Tag Archives: RS McCain

A Bunch of People Violently Died, Which Means It’s Time for Chris Matthews to Beclown Himself.

Posted by

1

And Outrage becomes cliche.

At different points during the day, I had the TV on three different cable channels: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. None of them have covered themselves in glory — Allah has video of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yammering pointlessly – but Chris Matthews was atrocious beyond description.

The worst part of ideological cocooning lies in how you lose sight of the ability to attribute good or evil outside of your epistemic shell. If violence happens in America, the Tea Party must be to blame, because the Tea Party is the representation of everything I think evil, so every evil act belongs to them somehow.

At present, the “authorities” (not sure if Boston PD or FBI or some combination thereof) are questioning a Saudi national in connection with the bombing. That doesn’t mean anything. They may determine he had nothing to do with it. But I don’t think there are very many Saudis in the Tea Party movement. Call it a hunch.

It’s boring to have to point these things out. It wearies the soul that such folly should stand, naked and unashamed, in front of us all. It’s infuriating that while we are burying our dead, that we have to blame it on each other’s politics. But the Left will have it so. They never let a good crisis go to waste.

Kermit Gosnell and the Holy of Holies

Posted by

2

Abortion is not new. It did not spring fully-formed from the head of the Supreme Court in 1973. It is as old as civilization itself, and the controversy surrounding it is just as old:

“Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit? Where there are many efforts at abortion? Where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot thou dost not let continue a mere harlot, but makest her a murderess also. You see how drunkenness leads to whoredom, whoredom to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevent its being born. Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?”

That’s St. John Chrysostom, one of the Doctors of the Church, writing in the 4th century AD, damning men for seducing women and abandoning them, forcing abortion upon them (just in case you thought that those old unmarried men had no idea what made babies happen). This argument has been going on for a very long time, and it’s going to keep going on. Nothing that has happened recently is going to change that.

It’s safe to say that the dam is bursting on the Kermit Gosnell story, as it inevitably must have. Nothing as lurid and horrifying as the prosecution alleges could have truly failed to escape the public consciousness, no matter how much certain circles would have preferred it.

I am late to this story, not because I didn’t know about it, and not because I haven’t been reading up on it (Stacy McCain in particular has been all over it from the beginning). I haven’t wanted to write about this for the same reason Megan McArdle didn’t: sheer revulsion and horror. What this bland, grandfatherly-looking man of 72 – a poster-boy for “the banality of evil” if ever one existed – created in his Philadelphia clinic amounts to an infant-sized Auschwitz, a crime against humanity. And even generically pro-life people like myself dont’ want to realize that it exists, for to do so would be to violate a polite taboo.

In ancient Israel, the sanctorum at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem was called the Holy of Holies. As the home of the Ark of the Covenant, it made incarnate the presence of God in Israel. Only one man – the High Priest – on only one day – Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – could ever enter the Holy of Holies. Anyone else (such as the sons of Aaron in Leviticus 10) who entered died. The presence of God was not for the unworthy to look upon.

If modern feminism’s obsession with “reproductive freedom” has something of a religious character (and there are those that say so), then the birth control pill is its Eucharist, and abortion its Holy of Holies. It is Between a Woman and Her Doctor: mere mortals are not supposed to know what goes on. When anti-abortion activists take to the streets with pictures of mutilated fetuses, we are angry at the makers of the pictures, not the makers of the content. This is true even of pro-life people, such as myself. We don’t want to see this. We don’t want to know. Witness Roger Simon:

The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself.  This is about the A-word.

No feeling human being can read this story or watch it on TV without being confronted with the obvious conclusion — like it or not — that abortion is murder.

It may be murder with extenuating circumstances (rape, survival of the mother, etc.) but it is murder nonetheless.  Dr. Gosnell — monster though he is — has accidentally shoved that uncomfortable truth in our faces.

