A SUDDENLY ABSCESSED TOOTH, that all-time horror of dental emergencies, has laid me low since last night, with the result I am unable to concentrate on anything much more than living from one minute to the next until I am able to get the problem tooth extracted. I don't know when this will be: I hope today, but I doubt it. My pre-move dentist is in Olympia (a two-hour drive from where I live now), so assuming I can secure an immediate appointment, I am still facing the nightmare of having to spend four hours dealing with some of the most infuriatingly congested traffic in America while in the midst of severe dental pain -- the most debilitating agony I know. And I won't be able to take even a single pain-killer until I am safely back home, which means I am looking forward to as horrible a day as any I have ever experienced. Forget the promised essay. At this point I hardly care if I never write another word.
If the long-promised high-speed rail system were up and running, my problem would be solved: I'd phone my dentist, get a painkiller prescription, gobble a handful of blessed-relief pills and take the train. But thanks to repeated sabotage by "we-don-wanna-be-like-Jew-York" xenophobes, the rail system is six years behind schedule. So I've gotta deal with all the frustrations of local motoring, especially the archetypical Pacific Northwest morons who get in the 65-mile-per-hour fast-lane and then defiantly obstruct traffic for miles by chugging along at 40 miles per hour. Such is life here in Pugetopolis, which claims to be the most environmentally enlightened metropolitan area in America -- but which demonstrates its utter hypocrisy by the infinitely damning fact it has the worst, most abysmally useless, most outrageously nonfunctional urban public transport system in the entire United States. Sure I can ride the bus to my dentist's office -- but though it is only about 40 miles, it is nearly a five-hour trip each way.
CONTRARY TO MY EXPECTATIONS, the essay I promised to post today remains unfinished. This is because -- as so often happens when I write -- it has taken off in a new and unforseen direction. Hence I am exploring the connection between the media's refusal to acknowledge the mytho-spiritual dimension of the Terror War and the absolute hostility to religion essential to the "free-abortion-on-demand" stance of the personal-as-political Left. My apologies for the delay; I should be finished with this (newly enlarged) work in time for posting tomorrow morning.
Meanwhile here is a must-read report by Daniel Pipes on Islamic efforts to fill the vacuum created in U.S. public schools by institutionalized hostility to Christianity and Judaism. Once again, political "correctness" is playing into the hands of those who would replace Constitution with Qur'an.
And have a good weekend too. I'll be back early Monday.
...to what I wrote yesterday, because I recognize it is a lot to digest (and most of all because I don't want to distract from it), I will refrain from posting today. But I am working on an essay about the underlying mythic significance of the War, which I will probably have ready to post in time for the weekend. And there are always the myriad news sites from which to lift short items, as I typically do between longer posts.
HERE IS THE ESSAY I have been promising for the past several days. When I began it, its original conclusion was that – despite the death of liberalism – the American social-conscience liberalism had formerly represented was now being reborn in myriad new forms public and private. But then the work I am doing forced me to take (another) hard look at the implications of how taxpayer selfishness has radically shrunken governmental services – this in combination with the infuriating reality of bureaucrats who legally inflate their own paychecks by denying services to the very people they are hired to serve. And when I realized the dismal extent to which these miserly tendencies have become universally American (even here in the allegedly “leftist” realm of the Puget Sound region), it forced me to conclude our national social conscience was probably never anything more than an artificial construct: a cultural anomaly forced on us in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the threats of fascism and Soviet Communism. But the America of the New Miserliness was not an America I was eager to acknowledge: hence the minor personal intellectual crisis – and spiritual crisis too – that is real reason this piece has taken me so long to finish.
THE PROBABILITY IS THIS era that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union will go down in history as one of our nation’s most cruel, at least as measured by its attitudes toward those who have fallen by the American economic wayside. What is said or not said by presidential candidates is always a mirror of United States values – especially now when all such presentations are so carefully shaped by focus-groups – and the speech-content of this last presidential campaign makes it undeniably clear that indifference to the poor is now one of our national characteristics. If the numbers of the impoverished were shrinking, our dwindling concern could be written off as merely an expression of good times, but in fact the opposite is true: by every statistical yardstick you can find, the underclass is getting bigger, which casts our national response – or rather the lack thereof – in an especially damning light. And as I discovered during a recent freelance assignment, whole communities – not just the archetypical poor – are feeling the pangs inflicted by America’s New Miserliness.
While the New Miserliness can be attributed to many factors – not the least of which is an uncertain economy – I believe its ultimate cause is the death of liberalism: the fact that in the wake of liberalism’s demise, we have become a nation without a domestic social conscience. Say what you like about liberalism, from the time of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt until liberalism’s destruction by forces mostly beyond its control, it was the true social conscience of America. And whether you were a Democrat or Republican, it made little difference in your acceptance of the basic notion that providing some level of social services was at least partly the responsibility of the government and thus ultimately the individual taxpayer: the ensuing debate focused on what and how much, not whether.
But before I say more, let me make it unmistakably clear what I am talking about: the liberalism I am lamenting is the old-time, John Fitzgerald Kennedy liberalism, the Dwight Eisenhower liberalism, the liberalism of Harry Truman and FDR and LBJ and Gerald Ford and yes even the begrudging liberalism of Richard Nixon, the kind of liberalism once defined by Webster: “ideals of individual esp. economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives.” This was the liberalism that re-unified America after the most fiercely contested political campaigns – the liberalism that gave every man, woman and child a sense of owning stock in the United States even if they did not own a single share in one of America’s corporations.
The liberalism for which this essay has become a eulogy thus bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pathology today’s mass media labels “liberalism”: the feces-hurling, GOP-office-trashing, war-monument-vandalizing hatefulness of the self-proclaimed “progressive” Left – a Left that in its pre-election frenzies reflected its cold indifference to America’s lower-income working families by proposing an expansion of health insurance that would have been available only if you as head-of-household were willing to submit self, mate and offspring to the ultimate humiliation of enslavement by the welfare bureaucracy. Not that I was especially surprised: the Left has dismissed the poor and near-poor as “hopelessly reactionary” ever since welfare mothers rejected women’s-liberation organizing efforts in the early 1970s. The Left’s ideological hostility to the American underclass was in fact one of the earliest symptoms of the New Miserliness.
