orientalism.”

…Some months back, Joan Didion published a truly regrettable essay in the New York Review of Books. It has now been published as a book. On page 12 at the back, Didion quotes a Steven Weber, who says, in part,

“The first thing you noticed was in the bookstores. On September 12, the shelves of books on Islam, on American foreign policy, or Iraq, on Afghanistan. There was a substantive discussion about what it is about the nature of American presence in the world that created a situation in which movements like al-Quaeda can thrive and prosper. I thought that was a very promising sign.

But that discussion got short-circuited. Sometime in late October, early November 2001, the tone of that discussion switched, and it became: What’s wrong with the Islamic world that it failed to produce democracy, science, education, its own enlightenment, and created societies that breed terror?”

And Didion herself attests, “Most of us saw that discussion short-circuited.”

Three things, then: books were sold, there was a discussion, there was a switch. That books were sold and that there would be discussion after September 11 were matters of course. Whether there would be a “switch” and what that switch would be would depend on how much the word “discussion” would have to carry. Well, quite a bit, and Didion comes prepared. Weber could talk about bookstores and conversations in New York because he was there. Anyone in that time and place could. But Steven Weber, says Didion, is so much more:

“A member of [U.C. Berkeley]’s political science faculty, Steven Weber, who is the Director of the MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance at Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, and a consultant on risk analysis to both the State Department and such private-sector firms as Shell Oil.”

How could it not be true? Look again at the “switch” though…

“What’s wrong with the Islamic world that it failed to produce democracy, science, education, its own Enlightenment, and created societies that bred terror.”

“What’s wrong,” after all, is an impermissible enquiry when…everything’s fine! But there are problems in the Arab Muhammadan world and there are many questions that need asking. What are the prospects for democracy in the Arab world? In Iraq, it once existed, but it was brief, and fragile. In Lebanon, it existed, as long as a non-Arab, non-Mohammadan ethnic group was dominant. In Algeria, it elected the F.I.S. Elsewhere, nothing. And science? The next Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry could very well be Arabs, but not if they work in Arab countries. Education? Don’t even mention Saudi-funded madrassas (themselves substitutes for the inadequate schools run by various governments) or the schools run by the P.A. What institutions of higher education would Weber recommend? Not even, one suspects, the American University in Beirut. In place of enlightenment, there is a deeper obscurantism. And as to the “breeding of terror:” that was the very reason for the “discussion.”

The questions Weber objects to are all reasonable points, all pertinent, all definitive of what the “discussion” was not. Didion herself goes on to discuss the “discussion,” and that will have to fend for itself. Weber, in this excerpt, does not. No need. “Discussion” is the ignorance trope. “Discussion” is the arduous voyage to where-I-am. It begins with the reading of a book and continues with, really, the first thinking the Discussers have done.

How, though, does the reading of books lead to this discussion? Books on Islam, on Afghanistan, and so on sold in great numbers just after September 11. And sure, it’s good to read books. But let’s hypothesize another Steven Weber somewhere. This Steven Weber has a job that requires him to wear a “Steve” nametag. He has read exactly no books on Islam, on Afghanistan, on American foreign policy, on Iraq. It’s not incuriosity, just other interests, need-to-know, and a wariness that much of what is available will only frustrate: who to believe? Still, if he has good sense and some knowledge of the world (as most people do), and he applies them, he will (a) know that certain things he simply doesn’t know and so can’t form a reasoned opinion on them; (b) have a pretty good idea of which factual claims are too implausible to be true; and (c) spot a faulty argument. As long as he works round what he doesn’t know, he may get quite a lot right. The truly lost cause is the one who says, “I read a book about this.” Shortly after September 11, on Canal Street, with the smoke from the Twin Towers overhead, the air hard to breathe, a heavy military presence, strict checkpoints, I saw an earnest type hurrying along by Church and Canal holding the Howard Zinn Reader. About the same time, I saw another earnest type on the subway reading Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. Two discussants! But what, one wonders, were they getting out of these books? Isn’t it pretty likely that they were taking the scrubbing brush to the smut that had just landed on their picture of the world? Their reading, was it effort at all, or the refusal of effort?

Not long after September 11, there was an item in the New York Times about recent book-buying in the city. It was mentioned that books about such things as Islam, Afghanistan, American foreign policy, Iraq were all moving units: but that was not news, not interesting, and not what needed an Institute of International Studies-MacArthur-State Department-Shell Oil expert to report. The item’s news was that a range of books was selling that suited a new emotional weather. Books about war in general – the Iliad; for example – had become best-sellers; and women and men were reading these books in equal numbers. Compare. That earnest soul on Canal Street with the Zinn in the crook of his arm was doing his homework, taking his part in the Discussion. And was he not using the Discussion to filter out everything around him? And the women with the Iliad was learning nothing directly about…Islam, Afghanistan, America foreign policy, Iraq. But she was trying it out, learning what was in herself, and in the world.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:33 pm 86. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”"Heh, I’m worried about what they can do with a tire iron, not what they can’t do. I’m also worried about their friends from the ‘hood. Especially when the government gives to those friends the vacant house down the street from me.”"”"”"”"”

Precisely, a large portion of America’s criminal underclass can act as the mercenary/”warrior class” of America’s hard left. There has been a strange romance between underclass criminality and leftism since the 60’s. As part of the proliferation of “volunteer corps” alluded to by Obama’s website, I envision the incorporation of street gangs into this, under the guise of “rehabilitating” them.

Much of the extreme American left strike me as physical cowards and classic bullies. If push came to shove, they would need this sort of “muscle” to try to counteract the Red State gun owners.

I hope this all proves to be an over-the-top dark fantasy on my part, but I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:37 pm 87. Alexis:

There is a key difference between anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism. Andrew Jackson was an elitist who was also anti-intellectual. It is also possible to be intellectual and anti-elitist. Strictly speaking, I am not anti-elitist because I support the ascendancy of a natural elite as opposed to a hereditary elite; the existence of natural variation leads to the establishment of elites because some people will have more ability and expertise in some matters than in others.

Intellectuals are the ones who are most concerned about the happenings on college campuses. Most people (the non-intellectuals) don’t know and they don’t care. It is intellectuals who will care the most about bad educators and warped philosophy; the vast majority of those who go don’t go to college don’t worry themselves about these things. The very act of making informed comments about John Paul Sartre is an act of an intellectual.

If opposition to certain intellectuals is anti-intellectualism, it is the Weathermen who would be the most anti-intellectual group in North America, for this organization would have tried to implement on Americans what the Khmer Rouge attempted against Cambodians; it would be the Killing Fields writ large. Let me make this clear. I oppose any faction that would seek to create filling fields, no matter whether it is led by Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga, Charles Johnson, William Ayers, David Duke, or Osama bin Laden. Yes, there are those who are anti-intellectual. There are those who know just enough about civilization to reject anybody who dares to be civilized. I have met some of them, and they are not nice people. Richard Fernandez is very definitely not one of them.

Is serving as President of the Harvard Law Review an achievement? Yes. It is a competitive process based upon academic achievement, but there is also more than a little bit of politics involved in the selection. So, this is an achievement just as getting elected to a student senate is an achievement. Or getting elected to the presidency of a college fraternity at Yale. It’s not as if Barack Obama had won a National Merit Scholarship.

Is Barack Obama part of a natural elite? Yes. Does that mean he should be President of the United States? No. Barack Obama is smart. He is educated. He is good at organization. He inspires people. However, he is not the best candidate for Commander in Chief of our armed forces. His past history as the right hand man for William Ayers raises questions about Senator Obama’s definition of patriotism. No one should ever question Senator Obama’s patriotism, but it is entirely appropriate to oppose Senator Obama’s definition of patriotism on philosophical grounds and it is entirely appropriate to oppose Senator Obama’s presidential bid on philosophical grounds.

One can be opposed to the radicalism of some highly educated people while valuing the importance of a good education. Please note the qualifier “good”. The prestige of a university is no guarantor of the excellence of its education. Although an education is usually only as good as the effort a student puts into it, it helps to have good teachers.

There is a key difference between a blanket opposition against intellectuals holding positions of power and opposition against any apparent monopoly of power that accrues to certain cliques who graduated from key universities. Hence, when both major presidential candidates in 2004 were members of Yale’s Skull & Bones Society, this is a cause for grumbling. One problem the United States faces is that our higher education has not sufficiently groomed a “second team” or a “third team” for positions of great responsibility. Just as monoculture of food crops leaves one’s food supply vulnerable to agricultural pests, a monoculture of political leadership fosters a danger that all of our political leaders will think the same way in a crisis when new ideas are desperately needed.

The Confederacy has great military leaders. Jefferson Davis was an officer himself, and he had served as the Secretary of War for the United States. And yet, the Union’s winning general was a drunk who finished near the bottom of his class at West Point – Ulysses S. Grant. While everybody else had learned from Andre’s Jomini’s manual of warfare, Ulysses S. Grant got bored. As it was, it was General Grant’s disregard for Jomini’s rules that led him to be a great general. Sometimes, professors get it wrong.

Education is important. It is so important that one must be willing to forcefully disagree with the ideas of some educators (such as Professor William Ayers) in order to ensure that real education happens. As it is, I have actually read some of the books written by William Ayers, and while he is quite adept at seeing many aspects of what is wrong with America’s schools, his ideas on how to solve those problems are quite deficient. For example, he notices how low expectations hurt black students. I’ve noticed the same thing. However, I take the point of view that Affirmative Action, in and of itself, serves to lower educational expectations of black people, and nowhere do I see any proposal by William Ayers to end race-based preferences and scholarships.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:44 pm 88. Doug:

The more you learn about this Toxic Stew, the more chilling are the implications of Wretchard’s short Note # 36.
—
‘Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?’…
By Orson Scott Card

Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.
—
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

Oct 23, 2008 - 12:44 pm 89. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”But the conservative attack on knowledge over the last eight years does not emerge from such concerns. Conservatives have not advocated for, say, deep experiential knowledge “”"”"”"

What the Hell are you going on about?