Pushing this case front and center in the media would change the national narrative on this subject.  (The current stats are here, via Rasmussen.)

I can give you two guinea pigs to prove this point — my wife Sheryl and me.  We were in the kitchen last night, preparing dinner, when we saw a short report of this story on the countertop TV.

Both lifelong “pro-choice” people, after watching only seconds, we embarked in an immediate discussion of whether it was time to reconsider that view.  (Didn’t human life really begin at the moment of conception?  What other time?) Neither of us was comfortable as a “pro-choice” advocate in the face of these horrifying revelations.  How could we be?

Yes, Dr. Gosnell was exceptional (thank God for that!), but a dead fetus was a dead fetus, even if incinerated in some supposedly humane fashion rather than left crying out in blind agony on the operating room floor, as was reportedly the case with one of Gosnell’s victims. I say blind because this second-trimester fetus did not yet have fully formed eyes. (Think about that one.)

So I don’t think I’m “pro-choice” anymore, but I’m not really “pro-life” either.  I would feel like a hypocrite. I don’t want to pretend to ideals I have serious doubts I would be able to uphold in a real-world situation.  If a woman in my family, or a close friend, were (Heaven forbid) impregnated through rape, I would undoubtedly support her right to abortion.  I might even advocate it.  I also have no idea how I would react if confronted by having to make a choice between the life of a fetus and his/her mother.  Just the thought makes my head spin.

And there it is. We are compromised. We see murder and we pretend not to. We call it something else. We treat it as magic, as though a first-trimester abortion mystically removes the unwanted-abstraction-which-is-not-alive-shut-up, transubstantiates the woman from “pregnant” to “not pregnant” and sends her heroically on her way. The death, the blood, the humanity-reduced-to-laboratory-specimens (I have seen them), we doublethink these messy realities away. And we tell our young (and ourselves, truth be told) that they may fornicate freely, without consequence, because “protection” exists, and if “protection” fails (or they fail “protection”) we have this Serious And Important Issue to Pontificate and Philosophize About, which will unmake the the consequence.

We call this “Love”. We call it “Modern.” We call it “Necessary.” We call it “Woman Retaking her Power from the Patriarchy.” We call it “Free of Medieval Moralizing.” We call it “Rational”. We don’t call it “Infant Girl Decapitated With Scissors.“

We don’t want to see it. We don’t want to know.

My Interactions with @REALBROTHER0003 and the Banality of Twitter

Posted by

0

A few days ago I tossed off a rather unremarkable post called “Self-Hating Honkies and the War on Easter“. Not much to it, really. In the post, I linked Stacy McCain, who gave me a shout-out on Twitter, as befits a gentleman and scholar.

This must have coincided with an ongoing spar with one @REALBROTHER003, voice of what he calls the Real Brother Radio Show, about which, I must admit, I know little more than nothing. I say that because I was visited with this:

Now, the first part of this tweet is correct, if someone pedantically so. Ethnicity and religion aren’t identical. But is intolerance for a different religion really so different from intolerance for a different race? Are not both essentially based on fear and dehumanization of Teh Other? But whatever, score him the point. The second part is probably what drew me in. It’s almost hilarious in it’s rush-to-judgement, a too-perfect expression of “RAAAAACISM!” I had to read through the man’s tweets to make sure he wasn’t being ironic.

So I engaged:

This earned me a counter-thrust, complete with ALLCAPS capstone:

Ah. The cri-de-couer of the Reality-Based Community. How authoritative. I probably should have taken my cue and left things be at this point, but somehow, I plunged on, determined to see if I could get past the rhetorical armor:

I thought my hashtag would provoke a different line of attack, but he just doubled-down:

We now have an entirely Manichean worldview: the Land of Reality, and Bizzarro World, presumably filled with Racists. I have been judged and landed in the second place. Which is not really telling me anything new, so at this point, I got bored.

