Vulcan's Mercy

Common Ground on Abortion a.k.a. The Graveyard

Thomas Peters of The American Papist has had his fill of the "common ground" efforts of pro-choicers to ratchet down the battle with pro-lifers.  Meeting on that common ground requires pro-lifers to compromise fundamental principles, whereas pro-choicers give up nothing but perhaps rhetoric on how swell abortion is.  Of course, even if pro-choicers also had to compromise on their principles, that common ground would still be a graveyard for pro-lifers where the truth surrenders to the lies that sustain political support for abortion-on-demand.  As any Christian should know, denial of the truth is death.  In his commentary about this, Peters does a fine job showing how the abortion argument is nothing but falsehoods, Orwellian vocabulary, and con artistry by tearing apart the noxious polemics of a hideous "common grounder" named Cecily Kellogg.

Missing In Action: The Honor of Senator McCain

Any decent person should be disgusted with the trashing of Gov. Sarah Palin by the media.  Whatever one thinks of her qualifications to be president, there's no basis for the calumny -- and just plain nastiness -- of reporters, pundits, and talking heads like that, most recently, of late-night host David Letterman and Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.  Palin deserves the support of all civic-minded Americans against this increasingly deranged assault upon her character, especially that of the man who brought her into the national spotlight last summer, Sen. John McCain.

Now McCain is quite a chest-thumping champion of personal honor, at least his own.  But he has been mostly silent when it comes to the defense of his erstwhile running mate, and what excuse does he have for such dishonorable conduct?  Why is he keeping his head low in this battle?  Especially when Palin's attackers are his campaign staffers too cowardly to put their names behind their words to the likes of Purdum?  When his own people are back-shooters, how come McCain cannot muster his honor to call them out to either stand by their statements against Palin or repudiate them?

Well, the truth is that what McCain calls honor is a lot like self-aggrandizement with a healthy dollop of sanctimony.  So if the matter at hand doesn't make him look good in the media or gore some particular ox of his, McCain isn't going to put himself out.  So even if common decency and genuine honor mean defending Palin against the slanders of his minions, the senator from Arizona ain't gonna do that if it doesn't win him the plaudits of the national media, the Beltway insiders, and the other bein pensants of the political muck he likes to wallow in.

[Note:  And just to make clear how unfit I thought Obama was for the White House, I voted for McCain last November believing all this about him at the time.]

Go West!

After high school I traveled quite a bit courtesy of the United States Air Force.  First I had the opportunity to journey back and forth from my home in Michigan to the West Coast a number of times over a period of a couple years.  Then I went east, and eventually across the Atlantic to England, where I was stationed for three years.  From there, I visited the Continent and my missions took me to even more exotic locations.  After that I spent awhile stationed near Washington D.C. and traveled up and down the East Coast.  Back to civilian life, business and fishing expeditions took me to other nooks and crannies of North America.  And most recently my wife and I spent a pleasant two weeks rambling along the backroads of France.

However, it was my first great journey from home to the wild wild West that made the deepest impression upon me, especially in contrast to my life soon after that in England.  It taught me both the importance of conservation while completely disabusing me of the urgency of environmentalism.   In other words, I learned that the wild spaces of the West and elsewhere would be best preserved by the evolution of our culture instead of the sledgehammer of our politics.  Let me explain.

Obama: No Friend of Liberty?

Obama's craven statements regarding the uprising in Iran have convinced me of the man's utter incompetence.  It's one thing to be a dove in foreign policy.  It's another to not support a people's demand for liberty because you think that would upset the tyrant you want to buddy up with.  How can he possibly think his mealy-mouthed cautions serve this country's interets?  Advancing liberty elsewhere in the world, where possible and practical, is never contrary to American security, commerce, and ideals.  Giving full-throated support to the Iranian people in their protests against the tyranny of the mullahs not only strengthens us in dealing with those tyrants but has the merit of being the right thing to do.  Only a man completely over his head at the White House could fail to grasp this.  The only other explanation is that Obama is no friend of liberty.  As the man clearly has a Marxist worldview, that could be true.  Then again, maybe the Iowa Hawk has Obama figured out on this one.