Liberals and leftists do not have a monopoly on intellectualism, and, besides, the “intellectualism” being attacked here is a fraud and a corruption of reasoned, rational thought.

Also, conservatives don’t have a monopoly on “anti-scientific” thought either. The hysteria over things like bio-engineered food, nuclear power, vaccinations, high-tension wires, Radon, Love Canal pollutants, etc., ad nauseam is all left-wing-driven.

Do you find us to be dullards, Benj? Even those of us who work with and converse with academics of varying ideological leanings? Which “intellectual” litmus test are we failing?

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:11 pm 90. Anthony:

The real issue should not be the fact that these guys had these plans. The real issue is whether they actually believed they would win and put teh plans into focus. If so, they should have been in an institution for the criminally insane.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:26 pm 91. Nine-of-Diamonds:

Strange how “intellectual curiosity” always seems to mean rubber-stamping the amoral Statism that failed (and continues to fail) in Europe. Or nodding your head sympathetically whenever Muslim bigots rail against the Jew…er-Zionists. 0bama is well aware of the anti-American subtext that is behind all this pining for “intellectual curiosity” and “open-mindedness”. Recall his comments on the stump about making Americans more like multi-lingual European elites. If 0 simply admired European cultural achievments his attitude would be harmless, albeit off-putting. However, 0bama really does seem to think that he will be able to provide Scandinavian-style cradle-to-grave benefits for a population of 300 million – not counting whichever illegals want in. He really does believe he has nothing to learn from “bitter” gun-owners, that Communist “educational activists” can be entrusted with millions, that American power needs to be constrained whenever possible, that there is a moral equivalence between Servicemen (who “just” air-raid civilians) and the Taliban. There are more examples of his textbook Euro-chauvanism, but you get the point.

Never once has he been “curious” enough to reexamine the warped beliefs he’s imported from abroad. Yet the 143-day wonder who’s lived his life in an ideological monoculture will somehow bring about an intellectual revolution. Uh-huh.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:29 pm 92. Doug:

You reveal yourself by acting as tho this is not a massive Criminal Organization, benj.
(Although IF DOJ still represented the slightest degree of Justice, the house of cards would quickly be brought down)

Fitting that the entire operation was moved to Chicago!
—

Who is John Galt?
Powerline PrintOctober 23, 2008 Posted
by Scott at 6:52 AM
ht – Deuce

I run a small Internet business and when I process credit cards I’m required to make sure the name on the card exactly matches the name of the customer making the purchase. Also, the purchaser’s address must match that of the cardholders. If these don’t match, then the payment isn’t approved.
Period.
So how is it possible that the Obama campaign could receive donations from fictional people and places? Well, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to the Obama campaign website and entered the following:

Name: John Galt
Address: 1957 Ayn Rand Lane
City: Galts Gulch
State: CO
Zip: 99999

Then I checked the box next to $15 and entered my actual credit card number and expiration date (it didn’t ask for the 3-digit code on the back of the card) and it took me to the next page and…

“Your donation has been processed. Thank you for your generous gift.”

This simply should not, and could not, happen in any business or any campaign that is honestly trying to vet it’s donors. Also, I don’t see how this could possibly happen without the collusion of the credit card companies. They simply wouldn’t allow any business to process, potentially, hundreds of millions in credit card transactions where the name on the card doesn’t match the purchasers name.

In short, with the system set up as it is by the Obama camp, an individual could donate unlimited amounts of money by simply making up fake names and addresses. And Obama is doing his best to facilitate this fraud. This is truly scandalous.

Our reader was not yet done. He tried the experiment on the McCain site: “I tried the exact same thing at the McCain site and it didn’t allow the transaction.” He then repeated the experiment at the Obama site:

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:31 pm 93. Benj:

Alexis – I read Richard Fernandez pretty closely for a couple years. I feel like I know Richard Fernandez. You’re not Richard Fernandez. THANK GOD! You’re way more honest…

Rod – You’re surely right that libs don’t have a monopoly on Mind. And I don’t recall anti-intellectulism on your end. Not that I’m giving out litmus tests there… But I do remember you’re readiness to sign on for win-at-all-cost rumor-mongering re Obama a few weeks back. (And I remember Wretch’s refusal to distance himself from your stance on that front.) So you’re not anti-intellecutal but everyone here has reason to believe you’re an amoral anti-democrat…

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:33 pm 94. Nine-of-Diamonds:

“However, I take the point of view that Affirmative Action, in and of itself, serves to lower educational expectations of black people…”

Oh, I don’t know about that. Without AA, Negro Christ-Superstar couldn’t have vaulted ahead of a half-dozen better qualified candidates. He was on the HLR and he went to Columbia – therefore, he has to be intellectually curious. Now if we could just find those transcripts…

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:43 pm 95. Alexis:

Correction:

In my previous post, I had meant to write, “The Confederacy had great military leaders”.

I value precision in language, so I don’t particularly like it when I am guilty of committing a clerical error that shifts the meaning of the language I use. Oops.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:44 pm 96. Storm-Rider:

Reason and truth are the basis of science and all other intellectual activity. I’ve read the works of many philosophers, but none have adequately defined reason or truth to my satisfaction. So, here is my attempt:

1. Truth is self-evident and does not require definition.

2. Reason is the ability of a person to observe and understand truth.

I’ll add that science is simply a controlled method of observation. Once a natural phenomenon is observed under controlled conditions the material truth of that phenomenon eventually becomes self-evident; and that material truth can often be reduced to mathematical expression.

Moral reasoning, i.e.: understanding moral truth, requires more than controlled observation; it requires an action of Divinity. Scientific truth is natural; moral truth is super-natural. The Marxist religion only believes in scientific truth, whereas the Jewish and Christian religions believe in both. It should be a sin in either religion to pervert scientific truth.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:50 pm 97. Roderick Reilly:

Benj:

I remember that post to which you refer, and I’m completely baffled as to why you (and another poster) were 1)offended by what you seem to think I said, and 2) that you misconstrued what I said. That post was in reply to what “Whiskey” had said alluding to (and I hope I’m not misreperesenting him!) some form of rebellion. I used the unfortunate phrase “I don’t share your optimism” in reference to his point of view, when i actually meant “assumption” in light of the fact that I didn’t agree with his point. Perhaps that was what set you off. I went on with some innocuous musings about how non-leftists could live lives as unobstructed as possible by government dictates and policies. Perhaps my musings were poorly-worded, but they were no cause for alarm.

You are also refering to a post where I said I didn’t have a problem if there were people who were going to vote against Obama on the basis of ignorant assumptions that he was a “Nigerian Muslim.” I make NO apologies for that. Those of us on the so-called “Right” are locked in a cold civil war with people who are ruthless, greedy for power, and have no scruples whatsoever. Given that that is a reality (NOT an opinion, but a fact), why should I, and others roll over and be polite? I don’t turn the other cheek to ideological bullies.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:51 pm 98. Konyok:

Benj,

I have very little interest in meta-discussions, let alone meta-meta-discussions. I confess that I am a philistine, count me among the plumbers.

Your earnest soul with the Zinn and your woman with the Iliad are indeed, er, *discussants.* Perhaps there IS some utility in brushing up on social criticism or revisiting deep cultural precedents, but there is certainly no substitute for informing oneself of the facts at contention.

“Who to believe?” Indeed, that is the question for the incurious, or lazy, soul that wants to be taken by the hand. The more difficult road is to plow through the information available, deal with the the contradictions and inconsistencies, and form a working hypothesis of one’s own. (Methinks that Didion et al. were less concerned about insuring an objective discussion as they were anxious to preserve their own critical analysis framework. Ditto Said and his compadres.)

The literary intellectual tradition is great good fun, but its reliance on analogous reasoning – similes and metaphors – makes it a lousy tool to extrapolate meaning into the phenomenal world. It provides insights of exquisite, heartbreaking beauty, but it is useless in deciding which crop to sow this year or in deciphering the unsentimental calculus of power.

Witness the dialectic that occurs on this very forum. We see a video of children singing for Obama. It looks LIKE totalitarian propaganda. The impression then becomes that it IS totalitarian propaganda. The more excitable among us begin muttering darkly about armed resistance. Confusion of metaphor for fact is a hallmark of literary intellectualism.
Consider the “McSame” Democratic talking point. It is short and snappy, but it is merely a metaphorical placeholder for a real fact. It is a discussion-stopper of the highest order. Bush resembles Hitler because he, uh, conducts a war with the informed consent of the elected legislature? Only metaphorical, impressionistic reasoning can make that a viable argument, but it is fondly embraced by an awfully lot of highly educated people.

There are social constructs, but, facts exist and facts matter.

Oct 23, 2008 - 1:58 pm 99. Benj:

Rod – you didn’t simply ok the idea of folks voting on the basis misinformation. You counseled Clubbers to let the rumors fly. You did dirt on democratic discourse…

K – Your linking of the Zinnian and woman with Iliad is ponderable…Gots to go home to visit my Mom so if I got anything worthy to say, I’ll come back down the line. BTW – should underscore that that woman was Charles O’brien’s conceit. Sharpest mind I know…Lotsa stuff on our website, including an 04 defense of W!!

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:35 pm 100. Doug:

Ignore the Criminality benj, it’s now the Patriotic thing to do!
—
Hatin Palin

The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation’s mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve.

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko’s bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov.
Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow.

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:44 pm 101. Kingston53:

It starts with idealism. These smart young university educated people can solve all the worlds’ problems. They have a plan. The goal is to remove all pain and suffering and to create a heaven like state on earth. It’s pretty simple really. It’s just a matter of the right kind of education. If that doesn’t work, then we just need to find the right incentive. Maybe it’s the scale or intensity of the incentive that’s the problem. Maybe we need to segregate some of the non-conforming elements. Maybe these non-conforming elements just need to be dealt with. Hey, how about a gas fired oven?