I suppose I had one last hope that my refusal to jump to his bait and moan “But I’m not a racist! Honest-to-gosh! And I don’t live in Bizzarro World either!” would at least give him pause. But @REALBROTHER003 has no truck with my contempt, and returned it full-force:

You have to give the man points for on-message consistency. And since I scored not one but two ALLCAPS explostions, I suppose I was getting under his skin that little bit. At this point that I summoned the interest to discover what TKCAL was all about: it seems to be an anagram for @REALBROTHER003′s name, Theron K. Cal. He’s also an independent filmmaker, with his own IMDB page.

Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary has three definitions for TKCAL, all of them referencing Theron, and none of them complementary (one of them is by “Real Brother’s Worst Nightmare,” which doesn’t sound terribly objective. This was the first link on the Yahoo search engine, as a matter of fact. So I’m guessing he puts that in all his tweets; reclaiming the name and all of that.

Anyway, I sent one more shot across the transom:

And that was that.

It’s not the worst conversation I’ve ever had on Twitter. I once got blocked by someone calling herself “Jezebel” (not @jezebel) because I wouldn’t let her give Bill Maher a pass during the Limbaugh-Fluke kerfuffle without calling her on it. Her tweets were hysterical in every sense of the word, and the block came when I told her that she had no idea how funny she was. @REALBROTHER003 was dignified by comparison.

But still, what a waste of time: a diary of two people not talking to each other. He shouts cliched insults, I sneer and condescend. He makes assumptions about me on nothing, I make assumptions based on little more. And that’s what we had: two assumptions with @-signs blabbing. What did we learn? Nothing, not even about each other.

And this is the media that delivered the last election? That sounds about right.

Rocking the Links

Posted by

0

A few things to read that other people wrote:

Finally, this guy worked very hard to reverse the gender roles of Donkey Kong so his daughter could play as Pauline (and if you knew that the girl in Donkey Kong was called Pauline, you know way more than I did about Donkey Kong)

The Union and the Confederacy: the Ongoing Civil War in the GOP

Posted by

2

The time has come for honesty. We cannot continue as we are, pretending to party unity. The schisms are too obvious. We talk of “establishments” and “purists” as though we all want different things. Let me suggest that this is in fact, because we want different things.

Let us first talk of the Union. The Union is the Washington GOP, the New York GOP, the PAC bundlers and the white-paper policy writers. The crew that ran K Street and runs Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and National Review. The opposition from the old days, when conservatism was drowning in a sea of rad-libs and fellow travelers, and keeping the faith alive from one defeat to the next was the order of business.

The Union are Hamiltonian men, for whom the business of government is management. The economy is to be managed; the welfare state is to be managed. Sure, we can make sound argument that these things should not exist, that they are poisonous to the body politic. But we will not unmake these things, because the insanity of the Left is something we must also manage to. If we push too hard, the left will turn the Eye of Sauron on us, and the mushy middle will betray us, and we will get Goldwatered. We must manage the progressive rot of our liberties, because the alternative is progressively worse.

Then there is the Confederacy. People who have been paying attention to the Tea Parties from the beginning know that hostility to Bush-brand bailouts and “compassionate conservatism” was also part of their fury. They felt betrayed by the conservatives they had sent to Washington, who had suckled on pork and given us Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind. What was the point of electing Republicans, if this was what they got?

The Confederacy – Tea Parties, Breitbart, and Reason-reading, Hayek-quoting kindred spirts of that ilk – don’t want to manage the erosion of our liberties. They want to roll it back. They’re tired of having to defend a constantly shrinking circle of redoubts, which the progressives may attack at their leisure. They don’t want to fix Social Security; they want to break it in two. They don’t want to increase federal education spending; they want to end it. Because that word – liberty – which I hardly heard in the 80′s and 90′s, has suddenly returned to vogue. The conservative base has had it with diluted conservatism, with begging the Priests of Leviathan to please not change everything right this minute.