But to see the New Miserliness in all its disturbing ugliness, we have to look at Enron – the Big Business equivalent of a consortium of economic Ted Bundys run amok. Enron, the victims of which are inescapably ruined, typifies the harshly divided society of exploiters and exploited that is arising in the wake of liberalism’s demise. And the Enron ethos is apparent everywhere: in an economy ever more propped up by the scab labor of illegal immigrants, in the ranks of the homeless that increase daily, and most of all in the climate of despair that now spreads even to seniors who suddenly find themselves deprived of the hard-earned comforts of retirement. All across the land it is Enron writ large: the workplace ever more 19th-Century-sweat-shop oppressive, the workforce ever more terrified and submissive, the whole people – all save the independently wealthy – ever more cowed by fears of outsourcing, downsizing, cutbacks and closures. Indeed we have become Enron Nation.
Contrary to rightist myth, it was not excessive tolerance that brought about liberalism’s terminal crisis of confidence, but rather its loss of faith in its own principles. Feminism, victim-identity cultism in general, self-hatred portrayed as humanistic moral equivalence, craven cowardice disguised as pacifism, pathologically greedy careerism – these are the forces that subverted liberalism inside the very Democratic Party that was once its primary home, the forces that eventually discredited liberalism in the streets of America’s cities, maimed it via welfare fraud and murdered it in the classrooms of America’s schools and colleges. Apart from feminism’s original (and once legitimate) claim of being the sole vehicle by which women might achieve equality before the law, none of these doctrines – especially the female-supremacist brand of fascism that eventually suppressed all of feminism’s originally libertarian impulses – would have prevailed if liberals had not abjectly surrendered their own beliefs during their post-Vietnam penance. That the liberals were needlessly contrite – that their rightful Southeast Asian cause had been undermined by the same bureaucratic intransigence that has crippled American foreign policy since the end of the Marshall Plan – makes their fate all the more ironic.
What sprang up to challenge liberalism’s place on the Left was an utterly bogus “progressivism” of false “diversity” that demanded not the keen critical thinking that had kept the variously named American liberal impulse alive since the time of Thomas Jefferson, but rather an absolute intellectual conformity and lockstep ideological discipline that, beyond the lunatic fringes, had hitherto been utterly alien to American political thinking. Apart from a compelling label stolen from the liberal Theodore Roosevelt, today’s “progressivism” is nothing more than a new brand of victim-identity fascism, with something promised everyone (save Caucasian males) by its self-centered ideology of “the personal is political”: an affirmative-action car in every garage and a quota-mongered chicken in every pot. In fact it is merely another form of Enron-ism, the exact equivalent of the Enron plutocracy’s sneering kleptomania: arrogant greed repackaged as “progressive” demands for “reparations.” As the ancient Greeks recognized, unlimited license for self-bribery does not ever further the cause of democracy or even public well-being.
But old-time liberalism sought no such license, which is precisely why it scored its notable triumphs. One of these was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which lifted the entire South out of devastating post-Civil-War impoverishment, turned it into a new El Dorado of economic development and did so without costing American taxpayers a single penny. But other liberal remedies were sometimes worse than the diseases they sought to cure – the deliberate transmogrification of welfare recipients into a vast permanent underclass of dependents is a classic example. Though this was not the failure of liberal ideals and ideas per se, but rather the inability of the enacting (upper-middle) class to transcend its own class-bred prejudice and greed. The greed-and-prejudice syndrome – and not some hypothetical unworkability of the liberal impulse to charity – is what created the entire welfare crisis. The welfare system became nothing more than a jobs program for a whole generation of parasitic feminists who in truth despised the very people they claimed to serve. The proof of this statement is in its associated numbers: from 1970 through 1990, welfare administrative costs skyrocketed by 5,390 percent – not a typo, and a sum based on the federal government's own data. Thus were the pretend-revolutionary bureaucrats feathering their own nests even as they slashed the value of welfare stipends and services by fully two-thirds. The real welfare queens weren't mythical Black Mammies living in crack hovels; they were ideologically arrogant matrifascist social-work bureaucrats ensconced in air-conditioned offices decorated with anti-male slogans. By claiming “the personal is political,” you can rationalize anything, including the depredations of the powerful against the powerless. Once again, Enron Nation.
A less-deliberate and thus somewhat more forgivable version of the selfsame blind greed has destroyed our labor unions. Unions are not irrelevant or unnecessary – far from it, given the epicentral kleptomania of Enron Nation – but in too many industries, the workers now totally identify with their Enron oppressors and thus fail to see that, via outsourcing, salary-reductions, pension give-backs and health-insurance cuts, their standard of living is being methodically reduced to the post-industrial equivalent of serfdom. Trickle-down economics work fine for people of the upper middle class and above, but for the poor nameless stiff just thrown off a production line (the same day his wife was ousted from her receptionist's job), the future is inexorably grim. Meanwhile, as we witnessed during the recent presidential election campaign, the victors speak of poverty as if it were nothing more than a repugnant statistic (the sort of distasteful thing one refrains from discussing in polite company), while the losers passionately lament the accelerating division of the United States into “two nations” even as they demonstrate their ultimate indifference to the poor by their failure to propose any solutions whatsoever, their pseudo-passion but a Shakespearean idiot’s tale, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Were liberalism the expression of some underlying collective American social conscience, as had I believed it to be when I began this work, it would surely have survived the double crises of Vietnam and the hostile advent of a venomously anti-intellectual New Left. In fact for a time liberalism did survive: witness the increasingly angry confrontations between the New Left’s ever-more-emotional agitators (“the personal is political”) and the meticulously intellectual Old Left leadership (“the function of government is to help people do collectively what they cannot do as individuals”). Such clashes were a major characteristic of leftist politics in the 1970s and the 1980s, and they set off conflicts that linger ephemerally even today. But what finally killed the Old Left (and thus destroyed American liberalism) was the death of the Soviet Union. Capitalism is like any other entrenched economic system: the only way to humanize it comes (just as Mao Zee Dong said) from the barrel of a gun. Liberalism's gun was the Red Army, and the secret but all-consuming paranoia of the Establishment that – unless proper concessions were made – America would someday rise up in a replay of Petrograd and Ten Days That Shook the World. Indeed it would not be unfair to say that it was the Red Army that made America what it was during most of the second half of the 20th Century. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of the Red Army vanished, and with it died any inclination of the politicians to listen to the liberal intellectuals’ pleas for meaningful reforms, much less any imperative for the private sector to allow their enactment. Predictably, soon afterward the liberal will toward reform died also – the Old Left silencing itself in despair (“why bother; no one cares”), the New Left abandoning any pretense of commitment to classically liberal ideals and quickly thereafter deteriorating into a miasma of self-centered totalitarian cults.