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:49 pm 102. Doug:

The Face of the Messiah’s Crusade

The Face of the Messiah’s Crusade
—
Covered carefully with a Happy Face by benj.

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:49 pm 103. twolaneflash:

The sooner Obama is defeated, the sooner America can cleanse its Congress, Courts, Fourth Estate, and educational institutions of Marxists. Where are you when America needs you, Joe? No, not the plumber. Tailgunner Joe. Where are you, you commie-hating rascal?

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:56 pm 104. Doug:

“Witness the dialectic that occurs on this very forum. We see a video of children singing for Obama. It looks LIKE totalitarian propaganda. The impression then becomes that it IS totalitarian propaganda. The more excitable among us begin muttering darkly about armed resistance. Confusion of metaphor for fact is a hallmark of literary intellectualism.”
—
Please enlighten us with your common sense explanation of what to Obama Children Videos mean to YOU, Konyok.

…and do you think Wretchard’s comment # 36. is a wild fantasy?

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:58 pm 105. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”"Rod – you didn’t simply ok the idea of folks voting on the basis misinformation. You counseled Clubbers to let the rumors fly. You did dirt on democratic discourse…”"”"”"”

Oooohhhh. Shame on me! If you’re trying to push a guilt button of mine, you have failed. Like I said before, when fighting a “civil war” with the unscrupulous, you dish out some of your own.

My “amoral, anti-democratic” behavior pales in comparison to the likes of ACORN, Bill Ayers, Markos Zuniga, etc. You are applying moral equivalence that doesn’t really apply to me.

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:58 pm 106. Doug:

“of what the Obama Children Videos mean to YOU”

Oct 23, 2008 - 2:59 pm 107. Doug:

One of the most chilling videos for me shows a young attractive, (the years of hatred had not yet taken their toll) Bernadine Dohrn, giddy on the intoxicant of Mob Psychology at work, speaking to her faithful followers.

Behind her, two young black boys stand with a mix of expressions on their faces, centering around puzzlement, confusion, and wonder.

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:10 pm 108. Konyok:

Doug,

I don’t think #36 comes from Wretchard. I don’t think it is “wild fantasy,” Ayers, given the chance would happily wield that power. He didn’t, doesn’t and won’t have that chance.

What do the singing children mean to me? They’ve got moonbats for parents. No more, no less. The video is a great way to make fun of them, an absolutely silly reason to panic.

Nobody can deny that the left has totalitarian tendencies. We have to resist them. But, we have to be clear about just who and what we are resisting. To conflate them with Stalinists has no forensic or persuasive utility.

Does the Bushitler-Cheney Haliburton argument sway you?

No, I didn’t think so ….

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:18 pm 109. Doug:

One thing I like about the Camera Work in the video I posted above ( “From Underground to de rigeur” [rigueur]) is the repeated return to the permanently smiling face of uncritical approval of a middle aged mom in the crowd.

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:21 pm 110. Doug:

THREE THOUSAND Professors have already signed on with their support of the murdering mastermind Ayers, Konyok!

I certainly have not brought the name Stalin to this argument, the NEA is scary enough for me to be concerned with.

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:25 pm 111. Doug:

The NEA, dba “CTA,” conducting business as usual.

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:27 pm 112. whiskey:

Wretchard, with all due respect, you miss some essentials of American history and character, which as a non-American, you could never know.

While the vehemence and naked blood-lust of the Weathermen is revolting (and telling), the eternal conflict between what can be characterized as Rev. Dimmesdale (from the Scarlet Letter) and say, Daniel Boone, has been in America since the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.

In no other country have the elites been periodically turned out, cleansed out, and replaced with others. This has kept America strong, however the last cleansing was in 1932, and we are paying the price for this long interval for cleaning out the elites.

The bloodlust of the Ayers group, is all about the pure hatred that powerful, who are the elites, have for “Westerners.” They hate Westerners (and those who are the frontier in spirit) because they pose existential threats to their power, which derives from a priesthood like Dimmesdales.

Jackson, btw, was neither elitist nor anti-intellectual. He was, after all, a Lawyer. He was however a Westerner, who was backed by the common man in the West.

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:29 pm 113. Doug:

“I guess I’m amused by a comment previously made by a candidate for the Texas Governorship:

“I’m in favor of Gay Marriage.
Why shouldn’t they be miserable like the rest of us?!“

Oct 23, 2008 - 3:48 pm 114. Charles:

The Obama birth certificate story has now got up to the national review

Its got the point now where people are saying obama is bringing in 200k pre hour. he could make this story go away for $15 by producing a birth certificate. but instead his lawyers have become squirmy about it.

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:18 pm 115. If Wretchard is correct, and I think that he is, atheism is a pretty serious charge against someone, especially someone who would possess the ring that rules them all. « Bear Diaries:

[...] Read it here. [...]

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:31 pm 116. Ken Nelson » Blog Archive » Bad Idea: Abstract thinkers + Political Power:

[...] Club covers the documentary “No Place to Hide” where Larry Grathwohl, undercover FBI agent, describes what Bill Ayer’s Weather Underground planned to do after the revolution: The Weathermen’s plans included putting parts of United States under the administration of Cuba, [...]

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:38 pm 117. Konyok:

Doug,

I don’t consider Ayers an opponent, he is an enemy.

For my part, I am circulating a petition among alumni of my alma mater demanding that the department of Education remove books authored or edited by Ayers from required reading lists. So far I have 108 signatures, my goal is 500.

Unfortunately, the prosecuters screwed the pooch on Ayers’ case. He got off “free as a bird” because of prosecutorial misconduct.

However, I don’t believe Grathwohl. The conversation that he relates is not consistent with what I know about those people. Notice how he puts it in first person, *he* is the one who asks “so, what do we do if we take over the government?” WTF? The goal was to overthrow the government, to remove it, to destroy it, to replace it with anarchic collectives. This guy, the undercover agent is the one to ask this question? Jeez. I have a pretty good sense of when my leg is being pulled …

Oct 23, 2008 - 4:39 pm 118. Konyok:

Doug,

I wasn’t specifically saying that you are calling people “Stalinists.” I use that term to designate the most malignant form of marxism. There ARE degrees of marxist and anarchist thought, by no means do all marxists believe in state terror.

Of course, a very good argument could be made that the *bad* marxists will always overpower the *good* marxists. But, identity does not follow.

Take a look at this:

http://www.adambaumgoldgallery.com/steinberg/posters/view_of_new_york.jpg

This is similar to the view that many on the right have when they look to their left – an enormous ideological territory shrinks into a neat package called “marxist.”

By the same token, our progressive friends do exactly the same thing when they look to the right – we’re all “fascists.”

Jeez.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:01 pm 119. Doug:

Sorry, I had not watched THAT video, my bad.

The REAL undercover agent I have read about that concerns me was the FBI Mole that documents that Dohrn herself murdered a Policeman in San Francisco, and Ayers only complaint was she should have had more help and should not have had to do it herself.
Sure puts the lie to what nice, honest people the Ayers are.

He later ratted out Ayers in a plot to bomb a police station, unconcerned about the innocent black folks in the restaurant next door. (Necessary collateral damage, you know.)
—
The Video I linked does bother me, however, and I agree with Richard (my bad again @ # 36) that “Ayers and co. are tireless and capable organizers. And that (with heartlessness) is mainly what it takes to take over a country and run it by terror. Ayers’ meetings would be to the point and constructive and would end with an action agenda containing assignments for everyone. ”
(admittedly edited! – I don’t really think a Death Machine would be required.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:03 pm 120. Doug:

btw:
Many thanks for time and effort on the worthy cause w/that Petition!

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:05 pm 121. Doug:

Looks like an accurate Google Maps Capture to me!

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:13 pm 122. veracious:

Outa my league @33,

Thanks for this update for those of us without time to get the info.

Obama’s legal citizenship status should be a huge problem for any sane nation. Whether this nation is able to enforce such a fundamental part of its law, via: politics, FEC, DOJ, DNC, court, other institution, or its in-alienable right of individual and collective defense of its Constitution, shall determine whether our nation is…

It is possible for a nation or other organization, just as an individual, to become sick, incapable of functioning in the world. At that point cures are required, be they medication, quarantine, surgery or amputation.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:17 pm 123. Fred:

Konyok,

Like Doug, the other day I took note of the petition signed by thousands of educators and professors in defense of William Ayers and his “reputation.” It was repugnant. These people sicken me. I was just telling my wife during supper here, in a political discussion about the election, how I grew up in a Democrat family and was registered as a Democrat until 2002. The Party has changed dramatically from what I once knew it as. I’m only slightly right-of-center, by the way. I have some sympathies with traditional Democrat issues. My wife and I were discussing a patient she had today at the clinic she works at (she’s an occuptional therapist specializing in shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand injuries and rehab). This guy is a hard working member of the “working poor” who just was laid off from a job he had recently taken. He’s diabetic and now has no health insurance. He can’t afford the insulin and other medicines and has not been taking any. His health, long term, is in grave jeopardy. We know lots of people without insurance, cannot afford it, or who have been denied because of pre-existing conditions. That is the one issue on the Democrat side I am in great sympathy about. I know a New Hampshire National Guard sergeant who did a tour in Iraq and who has medically fallen on very hard times. He is quite a mess, and part of his medical mess is that he also has PTSD. The Guard has been very good to him and he is on extended medical leave to recover and get his back and foot taken care of. But he may, ultimately, have to to be medically discharged, which he does not want to do. He loves his job (he is full-time Guard). His daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome and her medication costs about a thousand bucks a month and she’s a freshman in college. If she can’t get that medication (it is currently covered by his insurance as part of his Guard compensation) she may not be functional enough to continue her education. I know the girl, my wife and I have met them many times. They are not exactly well off people.