This divergence is at the root of all the strife amid Republicans, not just now, not just during the election, or during the primaries, or even during the first Tea Party primaries in 2010 (O’Donnell vs. Castle et. al), but further and yet further back. Yesterday Stacy McCain reminded us that Rush Limbaugh backed Pat Buchanan’s quixotic attempt to unseat Bush the Elder in the 1992 primaries.

Limbaugh knew that Bush was doomed to defeat in 1992, and that the key was to give conservatives a cause worth fighting for. After Bush lost, Limbaugh’s show became the focal point for the Republican opposition that triumphed in 1994.

We cannot win if we do not fight, if we do not risk defeat. Ace spoke on this yesterday:

Yes, taking the Strong, Uncompromising Position has a chance of moving the Overton Window in your direction, which the Weak-Tea Fudge Position does not.

But then, taking the Strong, Uncompromising Position can also move the Overton Window away from you, too.

It’s a high-risk strategy. As in investing, high-risk plays are the only ones that can generate high value rewards… but then they can also bankrupt you. You can make high-risk investments, but not too many of them, and you have to make such decisions only with great care and deliberation.

He thinks that Paul Ryan took the Strong, Uncompromising Position last year and that it blew up in our faces. People were terrified of messing with the government gravy train and so fell into the soft embrace of Obama’s orotund evasions. Perhaps, perhaps. But was this not instructive? Did we not learn something about the work that is before us? About the extent to which we are outflanked culturally and demographically? Did we not all, Establishment and Tea Party, come away with the understanding that we have to try harder, and in new ways, if we want to win again?

Perhaps not. Perhaps all the Union men came away with was the fact that we just got pummeled and that we should give the Beast whatever he wants so that he will eat us last. And Perhaps the Confederates learned only to Let it Burn, so that they can rebuild on the ashes.

But no election is ever the last one. We will have another chance, and soon. The question is, what will we use that chance to do? To maintain and manage, or to resist? Do we want to trim Leviathan’s claws, or do we want to kill the beast?

We need to make up our minds. Our enemies already have.

Does it Matter if He’s Eeeeeevil?

Posted by

11

Back in 2008, Jeff Goldstein had a long, ugly argument with Patrick Frey (which started here) about whether Obama was a “good man”. At the time, I found the argument much ado about nothing: what difference can it possibly make if he has a good heart or not? I’m opposed to what he does in any case, because he is a progressive and I am a conservative. Whether he’s a loyal husband, a good father, respectful to his underlings, etc., has nothing to do with me. The effects of his policies on my bottom line does.

And then Mitt Romney happened.

Yesterday, Erick Erickson resuscitated the good man/loyal opposition frame.

I believe the President’s policies are destructive and will harm our economy, our nation, and our sense of national self long term. I believe his policies have the effect of turning us into subjects of the government, not citizens in charge of it. Because of his expansion of the social safety net funded through class warfare, Mr. Obama’s policies will cause too many Americans’ fortunes to rise and fall with those of the government, unable to chart a course for themselves apart from government.

But I do not think the President means to do this maliciously.

Stacy McCain takes up Goldstein’s part this time:

The GOP’s ridiculous defensive flinch reflex — “Oh, no! Somebody said rude things about Democrats!” — is symptomatic of a larger problem: Republicans let liberals dictate the terms of debate.

If liberals say the problem is that Republicans lack “civility,” then the GOP is beset by hall-monitor types telling us to watch our language. If liberals say the problem is Republicans need to appeal to Latinos, we’ll hear a lot of sermonettes from the open-borders crowd. If liberals say Republicans are losing because of gay-rights issues, we’ll be told to drop our pants and bend over to demonstrate our support for sodomy.

At what point will Republicans figure out they’re being scammed?

The Democrats did not respond to getting their teeth kicked in by George Bush in 2004 by embracing civility, by congratulating the President on his re-election. They doubled down on outrage. They fought the President on his second-term agenda tooth-and-nail.