In truth the death of liberalism is a tragedy the dimensions of which will probably not be fully apparent for at least another decade or two – a profound loss not only for America but for the entire world.
In this context it is instructive to examine the evidence that is be gleaned from President Bill Clinton’s program of welfare reform. Here we see the real reason Democrat Clinton was able to throw millions off welfare, condemning them to what by all indications was a certain doom of Charles-Dickens-class poverty – lifetime minimum-wage employment without any fringe benefits and not one scintilla of hope for ever advancing out of the eventually lethal cesspool of poverty. That the reality of welfare reform proved to be far less deadly than the original projections is an aside: the point is that once the USSR was beaten, there was no threat of incipient revolution to reinforce liberal demands and proposals, much less prompt a receptive attitude toward them. Thus liberalism lost its imperative as a national-defense mechanism , became useless, and was shoved (by Clinton himself) into its grave. Like it or not, it is proof of Clinton’s Enron-Nation brilliance he recognized the post-USSR circumstances and acted upon them. Clinton understood that without the Red Army, America as we knew it – the America that at least pretended to care for its have-nots even as it provided lavishly for its have-plenties – is dead.
And the have-nots (like all rank-and-file Enron employees), have ever since been intimidated to silence. Nor is there anyone left who is willing to speak for them. What we are witnessing now, in the form of the Left’s endless post-election tantrums and hissies and its burgeoning threat of radical violence, is not at all what the Left and leftist-dominated mass media would have us believe – a predictable expression of post-John-Kerry proletarian anger. It is rather the rage of a disenfranchised elite: an elite that rode to power on liberal coat-tails without ever understanding what liberalism meant, squandered its inheritance on politicizing the personal, and now faces the same obsolescence that toppled its Old Left forebears. Victim-identity cults – a throwback to Naziism – are ultimately even less American than social-welfare programs. Welcome to Enron Nation, where the ubermenschen routinely sneer at those of us who live below the salt. All that distinguishes the Left’s contempt of the electorate from Enron’s contempt toward its customers is that Enron had something to sell – something the public desperately needed.
Of course the ideals of liberalism cannot die; they are at least as old as Rome. And in places like Cleveland, where outsourcing has left 35 percent of the workforce chronically unemployed, nothing but old-fashioned FDR-type liberalism can save the day; private industry simply does not have the resources. But even with needfulness of the Cleveland caliber, I can see nothing on the horizon that is likely to force liberalism back into public policy as a counterbalance to the bitter realities of Enron Nation – realities of which Cleveland is another prime example. This is because the Islamic enemy – unlike the enemies we faced during the most of the 20th Century – does not promise the boons of economic security (fascism) or political empowerment via the workplace (Marxism) to which we as a nation had no choice but to respond with betterment-pledges of our own. Instead the Islamic enemy offers only submission and extermination – realities that are literally too awful to contemplate – plus the likelihood of untold centuries of war. Hence there is no compulsion at all for America to concern herself with domestic socioeconomic betterment. Indeed, from a purely Darwinian perspective, the only logical national response to the Islamic threat is the creation of an ever-more-stratified, ever-more-unforgiving society – to which the increasingly feudal realities of Enron Nation are probably but the historical gateway. Our golden age is ended. Next will be the decades and perhaps centuries of Fortress America, like Roman Britain in the years of Arthur or perhaps like Ireland during the Norse Invasions: a harsh realm – but nevertheless an island of civilization in a raging sea of barbarism.
I AM NOT POSTING anything other than one quick vital link today because I am in the midst of the essay about liberalism – its death and possible resurrection in new form – I promised more than a week ago. I began work on its week-old rough draft yesterday evening and discovered about midnight I had undertaken a much greater project than I realized: the work I had been doing for a local publication had spilled over into this matter and was now impelling it in new directions, with the result the one-page draft quickly became five pages of Times Roman type. It is now nearly finished, but there remain some facts to be verified, and perhaps three concluding paragraphs to be written. Then possibly because of its length I will divide it into two parts, one to run Tuesday, the next Wednesday...or perhaps – because I am my own most demanding editor – it will take until Wednesday (or even Thursday) before I am satisfied with the results.
In the meantime I would share someone else's work – a very relevant essay, given its premise: the belief (which I hold in common with the Asia Times columnist who goes by the name of Spengler) that the increasing violence of Islam heralds a global war of unprecedented dimensions, a matter that just happens to be central to the question of what will replace liberalism as the social conscience of America. Spengler is discussing why Islam cannot be reformed – why the global clash is unavoidable – a must-read available here. I hope you find this Spengler piece as thought-provoking as I did.
THREE LINKS FOR YOUR weekend pleasure and contemplation, all seasoned by a solemn promise that on Monday I’ll be back to serious blogging: the November deadline frenzy is behind me and my sore throat is diminishing to a mere tickle.
Link Number One is purely utilitarian – a huge money-saver I’ve already put to the test – something called GasBuddy that helps you find the cheapest fuel in town just about anywhere in the United States. It’s available here (with a hat-tip to the always-useful WomensWallStreet site for the original link). You just type in your zip-code, compare your alternatives and purchase accordingly: in my test run this afternoon it saved me 10 cents per gallon.
The remaining links – two and three – are vitally informative.
Number Two is to Col. Oliver North (USMC Ret.), who tells us what really happened in that Fallujah mosque – the place where a radical NBC-TV cameraman claims a Marine committed a war crime and so gave Islam another hate-America propaganda film. If you read nothing else this weekend, read this. North’s account is close to what I guessed had actually occurred, which suggests the Marine deserves not a court-martial but an “attaboy” for being on his toes, never mind the contrary testimony of a man who seems to take his hairstyle cues from Charles Manson. Once again I am compelled to ask: what suicidal dementia possesses the Bush Administration it allows enemy propagandists to accompany our troops into battle?