These are concerns of mine, since I just don’t have the kind of brain and heart to just fob it off.

But I just cannot bring myself to vote for Obama over one issue. The total package disturbs me and I strongly disagree with him on foreign policy, defense policy, and tax/economic policy. My wife and I discuss health policy issues a lot (obviously)and she agrees with me that something has to be done, but it has to be done right or we will have an abomination of a health care system like countries where you have ungodly waiting lines for specialists, diagnostic procedures, and surgeries.

The Democratic Party has been taken over by the Far Left and this has been in the works for some time.

Just the very thought of a President Obama allowing Iran to lob a couple of nuclear armed Shehab II missiles at Israel after he takes office, and having his VP candidate beg the indulgence and forbearance of the Left faithful in Seattle because the President’s poll numbers sink like a stone is enough to frighten any responsible citizen.

I ceased being an ideologue many years ago. In the place of it, I prefer to have a flexible perspective. Everything about life is about balance. We live in difficult and challenging times, with a lot of problems, foreign and domestic. The kind of people the Weathermen are – these are not the kind of people I would ever have chosen to associate with even in my academic Marxist days. Why would Obama not run the other way from those kinds of people? He had to have known who they were and their history. Lying about that just won’t cut if one wants to aspire to the most important job in America.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:22 pm 124. Storm-Rider:

“The former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovksy, who has warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union, thinks that while the West won the Cold War in a military sense, we lost it in the context of ideas: “Communism might have been dead, but the communists remained in power in most of the former Warsaw bloc countries, while their Western collaborators came to power all over the world (in Europe in particular). This is nothing short of a miracle: the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 quite logically brought a shift to the Left in world politics, while a defeat of communism in 1991 brought again a shift to the Left, this time quite illogically.” Bukovksy is right: We never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold War, similar to the de-Nazification after WW2, and we are now paying the price for this. Many Marxist ideas have been allowed to endure and mutate, such as the notion that culture is unimportant or that it is OK to stage massive social experiments on hundreds of millions of people. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has stated that had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning Socialist society, tens of millions of deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay. But Marxist ideals of forced equality can only be enforced by a government with totalitarian powers, and will thus inevitably lead to a totalitarian society. There is no “enlightened Marxism,” and the idea that there is has ruined more lives than probably and other ideology in modern history. Marxism is an organized crime against humanity.”

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2125/print

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:30 pm 125. Doug:

Fred,
ot, but a real story of thanks to your wife, and all other professional Therapists:

Always tended toward a Medical Model perspective on health (Dad was a pharmacist, I’d consult the Merck Manual) and in college, as a biochem major and consumer of liberal elitist Kool Aid, I’d look down my nose at a beautiful girl friend of a friend that was working toward becoming an OT.

3 years ago, after a lifetime of chronic hip pain, I almost killed myself, losing more than half my precious (red) bodily fluids via a bleeding stomach caused by Ibuprofen abuse.

After getting out of the hospital, I managed to get to see a wonderful occupational therapist my wife recommended, (over the protests of my GP).
It took her 3 weeks of two visits a week to teach me how to take care of my back, and etc, and I have been pain and drug free since!

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:43 pm 126. Thomas Jackson:

The sad thing is that we have become sojaded that such people are now accepted into polite society. Worse they are members of academia which shows how corrupt academia has become. Can our civilization exist with people such as these destroying it from within?

I think not. We ignore the example of Weimar at our peril.

Oct 23, 2008 - 5:53 pm 127. Fred:

Doug,

I am not at all surprised that an OT helped you so much. My wife has been amazing, even helping me through a lot of bad stuff. After three right knee arthroscopies, one right shoulder labral tear repair, an L-5 spondylolisthesis, and my left and right hips replaced due to osteoarthritis (and now I have osteoarthritis in my right thumb), my wife has been an abidingly helpful presence to me throughout it all. In fact, she has been more sensible than a few physical therapists during my many rehabs from surgeries. You can call me, as my PCP now calls me, “The Orthopaedic Man.” (LOL!) But that’s all due to inherited genetic predispositions combined with playing ice hockey.

The plans of the Communist Weathermen for a social “cleansing” of America and their apparent comfort with that makes me think of The Terror by Robespierre and his thugs after the 1789 French Revolution. It seems that all of the modern socialist cleansings of society go back to that template.

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:06 pm 128. Konyok:

Fred,

You should feel comfortable voting for John McCain. I have supported him since my man Giuliani dropped out of the race. I believe that he has the best chance of this cycle’s Republicans to both win and then to govern successfully.

If pressed, I would describe myself as a radical moderate. That puts me in the conservative camp because the progressives have become so deranged. The issue of issues for me is the war on terror.

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:15 pm 129. Konyok:

BTW

Fred = fred?

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:17 pm 130. Demosophist:

Whiskey #110:

I think I said that, sort of. Ayers seems like a typically American sort of villain, like Chomsky and Moore. They are so deeply anti-authoritarian that they become authoritarian. It’s a kind of cautionary tale, like the Scarlet Letter. But there is no other political culture on Earth that can produce this particular kind of villain.

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:22 pm 131. Fred:

Konyok,

Yes, Fred=fred. Don’t know why, but I figured it made more sense for me to capitalize the first letter of my first name. So, yes, you can connect me with all of my past posts.

Yes, the issue of our time IS the recrudescence of Islamic jihad. And it is very dangerous, because obviously its ideology is more toxic. I don’t know of any socialists who are willing to die for socialism without a political officer’s pistol or machine gun aimed at their backs. Jihadis, on the other hand, are smitten with the promises made to the shaheeds of instant paradise. The force multipliers for Islamic jihad are: the Western socialists and anarchists and Russia. Both are in an alliance with Islamic jihad to overthrow the West. Russia is, as I type these words, rapidly arming Syria and Iran and has been helping Iran get the hydrogen bomb.

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:31 pm 132. Orphaned Son of Liberty:

100. Kingston53: The goal is to remove all pain and suffering and to create a heaven like state on earth

Not the first time that has happened. The proper response is “Don’t Immenentize the Eschaton”

Long live WFB

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:33 pm 133. Doug:

Giuliani-Palin would have been the perfect antidote.

Turns out Rudy knew all about Alinsky-Pivens-Cloward tactics, which is why he was so effective in saving NY City after it had attained the ratio of 1 welfare recipient to two workers!
(can that be right?)

At any rate, it’s become apparent why he got rid of Chief Bratton with his (non) performance in LA.

Oct 23, 2008 - 6:43 pm 134. Doug:

Useful Idiot

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:03 pm 135. Aristide:

Well, Steve Diamond, Global Labor and Politics, has no problems labeling Bill Ayers a neo-stalinist.

So what is the evidence of the influence of Ayers’ world view on Obama and his presidential candidacy?

First, what is the Ayers’ world view? Ayers is what political scientists call a “neo-stalinist.” Neo-stalinism is an authoritarian form of politics which attempts to control and build social institutions to impose state control of the economy, politics and culture on the general population. It has similarities to the original Stalinism found in the former Soviet Union but it arose in other countries and used slightly different forms and in some instances created regimes that were at odds for various reasons with the Russian regime.

Classic examples of neo-stalinist regimes – regimes that Ayers and people in his political camp respect and support – are the Chavez regime in Venezuela, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, the Castro regime in Cuba, and the maoist regime in China.

How could such a world view have anything to do with Obama? Well, the route that Ayers and his camp have followed to promote his form of authoritarian politics is a critical policy area: education.

Ayers/Obama Update

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:11 pm 136. NahnCee:

When I was in college — a freshman or sophomore, I think — I wrote a paper for an English writing class about what a great author I thought Robert Heinlein was. How well he wrote and what good ideas he had that I wasn’t seeing anywhere else.

I got it back from the female English professor heavily marked up, with lots of exclamation points. The woman did give me an A- (bless her pointy little head) because my paper was well-written, but she wrote a full paper’s worth of comments herself in the margins telling me in no uncertain terms how really evil Heinlein was, how bad his ideas are, and how immature and/or stupid I was to fall for them. Lots of red ink.

I remember being surprised at the reaction because I *still* thought he was a pretty good writer, but thinking that surely as a professor in an English Department in a real live university, surely she must know what she was talking about. So for some decades, I toddled through life thinking that Heinlein was some sort of evil hack like the guy who wrote Mein Kampf because that is what I had been TAUGHT. In no uncertain terms.

However, as the years passed, I noticed the Heinlein was still being read and quoted and cited. I also noticed that university professors were not as universally admired as they once had been, and indeed seemed to be getting stupider and stupider.

To the point we are today where university professors are pretty much regarded as being anti-American treasonous Marxists, while Robert Heinlein is still regarded as being a Great Thinker who also wrote a pretty ripping story.

The point I’d like to make in my little story is that in my case I don’t think my university’s liberal bent was an accident. In the case of my English professor, she had a very definite political agenda over and above grammar and how to write well. And she wasn’t at all timid about using words like “stupid student” to enforce the correct lessons she was trying to impart.

Parents who feel compelled to send their children off to get an education need to innoculate them against this sort of brainwashing … although come to think of it, it also goes on in high school. But surely if teenagers are feeling rebellious any way, they could do worse than to feel rebellious towards their Marxist professors and at least take these sorts of lessons with enough of a grain of salt to maintain their sanity while still managing a passing grade.

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:23 pm 137. JoeLiberalVet:

You quoted that guy Grathwohl about being in a room and talking about killing 25 million people. Then you said: “Actually, it’s easy. What’s hard to imagine is sitting in a room full of plumbers discussing the same thing.” Well, you cant imagine it, I experienced it as a cold war era vet drinking with soldiers who were all like brothers and many of them went on to go into the trades like plumbing. These guys would always muse on how they wanted to experience killing at least one person. That is humanity….