That worked out rather well for them, all things considered.

Part of the problem lies in the meaning of the word “malicious”. Erickson seems to think that if Obama believes that good will result from his actions, then he is to be treated as absent of malice. But these terms are very slippery. Almost certainly, Obama believes that if he gets his way, the result for America will be a net positive. But he knows perfectly well that it will be a net negative for great numbers of individual Americans. He knows what it means to “spread the wealth around.” He knows what it means to force people onto government healthcare exchanges. He knows that eggs will have to be broken. But he, like all progressives, is fine with that, because of the Grand Omelet.

Giving progressives a pass for their intent is a fool’s game. Of course progressives intend that their be liberty, equality, and brotherhood. But if they insist that this can only be accomplished by a happy-faced Leviathan pulling society up from its roots willy-nilly. And in their darkest heart of hearts, they enjoy the destruction of the old. They see it the way medieval monks saw scourging: as a necessary purification. For America to rise to great hights, America must first be unmade.

That is what Obama wants. This is not a debate about what in America needs reforming. Obama wants to reform everything about this country. He wants to change, utterly, the relationship of the citizen and the state. He has in mind some benevolent ant colony where all the good things in Julia’s life proceed from the wisdom of the enlightened ruling class. All things within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So no, Erick, Obama doesn’t need to be giggling in the dark to himself like a tanner version of Mr. Burns in order to be malicious. He needs only to be tyrannical at heart, to be working ever doggedly to replace our natural liberties with the crumbs of the all-powerful God-State. He needs only to act as though the Constitution doesn’t apply to him. That will do to make him the enemy of our society’s very basis.

And if we judge on that standard, we start finding a great many people to be enemies in the same way. Which is a scary thought, to be sure. But we can no longer pretend that we share common ground with progressives. They despise us as sinful reminders of what this country must overcome. In this, they may be fools more than monsters. But the folly is one they freely, and persistently, choose. So what difference does it make?

UPDATE: Jeff chimes in -

That is, because he believes it to be good and right, and is so confident that he can run the world more adeptly through his natural brilliance and charisma than can some invisible hand, he’s out to demonize and then destroy the foundational principles of this country as envisioned — and to so he’s willing to demonize and destroy those in principled opposition to his ideology. For the greater good, of course.

One of his mentors, Bill Ayers, thought that might require some camps and maybe 25 million dead.

And as I happen to be one of those, I take offense. Pardon fucking me.

A tyrant is a tyrant is a tyrant. To respect him is to pay him the coin that he wants, albeit in installments.

AND FURTHERMORE: Mike at Cold Fury links as well, and asks the progs if they’ve really thought about what seizing absolute power means. I suspect, if they have, that they think any unpleasantness will be over quickly. After all, no force of civilians could possibly restrain the world’s most dangerous military, right?

IT ALL COMES FULL CIRCLE: Stacy McCain riffs of my riff of his riff (It’s like trading fours!), discussing the conservative “generation gap.”

If you don’t remember where you were when Saigon fell (I was a sophomore at Lithia Springs High School) or the Berlin Wall came down (I was a 30-year-old sports editor for the Calhoun [Ga.] Times), it’s impossible for you to understand the Cold War mentality, the petri dish within which the post-WWII conservative movement was incubated.

Conservatism was originally and fundamentally about foreign policy: Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?

Trying to get Americans to listen to conservative ideas on domestic policy has always been much more difficult, and we are really now back to an era that precedes my own birth, which I know only from history books and from tales of old-timers like M. Stanton Evans. We’re back to the Truman era, when the godless Commies who threatened America were clandestine subversives who called themselves “liberals.”

The Fall of Saigon was just before my time on this earth of sorrows began, but I do remember the last phase of the Cold War. I remember feeling a wonderful sense of relief when the Wall came down, because I knew that I didn’t ever have to worry about Russian ICBM’s ever again. I was 13. It took me a little longer to stop worrying about the Rain Forest and oil spills and overpopulation and all the other bogies they terrified me with as a tad.