The third link is a tragic letter that tells us what life in politically “correct” Canada is really like, especially when you’re a law-abiding citizen desperately seeking protection from one of Canada’s protected minorities – in this instance, predatory crack addicts. I’m reminded of Manhattan in the 1960s, when most of the politicians (and too many of the cops) believed that if you lived in a bad neighborhood, you didn’t deserve any protection against the pukes and scumbags you necessarily had to share the turf with. But in the City it was merely another expression of the old adage that “money talks.” In Canada it’s something far worse: reverse bigotry enforced by men with badges and guns against a citizenry that it is totally disarmed and thus pathetically powerless – just the sort of place our gun-hating leftists would love.
Another reason to give heartfelt thanks for the United States of America – and have a fine weekend too.
STILL SWAMPED AND SUFFERING from a sore throat as well, I think it will be at least another day and maybe two before I can get back to “normal” blogging. Meanwhile, here is a must-read from Front Page Magazine, a disturbing report from the Caliphate of Dearborn about the growing popularity among American Muslims of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideology of global conquest.
THANKS TO A LINK provided by the Lucianne.com poster who goes by the screen-name of cap MarineTet68 (and of course thanks also to Lucianne Goldberg herself), I have finally seen the film Submission, which yet another Muslim hack-and-stab murderer protested recently by killing its maker, the Dutch art-cinematographer Theo van Gogh. What follows is a slightly enlarged version of what I wrote on Lucianne.com about Mr. van Gogh’s work, which brought to life a script by a woman who is herself a refugee from Islamic persecution and whose own experience thus illustrates the horrors to which all women are subjected in the name of Islam’s god Allah.
Named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the script-writer grew up an upper-class Muslim in Somalia. In 1992 she fled to the Netherlands, where she became fluent in Dutch, attended college, studied political science and, after publicly abandoning Islam, became an activist in the struggle to make the plight of viciously oppressed Muslim women known throughout the West – hopeful the West will somehow end their suffering. In yet another predictable demonstration of Islamic “tolerance,” Ms. Ali of course lives under constant threats of death herself.
Here is what I said about her collaboration with Mr. Van Gogh:
This film is simple poetry, profoundly moving, transcending even my prefatory skepticism, poignant as Deirdre's Song or some other equally tragic ancient Celtic lament that is also a call to arms. It should be shown to every soldier, every Marine, every sailor, every airman and airwoman in the U.S. military establishment. It should be shown to all our allies -- especially those, like the Geordies of The Black Watch, who come from traditions that yet embody memories of chivalry and the unequaled honor that grows from the righteous defense of Womanhood. For then this war would be, in the hearts of all those who fight in the name of Westernesse, a true Crusade -- a Holy Crusade to liberate all of that vast and tragic sisterhood who suffers enslavement by Islam. Then -- just as the Union soldiers did in the Civil War, we would truly bring the Jubilee -- the plantation-owner objections of the Islamic males be damned in an apocalypse of blood and fire.
The film can be seen here.
Sometimes when I post on Lucianne.com I do so in a manner that – in retrospect – suggests the need for a cooler head. But I do not regret a word of the above, save that in my passion I misspelled Deirdre in the original, accidently transposing the e and i, an error I did not notice until later.
TODAY’S OTHER LINK, RELATED to the first by more than simple synchronicity, was suggested by the blogger Anchoress, who asked me to post it for those readers we do not share. Here is what she said to me on November 11:
A pal who is connected to CBS is bemoaning that the right wing bloggers, so quick to castigate the network when they deserve it - and let's face it, they often do - are never as quick to give a little praise when it may be appropriate. He wrote, "This is something I find annoying... They cannot wait to rip us apart when we go against their grain, but they never stop to call attention to things they approve of. Last night's piece by David Martin on the wounded of Falluja healing at home, and getting thousands of dollars in financial help from Semper Fi, was a loving and respectful tribute to our men in uniform, and the people who love them. And a fitting prelude to Veterans Day. Were they all watching 'LOST'?"
He may well have a point. I don't watch much television at all (I had to ask him what "Lost" was) and did not see “60 Minutes” so I have only his word that the report was praiseworthy - but he's a good guy and his word is usually gospel.
I suspect that conservative bloggers simply didn't see the thing - I know a lot of people who "boycott" CBS, these days - and so didn't know the Fallujah soldiers were covered. It sounds like it was worth watching, and I'd appreciate feedback from any who did actually see it.
In the meantime, I wanted to pass on the information about Semper Fi, which CBS did include in its report. It seems to me an excellent way to honor our veterans might be to send them a little check!
Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund
The injured Marine Semper Fi Fund provides financial grants and other resources to injured Marines, Sailors, and their families. The Fund works closely with the Marine Corps and military hospitals nationwide to identify and assess the needs of specific families. Its goal is to provide immediate and real financial assistance to Marines, Sailors and their families during this extraordinarily stressful time. The hope is that by alleviating the financial stresses of our brave Marines and Sailors, they and their families can focus on the important job of physical and emotional healing. Donations are accepted by check payable to the fund:
Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund
825 College Blvd, Suite 102
PMB 609
Oceanside, CA 92057
For a link to The Anchoress herself, a blog that is always worth reading, see above under "Recommended Reading." And my apology for being so tardy in posting the Injured Marine information – fully a week late. This was due entirely to how busy I have been. Tomorrow things will really (I promise) be back to what passes for “normal” in this life.
ONE OF MY MOST impassioned pro-Bush arguments evolves from the crying need to rescue our major institutions from the subversive ideologues of the victim-identity cults. Though I have never objected to the dissemination of even the most terrifying ideals – precisely what makes victim-identity cultism so dangerous is the very lack of dissemination that protects its typically hateful core doctrines from public exposure – there is a vast difference between dissemination and subversion. The former is protected by the First Amendment, which recognizes that an informed public is the primary defense of a democratic society. The latter – distinguished from legitimate criticism by its underlying destructive intent – is technically illegal, especially in time of war. It is one thing for feminists, for example, to rail against sexism, denounce American liberty and Western Civilization as “patriarchy,” and demand reforms – all of which is diligently (and properly) protected by the Constitution. It is quite another thing to conspire to overthrow “patriarchy” and replace it with female-supremacist tyranny, particularly when the conspirators employ a tactic outlined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf: infiltration of state agencies and clandestine conversion of them into revolutionary front organizations.