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:32 pm 138. buddy larsen:

111. Doug:

“I guess I’m amused by a comment previously made by a candidate for the Texas Governorship: “I’m in favor of Gay Marriage. Why shouldn’t they be miserable like the rest of us?!“

Kinky Friedman, Doug –independent party goobernatorial candidate last time around, showed respectably. Made his fame as leader of 60s-70s Austin rockabilly band “Kinky Friedman & the Texas Jewboys”.

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:36 pm 139. Doug:

I’ve seen Kinky on YouTube, hadn’t heard he ran for Head Goober.

He Saw no evil
Obama and Farakahn

Oct 23, 2008 - 7:39 pm 140. buckets:

Since we’ve pretty much exhausted this thread, I’ll throw in my two cents.

Charles – My understanding of the Obama-citizenship lawsuit — while the guy (Berg) suing Obama is claiming Obama has “admitted” he is not a U.S. citizen, it appears Berg is mucking up the lawsuit by failing to adhere to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. So it seems unlikely much would be resolved before the election.

Nahncee, you warm my heart with your Heinlein shout-out

Benj – Man, I really do try to read those novellas you post, but I can’t handle the free-association and I always stumble over big words like “ceonsoriousness”

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:08 pm 141. Konyok:

Aristide,

Thanks for the link to Steve Diamond. He is one of the principled men of the left, along with Christopher Hitchens and Nat Hentoff.
He is absolutely right. The significance of Ayers is not the weathermen, it is his infiltration of education that is so damaging.

Benj,

I strongly urge you to follow the link at #132. Look around at the archives and convince yourself that Diamond is the real deal.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:11 pm 142. Konyok:

I should have said “satisfy yourself.” Didn’t mean to go all totalitarian and stuff …

Obey Obama!

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:13 pm 143. Aristide:

Weathermen connection to Cuban DGI. CBC 1982 documentary.

Weathermen/Cuban DGI

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:17 pm 144. whiskey:

Demosophist, I would not classify Dimmesdale as a villain himself, merely the tendency for Eastern-type elites who are non-productive, in the sense that they don’t produce Wealth by some sort of function, merely occupy high-status “Priesthood” type functions such as Media/Entertainment/Lawyer, or in the Plymouth Colony of Hawthorne’s novel, the Minister.

Meanwhile, the Daniel Boone types were always pushing Westward … BEYOND THE CONTROL of the Dimmesdales, or the JP Morgans, or the Nathaniel Hawthornes, for that matter. Not to mention the Thoreaus and such. Thoreau after all was a contemporary of Jim Bowie — one sat around and wrote essays about natural philosophy, the other lived a restless life totally removed from the polite ideas of Eastern Society. Pace JoeLiberalVet, we know from what was written by Jim Bowie’s contemporaries, and that of men such John Wesley Hardin (boasted of killing 60 men, likely no more than 40), Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Geronimo, Nathan Bedford Forrest (of loathsome memory) and Wild Bill Hickock.

Real life violent American men, in our history, fall into two categories.

Thos who dealt violence out, in a violent era, with no one and no law to protect them, to survive or maintain their freedom and dignity. This would include Bat Masterson (likely one of the few relatively “decent” Old West Gunfighters), Earp, Bowie, and probably Hickock. Men who killed to live or to live not on their knees but on their feet.

Then there are the other kind. Geronimo, haunted in his last days that his murders of women and children caused himself and his people to be punished by exile. Forrest, of the Fort Pillow Massacre and KKK, willing to put aside his racial hatred when it interfered with his business and ability to raise Northern Capital. Bonney, and Hardin definitely fall into this category. Perhaps the suicidal Holliday is a special case. But these are all killers who liked killing because well, they liked it. Revenge and hatred (Geronimo), perhaps Forrest, sadism and power issue (Bonney and Hardin).

But none of them could have conceived, or wanted to, a plan to kill 25 million people. Not even Forrest IMHO could have conceived of that — he wanted terror to restore as much as possible the status-quo ante, a slavery without slavery, but even he did not rouse the KKK to pure genocide. This is likely because of the frontier mindset — people could always escape beyond control thus terror not genocide was the idea.

Not even Geronimo had any illusions about killing all or even “most” of his enemies: Mexicans and Americans. He instead dealt out terror since that was what he knew.

No, there was never anything like Ayers and Dohrn and the other Weathermen’s plans for killing 25 million Americans in death camps. Not even to the two most notorious killers in American history, Geronimo and Forrest, would qualify. Heck, not even McVeigh had ambitions on that scale.

To conceive of such a thing … is European.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:20 pm 145. Konyok:

whiskey,

I agree that the very notion is European.

(That is my riposte to snooty Europeans – we Americans have never built factories of death. They always shut up.)

Watch the video closely. Listen to the way that he phrases things. Could Grathwohl pass for a revolutionary desperado? Do you believe him?

I don’t. It’s sexed up BS.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:34 pm 146. Konyok:

Ayers DGI connection?

Not just likely, but almost metaphysically certain. KGB would definitely subcontract that kind of business, and they would want to know everything about a character like Ayers. Not as a directed agent, but more as a prophylactic measure – they would want to sterilize any implied link with Ayers’ antics, and prevent any possible back contamination.

Back in the day I hung with a Chicano activist who went to Cuba for the sugar cane harvest. He told an interesting story about DGI’s recruitment and debriefing.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:42 pm 147. Aristide:

Grathwohl interviewed on 1982 CBC documentary.

Weathermen – Cuban DGI

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:43 pm 148. fred:

I do believe the Communist terrorist group called The Weathermen were capable of contemplating evil on that scale. Easily. It is consistent with the kind of ethics of expediency they practiced and their commitment to Communist ideology. I do not think the interview “sexed up” The Weathermen.

Ayers is a creepy character, as is his wife. He may even have been a serial rapist in his younger days. Not msu, by the way.

Oct 23, 2008 - 8:50 pm 149. Konyok:

Wowie Zowie!

Synchronicity?

After viewing the #144 link I’m inclined to give Grathwohl a bit more creedence. That bit certainly rings true.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:02 pm 150. buddy larsen:

Fred, some girl author wrote of Ayers, back in the 80s or 90s, in Esquire, i believe. i read the article back then. she told of Ayers –the theme of the article was how rotten we [she being a penitent fellow trav] radicals were, not so much Ayers per se –violating the feminist alliance by forcing her to have sex with a friend of his –while he hung around. Creep.

Also, here’s a mid-60s-aged old fart, all 5′6” of his penguin-shaped and rounded-headed dooflessness, still getting up in the morning and putting on his gddam golded dangling earrings –what will he be thinking as he peers into the mirror adjusting his earrings? “Wow, the kids in class r gonna luv THIS!”

–for crying out loud how barf-inducing can a piece of sh*t GET ? Blow bldngs and assassinate cops for awhile, then get mommy and daddy to fix the courts so ya can waltz straight back into upper-class law firm & university gigs –hey, didn’t the MAN create all that margin for ya?

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:14 pm 151. trangbang68:

131- Doug- Useful is debatable. Idiot is not. That is one dumb dude. Beside the fact that he resembles Nipsy Russell of Hollywood Squares fame.

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:22 pm 152. marymcl:

How do we know Sarah Palin has “no intellectual curiosity about the world”? I think that’s an extraordinary assumption to make – yes, she’s a woman of action but that doesn’t mean she can’t have an inner life

“So your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet and live with, into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and pretends to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is a caricature and a lie”
~ Isak Dinesen “The Roads Around Pisa”

Oct 23, 2008 - 9:56 pm 153. wretchard:

Also, here’s a mid-60s-aged old fart, all 5′6” of his penguin-shaped and rounded-headed dooflessness, still getting up in the morning and putting on his gddam golded dangling earrings –what will he be thinking as he peers into the mirror adjusting his earrings? “Wow, the kids in class r gonna luv THIS!”

That’s exactly the point, the reason for the gut disquiet with the Ayers connection. At the most you’d reserve him for a certain kind of company such as people sometimes have to put with in their professional life. But make friends with him out of choice? Let him babysit your kids? Not while I could afford a babysitter or take the kids to a daycare center. Launch your candidacy from his house? Not unless you were stupid or you had really bad taste. It’s not natural.

Have you ever been at a restaurant where this six foot, stunning blond girl is hanging out with a guy with a mouthful of gold teeth, a pot belly, a hairpiece and white, silver-buckled shoes? You know something isn’t right or there is something going on that indicates a deeper game. That’s the disconnect when you see Obama and Ayers.

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:06 pm 154. buddy larsen:

moreover, if they pull it off, can’t you see ‘em, sometime post-Nov 4, the first time they’re alone together, just cracking up , dissolving in glee, at how stoopid are the Amerikkkan Peckerwoods who never asked them any questions ?

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:16 pm 155. Dave:

Actually nothing new in this to me. Those who plot mass murder (skillfully or otherwise)
are inevitably those with no real grievances.

They have never known deprivation. More often than not they have never had to work for a living. The worst that has ever happened to them is that they got their feelings hurt at some time or the other.

These are the ones that concoct the utopian fantasies, the schemes to implement some perfect system that is at loggerheads with human nature, not to mention human survival.

So having all those folks with the advanced degrees from prestigous schools plot how to
destroy all that displeases them—-and themselves along with it— does not surprise me in the least.

BTW; Forgive me for again referencing Paul Johnson. In his book “Intellectuals” the people called “intellectuals” are the bad guys. The good guys he calls “men of letters”. The former try to bring about some form of perfection by conning the general public (and then coercing same). The latter earn an honest living with their minds
and sell their viewpoints in the free marketplace of ideas. Johnson’s semantics cleared up quite a bit of confusion in my mind. You all may not wish to use the precise words that he did, but I think you will find his distinction invaluable.

And wouldn’t you agree that Wretchard qualifies as a man of letters? Hear! Hear!