Wisdom at the Gates of Vienna

Thanks to the Maverick Philosopher, I discovered this piece of political wisdom by the Baron at The Gates of Vienna.  The Baron offers five reasons why we cannot be conciliatory to Muslim jihadists, and he's quite right the history shows us the disaster that will result.  (Actually the third and fourth reason are basically the same, but I quibble.)  I hope you find this as tidy an argument as I have against confusing decency with conciliation and appeasement.

Remembering Reagan

Five years ago Ronald Reagan died.  A good occasion to remember the man, especially these days when conservatives are frequently scolded for clinging to those antiquated principles that the Gipper governed by.

Of course, we are talking about the politics of only a quarter-century ago as though the lessons learned then are now suddenly irrelevant in the Age of Obama.  Human nature isn't so mutable that what was fundamentally true about taxes, sex, and war a couple decades back is any different today.  But then our culture has continued its decay, embracing the vulgarity and ignorance that have allowed unspoken leftist assumptions about man and his society to go uncritically challenge by most of us.  So the bohemain idea that people are plastic and amenable to radical change creates that upside-down world in which Obama, an old-fashioned man of the left peddling decrepit and discredited Marxist policies and programs, heralds the brave new world, while Reagan, a man who grasped the eternal verities of the human condition and brought about genuine liberation for hundreds of millions of people, is consigned to the dustbin of history.

Well, perhaps only the fools and the liars say that.  Neither of which is Mark Steyn.  Here is a reprise of his "Dutch Courage" that marked the passing of Ronald Reagan.

Murderers and the Mainstream Media

Author and film critic James Bowman wrote about the discrepancy in news coverage of the Dr. Tiller and Pvt. Long murders by politically motivated killers the other day.  A made a good point that not just liberal bias is at work but also conservative commonsense about crime:

"Yet the reason for this asymmetry is not just media bias, as you might think, though that must be at least a contributory factor in the case of the major media outlets. Apart from the FNC and the MRC, there are many blogs and cable TV shows and radio talk shows on the right which might have been expected to make a big deal out of tying the wacko Mr Muhammad to the left as the wacko Mr Roeder has been tied to the right but they pretty much didn’t. I think I know why. It’s because pro-lifers tend to be conservatives and conservatives don’t intellectualize crime as do liberals — who, as you may have noticed, also tend to be pro-choice."

This doesn't give a pass to the mendacity in the mainstream media.  (That corruption not being that a lefty point of view is apparent in news reporting, but rather the false pretense that it is not there.)  However, there is more going on that conservatives who tend to bleat about bias should note.  Many in the media are not capable of understanding the error in their thinking.  They are stuck in a mindset that renders them oblivious to the obvious, as Bowman illustrates with a sharp example:

"Faced with an act of violence, that is, the liberal of today characteristically looks around for someone to blame besides the person who committed it. In one remarkable case, which I noticed at the time in my website diary and later in my book, Media Madness, a columnist for the Washington Post even asked rhetorically how it could be that, if the Bush administration escaped the blame for the events of 9/11, 'no one' was at fault for it. Blaming the terrorist for his own act of terrorism no more occurred to Richard Cohen than blaming someone else for it would have occurred to most conservatives."

Let us pity the obtuse of print and the airwaves.

The 36-Year Political Cycle

With Obama's election, no one will disagree that there has been a sea-change in American politics.  But that turn left didn't occur on a dime.  It began with the 2004 elections.  At the time, as I read the post mortems of the 2004 election, I got the sense that it represented a fundamental shift, even though the raw vote totals for Bush and Kerry didn't appear to indicate such.  I thought there might be something to this, so I did a little noodling on the subject.  It appears to me that the history of American electoral politics is marked by a 36-year cycle.  At the end of each cycle is a major shift in the coalitions making up the major parties.  The 2004 election marked the completion of the latest cycle.  Let's take a look at this history.