But this is precisely what has happened in America. Feminists – specifically feminists of the ideological faction I persist in labeling “matrifascism” – have risen to dominance in mass media, public education, academia and the social-services bureaucracy, and from the beginning of their ascent to power they methodically set about undermining the very freedoms that had allowed their movement to flourish. Propagating their ethos of the personal as political, they spread their victim-identity analysis throughout already-restive minority communities and thus gained significant allies. Next, through their eventual control of educational and informational media, they hid away most of the true history of the United States, a three-decade act of philosophical and cultural thievery that by now is almost complete and that daily facilitates the spread of their ideologies of hate. Finally during the Clinton years they gained enough of a toehold over government in general to savagely cripple our ability to protect ourselves – witness both the enactment of draconian anti-gun laws (denying us protection against domestic criminals) and the castration of the military and intelligence establishments (facilitating the atrocities of 9/11). Worse still, the matrifascists and their victim-identity allies actively conspired to aid the enemies of the U.S. by further crippling our ability to wage war. This was accomplished chiefly through intelligence “leaks,” but quite possibly also through other measures including deliberate intra-government disinformation and perhaps even operational sabotage.
Because I am still up to my proverbial eyebrows in the last of my November assignments, I do not have the time (or even the energy) to be more specific about these matters, so I will have to trust you readers already know of what I speak – or that if you do not, you will comment accordingly, so that I can respond in detail when I am able. In the meantime, here is the most hope-kindling news story I have read since the election. The purge has at last begun – the purge (I hope) will cleanse our schools of hate-America indoctrination and restore them to places of learning, the purge (I hope) will rid the military and the intelligence services of all those victim-identity cultists who so despise America and everything for which it stands they are – like the leakers of the Abu Ghraib secrets – willing collaborators with an enemy that would subject us to the unspeakable horrors of a global caliphate. In peacetime we could have tolerated such fools, as objectionable as they are. But we are at war now – at war with a foe far older and far more dangerous than any we have yet faced. By purging the Central Intelligence Agency of its subversive elements, the President is finally demonstrating he recognizes exactly what is at stake.
DESPITE MY CRITICISM OF Andrew Sullivan a few days ago (Nov. 8), I probably couldn’t stop reading him even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. For Sullivan has done again what he does so often – linked us to another of those vital bits of journalistic evidence without which our understanding of the world would be sorely diminished. This time he shows us an essay that tells us all we need to know about the bigotry of blue. Indeed it is a veritable mini-Mein Kampf of big-city provincialism and intolerance, proclaiming urbanites the new ubermenschen and all the rest of us hardly fit to lick the rat-dung and roach-gooshy from the cement-scarred soles of their Birkenstocks. Here is a representative sample:
...We'll fight to keep guns off the streets of our cities, but the more guns lying around out there in the heartland, the better. Most cities have strong gun-control laws--laws that are, of course, undermined by the fact that our cities aren't walled. Yet. But why should liberals in cities fund organizations that attempt, to take one example, to get trigger locks onto the handguns of NRA members out there in red states? If red-state dads aren't concerned enough about their own children to put trigger locks on their own guns, it's not our problem. If a kid in a red state finds his daddy's handgun and blows his head off, we'll feel terrible (we're like that), but we'll try to look on the bright side: At least he won't grow up to vote like his dad.
There is such a harpy’s-brew of hate-mongering here I will not even attempt to deconstruct its separate components, much less set right its myriad misunderestimations – besides which, with my last November freelance assignment still demanding completion, I genuinely do not yet have the time. But just so you can see a true portrait of the “progressive” mindset (the better to understand its nasty penchant for vandalizing war memorials and trashing Republican office space), I will link to the entire hateful diatribe, available here. It appears in a Seattle publication appropriately called The Stranger – a sort of pierced-genitals/dirty-fingered-dominatrix derivative of the old East Village Other, but without even one of EVO’s many redeeming strengths, which included good writing, political sophistication, cutting-edge comics and the love-fantasy highlight of every edition: the un-PlayHouse, un-PetMate, never Barbie-dollish, always outrageously lovely Slum Goddess. (For more on EVO, Google “East Village Other”; for an example of a Slum Goddess, click here.) But EVO was produced when the apex of urban bohemian thinking was the Back-to-the-Land Movement. These arrogant simpletons who publish The Stranger don’t even understand the need for farmers and farmlands. In fact they seem to believe their parasitic super-ghetto (for that is precisely what they propose) can live on invective alone.
I wonder if Stalin’s “agriculture experts” held similar attitudes toward the mujikii their collectivist policies starved to death.
Once again, Mr. Sullivan, thank you for ratting out the opposition.
FOR A NUMBER OF rock-solid reasons – the Bush Administration’s brazen obstruction of the Armed Pilots Program, the administration's support for radically reducing legal firearms ownership by criminalizing all mental problems, Bush’s endorsement of the so-called “assault weapons” ban and his intent to outlaw gun shows – I have long maintained there is not a nickle’s worth of difference between George Bush and Sen. John Kerry on Second Amendment issues.
In fact I believe it is at least arguable that Bush is actually worse – worse because of his deceptiveness, especially as expressed by former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s view the Second Amendment guarantees what is indeed an individual right. For as undeniably correct as the Ashcroft position is, it has always been clear to me it was never anything but eyewash, tolerated by the administration merely as an especially dishonest vote-getting ploy – that the administration’s real stance toward the Second Amendment is undeniably proven by its (ongoing) policy of doing everything possible to thwart the arming of our airline pilots, the will of Congress be damned.
That my estimate is correct is now proven by the President’s appointment of Alberto R.Gonzales as the new U.S. Attorney General. Here is what The Washington Post said yesterday morning:
Behind the scenes, Gonzales clashed frequently with Ashcroft's Justice Department. He felt blindsided when Ashcroft, early in the administration, announced that the department would embrace, for the first time ever, a view of the Second Amendment that regards gun possession as an individual right on a par with freedom of speech or religion.
Never mind that WaPo’s “first time ever” assertion is an anti-gun Big Lie. The point here is that Gonzales clearly opposes the Second Amendment – that it is entirely likely he would overturn the right of individuals to own firearms for personal protection. The remainder of the Post report, which says nothing more about Gonzales’ anti-gun ideology, is available here. (Sorry; registration required.)