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:28 pm 156. Benj:

@ Fred – GO with that humane impulse. And I’m not thinking chiefly about this little election! KNOW HOPE – as a blogger said after quoting a report about a 90 year old black woman casting her (early) vote for BArack and then breaking down crying at the thought she’d lived to this day…THERE’S NOTHING TO FEAR!

@ K – Time is tight and I’m tempted to risk getting all jiggy w/ a metaphoical thingy that probably won’t ring your bell…But first…

Note the sentence below from the Union activist quoted in the post you told me to check – “At best [Ayers and Klonsky] are irrelevant wanderers”…This is from the FIRST thing I read by Diamond about the fearsome Ayers. See the graph below and note the re-play at the bottom re Ayers’ irrelevance.

“As one union activist who encountered Klonsky and Ayers in his inner city Chicago high school during that period said: “At best, they are irrelevant wanderers. At worst, they are teacher bashers and ideologues pushing a political line while collecting political patronage. On a couple of occasions they sent out their heavyweights (Mike Klonsky and Bill Ayers), who were equally irrelevant, albeit more arrogant (and a bit more polished).”

If I was argufying, I’d be tempted to leave it all right there…

But let’s roll back in time. The Small Schools movement is associated principally with Deborah Meier – Ayers was not a founder but a follower. Meier famously became the Principal at Central PArk EAst 1 in East Harlem in the 70s. She’s moved on to be a principal at other public schools, author of books, teacher of teachers and heavy in Ed School circles (Been on that scene much longer than Ayers – bigger rep certainly at Colum TEachers College, Steinway School of Ed etc.) As it happens, My kid goes to Central PArk EAst 2 – down the block from 1 and informed by Meier’s originary “Small Schools” approach. There is definitely a “social justice” dimension to these enterprises. But it’s not about P.C. ideology. The “progressive” bias comes out in the emphasis on nurturing “community” and the fairly self-conscious commitment to having an integrated public school in an urban setting, which means (necesarily) a school with a significant degree of class mixing as well.) I’m unaware of any other public schools in Manhattan that are as racially mixed as CPE1 & 2. The communal thingy is reflected in the School’s familial approach – and refusal of “tracking” systems that tend to be class-bound – To invoke terms that you’ve used in the past – liberty probably isn’t seen as opposed to community (or even…equality). Yet CPE 1 & 2 are probably more responsive to “individuality” than, say, your local Catholic school or any public school I ever went to…

Sorry to Go On… but not quite done. The Small Schools approach is big on education for citizenship and skeptical of teaching to the test. On that score one of the most positive things I’ve heard about – mebbe even for a radical moderate like you!! – is the recent reconciliation between Debby Meier – proponent of Small Schools – and Dianne Ravitch – the great historian of American public schools and an original neo-conservative voice dating back to the 70s. These two women don’t agree on everything, but they DO understand that teaching to the tests is a killer for genuinely creative ed. And they also know that America schools aint done too tough when it comes to, ah, improving our demos – enhancing our civic discourse, improving our VOTE! OK – so – that’s some background on the “small schools” movement. Ayers, to repeat, was glomming on to the latest (and best?!) update of the old Dewey paradigm of the “progressive school” – The Small Schools movement is not a “neo-Stalinist” enterprise – it’s in the tradition of Dewey’s) Gary Schools, and (in Chi-town) Jane Addams Settlement Houses…

Now for Barack – the more I hear re his attempts at a late 80s’s alliance (something like the Community Control thing back in the day in NYC) that would undercut the black petit-bourgeois in Chicago’s teachers’ unions and administrators – the more I like it…This (admittedly) relatively unsuccessful espisode is a lot less embarrassing than when Mr. O got himself aligned with multi-culti gentrifying developer/slum-lords. THAT’s something to be embarrassed about!! Taking on Jesse Jackson and PUSH ties to the local school system and Machine? – Damn! – sounds pretty good. Reminds me why Obama is tight with Cory Booker!!

The politics – and ideological tastes – that are particular to Ayers (as opposed to his born-again ID with the Small Schools movement which isn’t HIS inspiration) are not OBama’s. When O (repeatedly) registers his skepticism of teaching to the test, he is following Meier and her disciples in, for example, my kid’s school AND Dianne Ravitch!! When O notes that teachers who suck got to go, he’s pushing back (a little) against the teachers’ unions. Steve Diamond invokes Chavez – Ayers has a groove for Hugo. But Obama has dissed the wannabe Fidel repeatedly. On the other hand, unlike ideologues on the Right (such as Ralph Peters), Obama isn’t so dim as to equate Hugo with Evo Morales. O knows most politics are local…

Sorry to get SO local re NYC ed politics. But in this case, it really is…relevant. One more time – Meier et. al are the keys to the Small Schools Movement. Ayers came to Teachers College in NYC to get the gospel. It’s in the liberal – not even the Gramscian (much less neo-STalinist) traditon. And OBama didn’t need this ex-weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing…

NO TIME for my meta – But my guess is you’ll live w/o

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:33 pm 157. Alexis:

Have you ever been at a restaurant where this six foot, stunning blond girl is hanging out with a guy with a mouthful of gold teeth, a pot belly, a hairpiece and white, silver-buckled shoes? You know something isn’t right or there is something going on that indicates a deeper game.

I would assume she charges hourly rates.

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:44 pm 158. Doug:

The Bill Ayers-Obama Idea Teaching “Social Justice”

Oct 23, 2008 - 10:54 pm 159. Doug:

Nice words, benj, but Fredosso documents DEEDS in which Obama is seen to consistently go with the established machine, AGAINST evolutionary change.
One instance that comes to mind was when Dems and Pubs got together to run a candidate against an entrenched Crook.
Barry went with the Crook.
You could quote high-minded pronouncements he’s made in the last year about Wright’s Tirades of Hate and Division.
I could show you almost 20 years of Deeds to the contrary.
And so on…

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:05 pm 160. Doug:

benj:
I read some time ago that Ayers wrote the proposal for CAC, or Small Schools?
Also just 2 days ago learned of the $2 million that went to Small Schools Program headed by Ayer’s buddy, the Maoist, Klonsky.
…but maybe he sub’ed it out to Mr Rogers all those years?

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:11 pm 161. Doug:

Being a man of such high Character, I can’t imagine Ayers allowing his friend Klonsky deviate in the slightest from the best in the Small Schools tradition.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:20 pm 162. trangbang68:

Benj,blah,blah,blah….Ayers is what Buddy Larsen said and then some. Excuse me, a mere carpenter for pooh-poohing your arcane description of the progressive schools movement, but who cares. Ayers and Dohrn are despicable treasonous rats and are glad to be. They are radioactive and Obama is glowing from contact with them.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:25 pm 163. Eggplant:

Charles Krauthammer wrote another good opinion piece, refer to:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/security_first_why_im_voting_f.html

Krauthammer like almost everyone else realizes that the MSM is going to get their guy elected. However Krauthammer is no idiot and refuses to bow down to the Messiah. I’m with Krauthammer and will vote for McCain. At least four years from now after everything has gone to hell, I won’t have to lie when people ask me who I voted for.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:33 pm 164. Charles:

110. whiskey:
While the vehemence and naked blood-lust of the Weathermen is revolting (and telling), the eternal conflict between what can be characterized as Rev. Dimmesdale (from the Scarlet Letter) and say, Daniel Boone, has been in America since the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock
………..
This is a difficult metaphor. Only secular institutions hold the kind of power today that the religious institutions of late 18th century in the US. So you would have to map a dimmesdale over onto a college to get the anology properly. In the late 18th century Harvard was a minor adjunct of the religious institutions that founded it. Today the religious institutions in boston are minor adjuncts of Harvard.

For myself, imho the short story “Young Goodman Brown” is prophetic.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:49 pm 165. Doug:

I have no doubt Obama was tireless in speaking out against his buddy Khalidi’s and respected mentor Said’s views on education:
(from “Social Justice” link above)

“In 1997, Ayers and his mentor Maxine Greene persuaded Teachers College Press to launch a series of books on social justice teaching, with Ayers as editor and Greene serving on the editorial board (along with Rashid Khalidi, loyal supporter of the Palestinian cause and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University). Twelve volumes have appeared so far, including one titled Teaching Science for Social Justice.

Teaching science for social justice? Let Teachers College professor Angela Calabrese Barton, the volume’s principal author, try to explain: “The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.” If you still can’t appreciate why it’s necessary for your child’s chemistry teacher to teach for social justice, you are probably hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities…

One by one, the education schools are lining up behind social justice teaching and enforcing it on their students—especially since they expect aspiring teachers to possess the approved liberal “dispositions,” or individual character traits, that will qualify them to teach in the public schools. The National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the main accreditor of education schools, now monitors how well the schools comply with their own social justice requirements…”
—
From Eggplant’s link:
“McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.”

…but then, Trangbang just said that.

Oct 23, 2008 - 11:54 pm 166. buddy larsen:

What was the certain tally –five cops & security guards? Those guys have names? Wives? moms, dads, sisters, brothers, cousins, KIDS?

Wonder how they –these innocents –made out, how well they coped and are yet coping, with the bitterness and weight of the grief, every minute of every day, of knowing their mate or loved one or breadwinner or son or daddy was frivolously, festively, murdered for theater and for fun?

What strands and webs of future existence were eternally wiped out for the entertainment of the bored, grandiose imaginations of these celebrity gutter trash?

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:12 am 167. Charles:

It is, as James said, incidentally secular. But the Left is essentially a deism, even when it adopts a secular skin. It’s hidden god is power. Power over man is its ultimate goal.

It is power over man, not nature, that it craves.
………………
It occured to me a couple years ago that the modern mind was formed by the novel form. The novel presents a form of internal dialogue very very different from internal dialoge of previous ages. Internal dialogue of the novel has character talking to him/her self.

In previous ages a person would pray (to God) or (gods).