BTW, I made Memeorandum for the first time ever. Red Letter day! Thanks to all for the hot linky action.

 

Stupid Teenagers are Stupid

Posted by

1

Not being a reporter, I have neither the skills nor the resources to discern fact from fiction in the Steubenville Rape Case. I trust that Stacy McCain has the right of the matter, and that the KoolKids from 4Chan (or whatever) are just desperately seeking lulz.

So I’d like to talk not about the particulars, but about the universal adolescent need to be stupid:

At the parties, the girl had so much to drink that she was unable to recall much from that night, and nothing past midnight, the police said. The girl began drinking early on, according to an account that the police pieced together from witnesses, including two of the three Steubenville High athletes who testified in court in October. By 10 or 10:30 that night, it was clear that the dark-haired teenager was drunk because she was stumbling and slurring her words, witnesses testified.
Some people at the party taunted her, chanted and cheered as a Steubenville High baseball player dared bystanders to urinate on her, one witness testified.
About two hours later, the girl left the party with several Big Red football players, including Mays and Richmond, witnesses said. They stayed only briefly at a second party before leaving for their third party of the night. Two witnesses testified that the girl needed help walking. One testified that she was carried out of the house by Mays and Richmond while she was “sleeping.”

Let’s break this down. A girl gets so drunk that people start making fun of her, then proceeds to go to another “party”, where she spends 20 minutes puking and then gets kicked out. Hey, we’ve all been there. The sensible thing to do is cut your losses and go home. Instead, she rallies for the third party, where two goons are charged with raping her.

Is it her fault she got raped? No, by definition it can’t be. Is it her fault she’s stupid? Yes.  Because getting raped is not the only bad outcome of her state. She might have driven a car and crashed it, killing herself or someone else. For that matter, she might have died from alcohol poisoning. Nothing good comes from getting blackout drunk, and even a 16-year-old girl should be expected to know that.

The boys are even stupider. Even if (and let’s assume that a rather gargantuan IF) they aren’t guilty of rape, they’re guilty of utter negligence and basic inhumanity. Inflicting yourself on a drunk girl just because you need your rocks gotten off is barbarian in every sense of the word: primitive, uncivilized, and not speaking the same language as the rest of us. A drunk girl is not an “opportunity,” she is a person in need of help, or at the very least, someone you should probably leave alone. Being full of beer and sperm does not abrogate these facts.

A deeper question: why is this normal? Why is a 16-year-old shambling around to house parties drinking herself to unconsciousness unremarkable? Why are teenage boys encouraging and reveling in their savagery just your typical Saturday Night? What the hell is wrong with us?

This is beyond “Rape Culture” or any other tedious neologisms that the academic Left would pin to whatever scapegoats they have in mind. This is about a consummate failure to instruct the young, to nurture in them the sense to know good from bad decisions and the will to prefer the former. We do not punish the young for risky behavior; we celebrate and envy them for it. We encourage them to have a good time, while they can, while they’re young, before they have to do the things that actually matter in life. It’s not about Rape Culture, it’s about Stupid Culture.

Look at all the fun he’s having.

I’m Not a Particularly Good Catholic

Posted by

0

Which is why it took Stacey McCain’s epic blog post on Anne Hathaway’s wardrobe malfunction to remind me that I should follow His Holiness on Twitter. Something to confess this Saturday before Armageddon arrives the following Friday. Mea maxima culpa.

When this story first trickled through the media, it was reported that the Pope would not follow anyone, nor re-tweet. But the first thing you’ll notice is that the Pope follows seven people: Who are these seven?

Himself, in seven other languages.

I mean, a Triune God is one thing. A Septune Pope is enough to frighten even the doughtiest ultramontanist.

Image