The Gonzales appointment – which was applauded by one of America’s leading anti-gun zealots, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., NY) – is a disconcerting signal in at least three ways. First, it is a slap in the face to the National Rifle Association and to Second Amendment advocates in general, absolute proof the always-bogus Bush/gunowner honeymoon is forever ended. Second, the appointment is an important concession to Hispanics, 71 percent of whom are said to favor “gun control,” though the survey-findings that make this claim, available here (and scroll down), leave the precise meaning of “gun control” undefined. Third, I cannot doubt the appointment signals the ultimate triumph of the unrestricted-immigration/amnesty-for-illegals alliance of Cheap Labor Republicans and Big Bureaucracy Democrats, with long-term results I do not even want to contemplate: ruinous to the pay scales of working Americans and toxic to the cultural foundations of the nation.
Bottom line, the Liberals and perhaps even the far Left may have won this election after all: with Gonzales in the AG’s office and Sen. Arlen Specter (RINO., Pa) at the judicial-appointment switch, the prospects for meaningful change (especially on the Second Amendment) are somewhere between zilch and bupkes.
Ironically this relates, albeit distantly, to what I had intended to write as this weekend’s secular homily: an analysis of how the collapse of the Soviet Union is directly responsible for the present-day American crisis – a crisis that surely includes not only the ruinous plague of illegal immigration but the frequent anti-voter treachery of both our political parties. Alas, I am still too busy with freelance work to transform the intended preachment from draft to completed essay. Though all but one of my free-lance assignments are finished, late-breaking news has dramatically altered the form and content of the last of these November reports, so I am likely to be tied up for nearly another week.
Hence my apologies.
Meanwhile, have a great weekend!
ONE MORE DAY BACK on the beat – no, I’m not doing investigations again; I’m speaking metaphorically – and then I’ll (probably) be caught-up enough to finish (and post) an essay on a topic I’ve been thinking about for several years: how the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the present-day political and socioeconomic impasse in the United States, and how the this conflicted reality offers several clues as to how its problems might be resolved. Meanwhile here are two more vital links to keep you entertained while I am off chasing the Greenback Dollar.
The first link, to a cogently disturbing report in The New Republic, warns in very specific terms of the growing Chinese influence in Africa, even linking it to the genocide in the Sudan:
...China's march could scuttle Washington's efforts. In a searing 581-page report, Human Rights Watch recently argued that Chinese companies are complicit in Khartoum's efforts to displace populations in southern Sudan to clear the way for oil rigs. It also charges that China's oil purchases have enabled the Sudanese government to buy arms--sometimes from Beijing itself--fueling the violence in Darfur that Washington says it is now trying to stem. And who knows how much of the $1 billion in arms that Beijing sold to Ethiopia and Eritrea during their 1998-2000 war has migrated over the border into Sudan?
The rest of this well-researched, frightening (and surprisingly pro-Bush) analysis, which should be read by every spook on the Central Intelligence Agency’s Chinese and African desks, is available here.
Next and last comes a link to an equally spooky speculation that grave mischief is again a-brewing in Central America, complete with an ominous threat to Miami. I can’t help you evaluate it because I’m not familiar with the writer (though the on-line publication itself seems to have a reasonably good reputation). Here’s the link. I provide, you decide.
STILL TOO BUSY WITH bill-paying freelance work to spend adequate time with this blog – six articles to finish and the deadline now only nine days away – so I am once again going to take the busy man’s out. Here’s a link to another blog, The Anchoress, who is one of the very best (unrecognized) writers on the ‘Net. Her work is always insightful, but yesterday she set out some especially cogent observations about liberals and liberalism – conclusions with which I mostly agree but which are so well written they would be worth reading even if I disagreed vehemently. (Scroll down to “God Bless Christopher Hitchens”; I recommend “Master Bullies” too.) Then I am going to direct your attention to a truly astonishing piece in Editor & Publisher – astonishing because of its suggestion E&P is finally beginning to practice genuine diversity. Click here; you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
ANOTHER SHORT POST WITH lots of links and not very much writing, an expression of just how busy I am with freelance work.
First is a story from a British sensationalist tabloid describing how the new Euroaxis – France, Germany, Spain – hopes to undermine NATO and eventually oust both Britain and America from influence on the Continent. While I don’t normally think much of The Sun, its report is echoed by other sources and is thus worth posting as evidence of yet another of the obstructions being flung down in the path of President Bush and his ally Prime Minister Blair.
Next is a portrait that foretells another kind of axis: the axis of anti-American hatred – no doubt already advised by Islamic terrorists who have seeped into the country thanks to leaky immigration controls. This illustrated report describes what I believe we will be facing ever more frequently here at home as the rabidly infuriated Left attempts to coalesce into a new Weatherman Underground, never mind the fact its wanna-be revolutionaries no longer know which way the wind blows.
Third is a vital report about Islam in action – theocratic tyranny once again tightening its strangle-hold over the long-suffering people of Iran. (My apologies if registration turns out to be necessary.)
Last is an analysis that suggests the Iraqi insurrection is an expression of the tactics employed by Saladin – as is much else that has happened there since the invasion. The report is learned, detailed and fascinating. While I agree that Saddam Hussein planned out this entire war well in advance, I disagree that his tactics came from Saladin – or at least from Saladin alone. Instead they (and the strategy underlying them) appear to have been derived from the bitter lessons Darius the Persian learned in Scythia – lessons that are detailed in Book Four of The Histories by Herodotus, beginning with the section titled “Why Scythia Is Hard to Conquer.” Islam cherishes the study of history (though its view of post-Mohammed history is viciously warped), and folk memories in the Middle East are so long as to defy belief: British sources say that in the nether regions of Afghanistan, the invasion by Alexander the Great is still remembered as if it happened only a century or two ago.
THE MAIN REASON I continue to read Andrew Sullivan every day despite his increasingly strident anti-heterosexual screeds (which is precisely what I am beginning to believe they are) is that Sullivan remains one of the best sources I know for links to important pieces of journalism I would otherwise never discover.