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:13 am 168. Doug:

Buddy,
At UCSB when the custodian was blown up while grasping a trashcan in the Faculty Lounge, attention was drawn, but in the greater scheme of things in academe, it was “only” a custodian, and life soon went on as usual.

Nothing like the overwhelming grief that would have engulfed the campus for months had some august professor like Dr Ayers been killed!
—

The CTA “responds” to a Conservative Blogger/Teacher
—
New Party News

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:21 am 169. Charles:

137. buckets:

Charles – My understanding of the Obama-citizenship lawsuit — while the guy (Berg) suing Obama is claiming Obama has “admitted” he is not a U.S. citizen, it appears Berg is mucking up the lawsuit by failing to adhere to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
……..
As reported at Freerepublic
WND reported earlier this week Berg’s claim that Obama has legally “admitted” the accusations included in his lawsuit, including that he was born in Mombosa, Kenya, by not responding to the allegations.

Berg has cited Rule 36 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which states that unless the accused party provides written answer or objection to charges within 30 days, the accused legally admits the matter.

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:26 am 170. Doug:

Hell, we can be SURE, a minimum of 3,000 Professors would be thrown for a loop, were Dr Ayers to prematurely depart the planet with a bang.
The Whimpers would be deafening!

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:32 am 171. Doug:

Diamond on Ayers, Obama, and the CAC:

NY Times Confirms Ayers’ Role in Obama Appointment as Chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge

In August of 1994, Leff wrote a letter to Brown’s Gregorian lauding Bill Ayers for his leadership in organizing the grant application and said that her Joyce Foundation was awarding $80,000 to his Annenberg working group, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, to continue their work to secure and establish the Annenberg program. This Collaborative was the group which Ayers represented when he submitted the final Annenberg grant application in November.

Thus, as of August, 1994, Leff’s Joyce Foundation also recognized officially that Ayers was the formal agent for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge applicant, the Collaborative, and they were financially aiding him in that effort.

…in the end only Ayers had the legal authority to approve of Obama, whether or not Leff, Simmons and Graham understood that, much less the New York Times.

Only if the Collaborative had revoked Ayers power to represent them, could that have changed.
Of course, the opposite happened – they made Ayers co-chair and he represented the Collaborative at the board meetings of the CAC itself once it was established in March, 1995.

The individual with the legal power to overrule a decision is the person with the actual decision making authority.
That was Bill Ayers and his decision was:
Barack Obama.

Oct 24, 2008 - 3:26 am 172. Jack Aubrey:

Paranoid MUCH, wretchard?

Oct 24, 2008 - 5:38 am 173. Jack Aubrey:

AND you can vote for Palin in 2012 and watch the landslide roll over you.

162. Eggplant:
Charles Krauthammer wrote another good opinion piece, refer to:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/security_first_why_im_voting_f.html

Krauthammer like almost everyone else realizes that the MSM is going to get their guy elected. However Krauthammer is no idiot and refuses to bow down to the Messiah. I’m with Krauthammer and will vote for McCain. At least four years from now after everything has gone to hell, I won’t have to lie when people ask me who I voted for.

Oct 23, 2008 – 11:33 pm

Oct 24, 2008 - 5:41 am 174. buddy larsen:

I have just spoken with Dr. Stephen Maturin.

When informed that Jack Aubrey had thrown for the likes of Obama, he began laughing so hard the mains’ls suddenly billow’d whereupon HMS Surprise made Way and drug the entire wharf out into the middle of Portsmouth harbor, where the Helmsman, First Mate, and Officer of the Deck in concert did manage to tie down the Wheele and thus save us no worse than making way in a tight, rather ridiculous, circle to starboard, dragging of course the uprooted wharf and its complement of several dozen terrified Longshoremen loudly hailing in favor of an immediate walkout.

Poor Dr. Maturin had to be coldcocked and stowed belowdecks out of laugh-range of the canvasse.

However I am now told he has revived, has asked of the attending Midshipmen if Captain Jack is still for the likes of Obama, to which the middie’s affirmative guess –them having of yet heard no different from the commenting party in the Belmont Clubbe –did regale the goode doctor to recommence such uncontrollable & explosive laughter that I fear we may of the nonce must needs coldcock him yet again, and then perhaps bleed him four leeches or more.

Oct 24, 2008 - 6:53 am 175. Mark:

Buddy Larsen, above: very funny!

Charles wrote:

“The Obama birth certificate story has now got up to the national review.”

HORATIO: “In what particular thought to work I know not; But in the gross and scope of my opinion, This bodes some strange eruption to our state. …” Indeed, something seems rotten in Denmark.

If Sen. Obama had, at any time in his adult life, identified himself as Muslim . . . .

The Columbia University application would be interesting also. Usually, even now, one indicates religious preference on an application. Any guess about the religious preference that Barack Hussein Obama might have written down? After all, diversity counts in applications to elite colleges.

Oct 24, 2008 - 8:03 am 176. buckets:

Charles –

I think the Freepers would be correct in stating Obama has admitted (for purposes of the lawsuit) that he is not a citizen, but Berg isn’t correctly following federal procedural rules. From what I can glean, Obama filed a motion for a protective order which would basically give Obama more time under Rule 36 to respond to the request to admit facts, and so I’m not sure Obama really has “admitted” anything. Also, Berg may have filed his discovery too soon, before the discovery conference that is mandated by the Federal Rules.

Lawsuits are strange creatures, and you really never can tell what the result will be until it’s all said and done. Given the legal talent Obama has working for him, I’m almost positive Obama can delay the proceedings until after November 4.

Of course, you’d think he would just produce a birth certificate and get the whole thing over with. There’s speculation that’s why Obama really went to Hawaii this week, to see if he could “find” it.

Buddy –
I’m actually working my way through the Aubrey/Maturin novels right now. Strangely fascinating. It makes you despair at the current state of England – how the mighty have fallen.

Oct 24, 2008 - 8:11 am 177. Konyok:

Benj,

I have no objection to “Small Schools,” per se. My sons were home educated, the ultimate small school, and are considerably more scientifically and culturally literate than their peers. It is the “social justice” indoctrination that troubles me. For communitarian reasons, I believe that traditional patriotism should be the foundation ideology of American education. Yes, I do believe in American exceptionalism, and for that very reason I have little fear of creating “good little Germans.” There is something in the traditional American character that is resistent to totalitarianism – a stubborn reversion to the mean. (I’m sure that whiskey could speak to that more eloquently than I.) On the other hand, I have a positive dread of cultivating a generation of little hipsters. Counterculture has always been an organic and spontaneous expression of the marginalized. When it becomes itself the dominant culture, I fear the unintended consequences. (The hipster’s dilemma: the nonconformist needs a healthy host culture to rebel against.)

That there are some aspects of Ayers’ educational reform that are reasonable does not sanitize Ayers’ unabashed politicization of education. An honest and fair minded communitarianism demands that the essential institutions of our communities – schools, police, elections, etc. – be themselves fair and reflective of the community, not “agents of change,” whether progressive or reactionary. (That is the bitter lesson that progressives will learn from their current antics – eventually conservatives will learn THEIR lesson and the culture wars will begin in earnest.)

The point of the link to Diamond is to illustrate that there IS a troubling discontinuity between the myth of Obama and his actual record. Wretchard makes a salient point in his #152. If Obama has felt this calling for years, why did he associate himself with such? If this is the most important election of our times, why is the media so incurious? The issue isn’t really that he shares so many degrees of separation with this one or that, the issue is that he reveals an intrinsic contempt for traditional sensibilities in the way that he, and his supporters, dismiss the question. Maybe, America has changed beyond recognition and doesn’t care anymore – the existential angst of many on this forum, or, maybe, there will be a delayed reaction until Americans come to a full understanding.

For me, the most troubling aspects of Senator Obama are 1) his interminable coyness – couching all of his rhetoric in the most insipid terms, 2) what seems to be the essence of Obamism is fuehrerprinzip – the belief that charismatic leadership is the necessary element to solve the people’s problems. (Coming from the left as I do, I believe that history is driven by structural causes. The few instances that I see of the *great man* playing a truly decisive role in changing history have ended rather badly.)

Oct 24, 2008 - 8:38 am 178. Aristide:

Buddy @ 12:12 #165

For a chilling sixteen page account of the Weather Underground from the Greenwich brownstone explosion thru the Brink’s massacre of 1981 and it’s aftermath check out this article form TruTV Crime Library.

AMBUSH: THE BRINKS ROBBERY OF 1981

Oct 24, 2008 - 9:38 am 179. Robert:

It looks like Larry Grathwohl uncovered an unmistakable declaration of predatory war from the Weather Underground against every citizen of the United States of America. While it may seem that they are too incompetent to take seriously, remember that history is littered with the ruins of numerous civilizations that failed to take a dedicated enemy seriously enough, soon enough, and were destroyed as a result. We had best exercise our 2nd Amendment rights now, and arm ourselves against this predatory enemy and be ready to kill that enemy if necessary, remembering they have already openly declared predatory war against us, especially if we don’t dodge the Obamination bullet this November. If we aren’t able to dodge this bullet, at least it seems that IF he survives his term, he will be the most reviled president in American history, and he and his party will be swept out in 2012, if not out of Congress in 2010. That would be the time to make every communist, socialist, and other Marxist fascist pay for their treason with their lives. Backlash writ large!

Oct 24, 2008 - 10:39 am 180. buddy larsen:

Robert, as much as i’d love to lay down with the same beautiful temptress, she is crawling with syphylis. Balkan valleys still kill in the next valley over for thousand-year old spilt blood. I just read an article on Sgt York, USA’s WW1 hero. He was from a Civil War border state, and he and his wife had both lost kin in the 20th century, murders in fueds between neighbors which had begun over Blue vs Gray allegiances in the Civil War. Civilians in Kansas and Missouri were terrorized and murdered, full families, ma, pa, & the kids, in the hundreds if not thousands, by other civilians, often in “county wars”. And this is here, in America, only a few generations ago.