With Obama's election, no one will disagree that there has been a sea-change in American politics.  But that turn left didn't occur on a dime.  It began with the 2004 elections.  At the time, as I read the post mortems of the 2004 election, I got the sense that it represented a fundamental shift, even though the raw vote totals for Bush and Kerry didn't appear to indicate such.  I thought there might be something to this, so I did a little noodling on the subject.  It appears to me that the history of American electoral politics is marked by a 36-year cycle.  At the end of each cycle is a major shift in the coalitions making up the major parties.  The 2004 election marked the completion of the latest cycle.  Let's take a look at this history.

Hugs and Kisses to the Mullahs

Obama's speech in Cairo on Thursday wasn't just dismal, it was disgusting in many regards.  His moral equivalency between the Israelis and the Palestinians generally, and the Holocaust and Palestinian refugees in particular, demonstrates a mindset lost to the Left, and so to reality -- and common decency.  Therefore, I suppose his comparison of Eisenhower's Operation Ajax to keep Soviet influence out of Iran in 1953 to the murderous mullahs' international campaign of terror over the past three decades shouldn't have been a surprise.  But throwing in the towel on Iran's A-bomb program was unexpected and dangerous.  (To say nothing of the silliness of Obama ascribing the conflict over that effort as a disagreement about international nuke regs.)  In short, our president's fawning and weakness in Cairo has emboldened our enemies (the mullahs and the jihadists), confused our fairweather friends (the relatively sane, though still noxious, Arab dictatorships), and alienated our one staunch ally in the region (Israel).  Obama may have blown kisses to the mullahs in Iran, but that love will be unrequited.  Meanwhile, his speech went a long way toward making it more likely that Israel will attack Iran to destroy its nuclear weapons program.

A Good Case Against Sotomayor

Stuart Taylor offers a good argument for conversatives to make against Sonia Sotomayor's appointment to the Supreme Court in an article for the National Journal.  (Hat tip to Real Clear Politics.)  Better than calling her a racist for her race "pride", Taylor suggests an examination of her jurisprudence that would make affirmative action (i.e., government-sanctioned racial discrimination in favor of blacks and Hispanics) the law of the land permanently.  His argument centers upon her support of the decision against the New Haven white firefighters who passed a difficult examination for promotion but were denied it because no blacks passed.  Here is how he wraps up his point against Sotomayor:

Torre [attorney for the white firefighters] went on to emphasize why the test was a valid basis for making promotions -- and what can happen when promotions go to people who have not done their homework:

"These men [are not] garbage collectors. This is a command position of a first-responder agency. The books you see piled on my desk are fire-science books. These men face life-threatening circumstances every time they go out.... They are tested for their knowledge of fire, behavior, combustion principles, building collapse, truss roofs, building construction, confined-space rescue, dirty-bomb response, anthrax, metallurgy.... The court [should] not treat these men in this profession as if it were unskilled labor. We don't do this to lawyers or doctors or nurses or captains or even real estate brokers. But somehow, they treat firefighters as if it doesn't require any knowledge to do the job....

"Firefighters die every week in this country.... A young father and firefighter, Eddie Ramos, died after a truss roof collapsed in a warehouse fire because the person who commanded the scene decided to send men into an unoccupied house... with a truss roof known to collapse early in [a] fire because of the nature of the pins that hold the trusses together.... And the fire chief had to go tell a 6-year-old that her father wasn't coming home."

Judge Sotomayor responded by observing that there must be "a fair test that could be devised that measures knowledge in a more substantive way."

Translation: New Haven needs a test that won't give such an advantage to the firefighters who have learned the most about fighting fires.

Exactly right.  Of all the folly of the leftist jurisprudence that Sotomayor subscribes to, perhaps the worst is her willingness to twist the law against commonsense.