To illustrate more vividly, the Sullivan who writes this:
A clear victory in this election - but no landslide - has now apparently led (President Bush) to contemplate Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. And we're also told by Karl Rove that "if we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal, and the ideal is that marriage ought to be, and should be, a union of a man and a woman." By inference, the hopes of gay couples to belong to their own family and society are somehow non-existent; and the commitment of one gay person to another is somehow "indecent." On Meet the Press Rove also argued that even civil unions backed by "a few local elected officials" should be banned. Bill Bennett must be thrilled. I had hoped that this president might use his victory to unite. But he is dividing more aggressively than ever.
Is the same Sullivan who writes this:
MORE ON CHOMSKY: Another must-read on the most poisonous intellectual in America.
Which links here – thank you, Mr. Sullivan – to the most informative essay I have ever read on Noam Chomsky and his truly infinite hatred of the nation on which he has grown rich and famous.
But is Sullivan really a straight-hater who has been outed by the election?
I have been close enough with enough gay people over the years, particularly in Manhattan but also even now here in Washington state, to recognize that there is a tiny gay and lesbian minority who does indeed despise heterosexuals with the very same intensity of venom racists direct at “uppity” minorities. Hence – and very sadly – I can think of no other explanation for Sullivan’s ongoing invective. Especially given the fact he himself is one of a minuscule number of Bush opponents who have actually troubled themselves to analyze the post-election data – data that shows conclusively the (presumably gay-bashing) Amen Corner of the electorate made up only 22 percent of the President’s majority. In this sense it appears Sullivan is no different from Jane Smiley and Maureen Dowd – so blinded by hatred, he seems to reflexively assume all of us who pulled the Bush/Cheney lever did so because we are dangerously violent sociopathic cretins.
Not only that, Sullivan writes as if he fears the nation is now on the brink of unleashing its metaphorical Cossacks on some coast-to-coast homophobic pogrom or mustering its Christofascist Storm Troopers for some 50-state anti-gay Kristallnacht. Sullivan thus portrays himself as ever more emotionally equivalent to the KuKluxKlansmen who believed enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act foretold the “final mongreliezation” (sic) of the white race – and I for one am getting damn tired of the continuing volleys of implicit insults. I expect it from the likes of Dowd and Smiley, but until now I assumed Sullivan was many levels above and beyond the Smiley Dowdiness that has so envenomed the American media we now have to go to the foreign press to find intelligent explanations of our own election results.
Since I am one of those bloggers who is appalled by Bush’s proposed marriage amendment, both by its intrusiveness and by its implicit (and infinitely perilous) manipulation of the Constitution to impose morality (go here for my earlier comments on the subject), I have no fear of being branded a homophobe for my criticism of Sullivan. Indeed I have gay and lesbian relatives, and for this reason alone I have never demonized homosexuals of either gender. I do not believe there is any such thing as “the homosexual agenda” save live and let live. Nor have I ever regarded “gay marriage” as the mockery of matrimony too many people proclaim it to be. In fact I have a very difficult time understanding the entire “gay marriage” controversy: if two adults seek to pledge their troth, it is their business, not the state’s. Unless, of course, the state (which in our nation, after all, is the whole of the people) is so insecure in its selfhood – whether spiritual, sexual or socioeconomic – it now must needs regulate love itself.
But I do not believe this election portends any such thing. I believe what it portends is just the opposite: that America is at last awakening to the threat of Islamic tyranny, no small part of which is Islam’s murderous hatred of America’s resurrection of a definitively Classical notion – that since adult human love comes in many forms, none of them (save incest) should ever be forbidden.
TAKING THE BUSY MAN’S way out, today’s entry in the galactic blogstakes is a succession of descriptive links to various commentaries on the election. These are each analyses I think are vitally revealing– and therefore exceptionally good contemplative reading for an early-winter weekend.
First is a causticWall Street Journal piece that argues – very compellingly I might add – that the election was a referendum on the near-revolution of the 1960s. The WSJ article, by Daniel Henninger, is available here. It concludes that blue-state America and red-state America are irreconcilable enemies – an assumption with which I emphatically disagree: I believe (and history bears me out) we are ultimately most of us still Americans – though that is a topic for another time.
Next is an essay from Slate entitled “The unteachable ignorance of the red states.” By the ironically named Jane Smiley, it says I voted for President Bush because I “prefer to be ignorant,” and it blames the Bush victory on a malevolent conspiracy:
...the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey—workers and consumers.
Smiley’s invective, linked here, is especially relevant because it is the perfect leftist complement to Henninger’s rightist analysis: contempt begetting contempt.
Anthology chapters Three, Four and Five come from The Asia Times, always useful for monitoring overseas opinion beyond the frenzies of Old Europe, and in this instance a source of important information our own American media – yes even the blogosphere – has overlooked entirely.
The first link, here, is to a piece by Ian Williams, who likens the election result to “Turkeys Voting for Thanksgiving.” But before you dismiss it in a xenophobic rage, read on. Williams makes one very good point I haven’t read anywhere else:
“The mismatch can be seen in the victory of the referendum in Florida to raise the minimum wage - a plank of the John Kerry campaign nationally, which George W Bush has resolutely opposed in Washington, but which, as he showed during the debates, he was totally evasive about during the campaign. More than 72% of Floridians voted for the raise, which means that at least 60% of Bush voters supported a measure that is socially and economically the antithesis of what their candidate stands for.”
Shame on the U.S. media for its failure to report that (and many other) glaring dichotomies – a failure no doubt motivated by the (feminist) need to cover the election results as if they heralded the advent of a Christofascist Fourth Reich.
Second is the always-provocative Spengler, who argues that the election results indicate a popular reaction to the threat of “social decay” – a conflict that has been going on in America for many years but which has been mightily inflamed by the Islamic assault and its attendant threat of a global caliphate. Spengler’s implication – a notion with which I heartily agree – is that the public has at last become aware how “social decay” is a defacto Islamic fifth column: the very force that could subvert America into another Old Europe and thereby hand Islam an ultimate (and undoubtedly terminal) victory over all the planet. Spengler is here.
Last in this AT segment is Mark Erikson’s optimistic analysis that the Bush victory marks the beginning of an economic revolution – a finalization of the transformations begun during the Reagan Era. It is available here.
Concluding the anthology are two more links from diverse sources.