Konyok, aware that the war is over the very meaning of America and that as such the prize is the future (meaning the next generations), has suggested attending school board meetings. Tho I’ve done this a few times, never have i gone armed with a determination too speak out strongly while waving a school textbook which i’d previously close-read and red-lined the rot within.

Anyhoo, i got to thinking about that Eastwood film “Unforgiven” –a scene in it where Eastwood’s William Munny character and his accomplice “the Kid” have killed the bad guys and are resting under an oak tree talking it over. I found the dialogue –it’s great reading if you saw the flik. Here’s that excerpt:

THE KID
That was… the first one.

MUNNY
First one what?

THE KID
First one I ever killed.

MUNNY
(preoccupied with
his vigil)
Yeah?

THE KID
How I said I shot five men…
it wasn’t true.
(long pause)
That Mexican… the one that come
at me with a knife… I busted his
leg with a shovel… I didn’t
shoot him or nothin’.

Munny is watching the rider and the rider is much closer but
coming at a walk and Munny goes back over to The Kid for a
pull on the bottle and he’s trying to make The Kid feel okay
when he says…

MUNNY
Well, that fella today, you shot
him alright.

THE KID
(forced bravado)
H-hell yeah. I killed the hell
out of him… three shots… he
was takin’ a sh-sh-shit an’…
an’…

The Kid is shaking, becoming hysterical, he can’t go on, and
Munny hands the bottle back.

MUNNY
Take a drink, Kid.

THE KID
(breaking down, crying)
Oh Ch-ch-christ… it don’t… it
don’t seem… real… How he’s…
DEAD… how he ain’t gonna breathe
no more… n-n-never. Or the
other one neither… On account
of… of just… pullin’ a
trigger.

Munny walks back to the edge of the rise and watches the
rider and it is a lovely sunset happening and he is talking
to no one in particular.

MUNNY
It’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it,
killin’ a man. You take
everythin’ he’s got… an’
everythin’ he’s ever gonna have…

THE KID
(trying to pull him-
self together)
Well, I gu-guess they had it…
comin’.

MUNNY
We all got it comin’, Kid.

Oct 24, 2008 - 11:51 am 181. Konyok:

buddy,

The bad news is that it is a long and tedious battle in front of us.
The good news is that we really do have the space to check our footing and take our first steps. We don’t have to run out of our burning houses in a blind panic.

Ben Franklin’s words still apply: “You have a republic, if you can keep it.”

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:19 pm 182. Robert:

To Unsk, regarding in comment #51:

Our Academics purpose seems to use intellectual thought only to punish society, particularly the segments of society aligned with traditional conservative values, and not to use intellectual thought to promote the common good… Just as the word “liberal” has come to mean something very ill-liberal, I think the term “intellectual” has come to mean someone intellectually dishonest.

See if pages 6 through 14 from “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto” (at http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp ) fills in some pieces for you. Key clips:

“…there did appear, from the very beginning, powerful elite forces, especially among the large merchants and planters, who wished to retain the restrictive British “mercantilist” system of high taxes, controls, and monopoly privileges conferred by the government.”

“…classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests — the ruling classes — who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies…”

” It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the laissez-faire forces were known as “liberals” and “radicals” (for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly known as “conservatives.”

Indeed, conservatism began, in the early nineteenth century, as a conscious attempt to undo and destroy the hated work of the new classical liberal spirit — of the American, French, and Industrial revolutions.”

“By the middle of and certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives began to realize that their cause was inevitably doomed if they persisted in clinging to the call for outright repeal of the Industrial Revolution and of its enormous rise in the living standards of the mass of the public…Hence, the “right wing” (a label based on an accident of geography by which the spokesmen for the Old Order sat on the right of the assembly hall during the French Revolution) decided to shift their gears and to update their statist creed by jettisoning outright opposition to industrialism and democratic suffrage. For the old conservatism’s frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the public, the new conservatives substituted duplicity and demagogy.”

“To establish this new system, to create a New Order which was a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien régime before the American and French revolutions, the new ruling elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that continues to this day.”

“In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.”"

“To insure the dominance of the new statism over public opinion, to insure that the public’s consent would be engineered, the governments of the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries moved to seize control over education, over the minds of men: over the universities, and over general education through compulsory school attendance laws and a network of public schools. The public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience to the State as well as other civic virtues among their young charges. Furthermore, this statiz-ing of education insured that one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would be the nation’s teachers and professional educationists.

One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as “liberals,” and the purest and most militant of them as “radicals”; they had also been known as “progressives” because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words “liberal” and “progressive,” and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, “Neanderthal,” and “reactionary.” Even the name “conservative” was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of “reason” as well.”

So now when someone says “liberal”, “radical”, “conservative”, or “reactionary”, if the attitude isn’t already clear, I have to ask, “by the 18th and 19th century definitions, or by the 20th and 21st century connotations?” If liberty is to survive, we are going to have to finish sometime the uncompleted work of the American Revolution of destroying the last vestiges of the old medieval European feudal order (which is more than just half-way evil) that today’s “liberals” and “radicals”, who are really the “conservatives” and “reactionaries” by the 18th and 19th century definitions, want to drag humanity back into kicking and screaming. And note how characters like Al Gore who fancy themselves the ruling elite over serfs who would live a bare subsistence existence, aren’t even waiting to live lavishly while expecting everyone else to live a bare subsistence life.

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:34 pm 183. Robert:

Oh, and in #178, I was actually thinking of treason trials, and lifetime imprisonment or execution upon conviction of the communists, socialists, and other Marxists such as the Weather Underground, and politicians who have acted to betray our country by giving moral support to our enemies, like Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, etc., rather than thinking of vigilantism. Hopefully it won’t come to civil war in the streets, and if it does threaten to become that, then the armed forces will remember their oaths to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and act on it. Though that would mean we would get our own Chile 1973 moment.

Oct 24, 2008 - 12:50 pm 184. buddy larsen:

robert, sorry for that –i misinterpreted your 178.

konyok, that quote belongs on billboards by freeways, newspaper mastheads, public building dedication plaques, banners, handbills, desktop screensavers, skywriter’s smoketrails, and on the minds of citizens from sea to shining sea.

Oct 24, 2008 - 1:01 pm 185. Charles:

175. buckets:

Of course, you’d think he would just produce a birth certificate and get the whole thing over with. There’s speculation that’s why Obama really went to Hawaii this week, to see if he could “find” it.
….
Yeah that’s the point. The dems got articles in the NYTimes in the spring discussing McCain’s citizenship because he was born in the Canal Zone. There was a lot online talk on the left around the issue.

McCain put discussion of his citizenship to rest back in May by producing a hard copy birth certificate.

You would think that this would be performa for any candidate.

Obama is now up to 6 lawsuits suing him to produce a birth certificate.

Why does he take the grief?

I don’t know. Maybe his — I am a world citizen — speech in Berlin last summer was his way of saying that he’s not –in fact — a US citizen.

Oct 24, 2008 - 1:10 pm 186. sirius_sir:

Would you be one of the 25 million who were part of the die-hard resistance? Or would you fall in line, in order to stay alive? cfbleachers @ 57

Stay alive? Truly? And in any case, for how long?

Oct 24, 2008 - 1:13 pm 187. trangbang68:

Talking to my son who was brainwashed in the elite University Gulag and now swills the leftwing gruel with gusto. The topic was Ayers and Junior ,the educated dope, tried to minimize the significance of Ayers. It dawned on me that I went through Basic training at Ft. Dix, albeit in 1968 not 1970 when Terry Robbins, Ted Gold and Diana Oughton intended to bomb the NCO club. I could have been on the receiving end. David Horowitz in “Destructive Generation” or “Second Thoughts” de-constructs the Weathermen ,Panthers, etc. as the sick little monsters and street trash in the case of Huey Newton and Eldredge Cleaver that they really were. That odious creeps like Dohrn and Ayers are celebrated in the leftist University culture speaks volumes about the sunset of reason on campus.

Oct 24, 2008 - 1:59 pm 188. buddy larsen:

…the sunset of reason on campus

Sunset, when small men cast long shadows.

Oct 24, 2008 - 2:11 pm 189. SpeakEasy:

The “intellectuals” never get their hands dirty when the the “time of enlightenment” begins. All they need is control of the military and the courts. The military leaders receive their orders, the more morale are forced to resign when they refuse to comply with orders. The result is civil war which suits the anarchists just fine.

Choose wisely America or it will get bloody.

Oct 24, 2008 - 3:30 pm 190. bobal:

The first thing we should do, is kill all the farmers.

That way we’ll have a steady supply of grain.

Oct 24, 2008 - 3:32 pm 191. buddy larsen:

a secret police is critical. You want to keep the people poor and scared, so that they’ll trade anything for comfort & security. but if too poor and too scared, they’ll revolt. Enter basic necessity, which must be prepared as soon as the coup takes effect, a secret police. why secret? so a potemkin social-justice can be shown off, which includes courts. so ya gotta have a police that isn’t availabe to the courts.

Oct 24, 2008 - 4:30 pm 192. copperhead:

Buddy Larsen, you have made some interesting comments tonight. A word of appreciation. And thank you for your correspondence with Dr Maturin. I have been wondering about him…

Oct 24, 2008 - 7:02 pm 193. Utopia Parkway:

Why do you think that Obama hasn’t released a hard copy of his birth cert?

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

Oct 24, 2008 - 10:59 pm 194. Expressions:

The Ivy-League illuminati politicians believe they are superior to everyone. The elitists think their eloquent words fool us, but we stick to facts, not words!

Oct 25, 2008 - 11:48 am 195. mnotaro:

I agree….the left wing illuminati elitists think they have us all fooled, but we are smarter than that and don’t fall for some good looking, well spoken black man–we are more concerned with the facts and the facts speak for themselves!

Oct 27, 2008 - 12:21 pm

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