The first, another Slate piece, is forthright criticism: what the Democrats need to do to make themselves more acceptable in Peoria – which of necessity means becoming less acceptable in Paris. By the formidably pragmatic William Saletan, it is available here.
Number two, a Beliefnet analysis, discusses the same topic from a more purely theological perspective, noting that bogus proclamations of faith will do nothing save further red-blue alienation:
...the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the Left who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge that many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life.
The remainder of this thought-provoking work, by Michael Lerner, is available here.
Finally, as an afterword, click here (and scroll down to “Dog’s Life”) for a portrait of how the election has personally touched another blogger – a favorite near-daily read who is every bit as much a dog-lover as I am.
Have a good weekend!
IT OCCURRED TO ME me watching Sen. John Thune's victory speech last night that one of the things the 2004 election campaign has done is brought America's religious faith back out of the closet, and I don't mean just for Fundamentalists, or only for those of us who are Christians, but in fact for anyone who recognizes and invokes a benevolent Higher Power. This may be the most profound impact of all, extending far beyond the election – the long-overdue reversal of the down-with-spirituality trend begun in the 1950s by Madalyn Murray (subsequently Madalyn Murray O’Hair), the late, unlamented queen of a singularly malicious brand of lockstep atheism. O'Hair, who was murdered by one of her own disciples of godlessness, successfully sued to prohibit prayer in the public schools and sought to suppress religious or spiritual observance in all of the nation’s public domains and functions.
While O'Hair did not entirely succeed in the latter quest, her endeavors were enthusiastically supported by most of the mainstream media, which generally endorses Marx’s notion that religion is merely an opiate of the masses – surely a hypocritical stance given that religion recognizes only one Sabbath per week, while the media peddles opiate 24/7/365. O'Hair was also beloved by the Hollywood pornocracy, and the resulting threesome – pornocrats, newsmongers and Mad Madalyn herself – bullied America into regarding religious faith as the ultimate faux pas. Christian, Wiccan, Buddhist, Jew, American Indian – it made no difference; you were pressured to hide your spirituality just as polite society once concealed its insanity, bastardy and masturbation. Indeed the only exception to the expression-of-faith taboo was Islam – encouraged no doubt because it includes particularly succinct expressions of the same hate-America doctrines that have motivated so much other mischief since the 1960s.
But now Americans are again becoming unashamed of their spiritual convictions, and I believe that one of the key results will not be the New Fundamentalist Inquisition the leftists anticipate with such fear and loathing but rather a renewed flowering of genuine ecumenicism. This is not to say the Left’s concerns are irrational. Alas, they are not; neither are the identical worries of libertarians and non-Fundamentalist conservatives. But I believe tolerance will prevail. And ecumenicism was the ultimate direction in which our public religious observances were gradually leading before Madalyn and her Madalynoids declared their vindictive war on the entire spiritual dimension of life, the one dimension without which being itself withers into meaninglessness – or so most Americans seem to believe, myself surely among them.
Two interesting links today. One is to an Associated Press story exposing how Kofi Annan demonstrated once again his Third-World-tyrant’s morals by arbitrarily suppressing an American woman’s sexual harassment complaint. The AP’s report – the sort of “this-is-your-real-United-Nations-in-action” revelation I expect we will see a lot more of during the next four years, is linked here. Then, to end on a positive note – something I promise I will try to do more often now that I’m no longer obsessed with the election – there is a genuinely wonderful dog story here, a report that illustrates vividly the true brilliance with which dogs sometimes find ways to express their love and concern – that and why it is a barking dog should never be merely dismissed or ignored.
I GOT TWO SEEMINGLY unrelated but politically revealing slaps in the face this weekend, and the second one taught me an unforgettable lesson in just why it is 55 percent of the American electorate feels our country is headed in the wrong direction. The first slap, a relatively mild smack on the cheek early Saturday morning, was the surprising decision by the nominally libertarian/conservative website Tech Central Station to suppress a carefully reasoned pro-Bush commentary I submitted in response to an insightfully critical analysis of Kerry Administration foreign policy – a subject I will return to below. The second slap – late Saturday afternoon via the U.S. Mail and more like a knockout blow on the point of my chin – was the discovery that premiums and co-payments for the private-sector health insurance I buy every year will soar a total of 4,155 percent (not a typo) effective January 1, 2005. Had I received the insurance information before I voted – like the vast majority of Washington staters I vote by mail and had mailed in my ballot last Thursday – it triggered such fear and rage I would have voted for John Kerry, U.S. foreign policy be damned. This truly ruinous 4,155-percent hike, which will eventually either force me forever onto welfare or permanently into the ranks of the uninsured, is for reasons that I will explain in a moment entirely the fault of the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress.
Alas, the foreign policy realities that prompted my vote for President Bush are inescapable, though it took a day of some of the most embittered reflection of my life to bring me back to that realization. But I am left with such anger at the GOP’s Marie Antoinette indifference to people at my end of the socioeconomic spectrum – let us all eat (outsourced) jobs – I will surely never vote Republican again, just as I have not been able to bring myself to vote Democratic ever since my career was destroyed and my life thus ruined by feminist quota-mongering – quota-mongering that perfectly expresses the racial hatred and gender-war bigotry that is the core ideology of today’s Democratic Party. But even ideological posturing is ultimately a red herring. The ugly truth of America in the 21st Century is that – unless you are upper middle class or better – neither party gives a Big Rat’s Ass about you or yours. Those of us who live below the ever-more-insurmountable class barrier have absolutely no place to turn for political representation. The last time this was true of U.S. politics – at the beginning of the Great Depression – it was only the miracle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal that saved our nation from Communism and Nazism: kept us from probably embracing each ideology in equal measure and fighting a second Civil War to determine whether our lives would be run by oberfuehrer or kommissar.
But now it is the epoch of the New Poverty, and my personal insurance crisis is typical. Because Medicare is worthless unless you are independently wealthy – the co-payments are typically $50 per doctor-office visit, the deductibles can add up to $34,428 per year, no typo, and the collection agencies are vicious beyond belief – I have long supplemented my Medicare coverage with private-sector insurance. Since I live in Western Washington state, I am fortunate enough to have access to the finest health insurance available in America: the Group Health Cooperative, a true non-profit insurance co-op that was organized here by local citizens shortly after World War Two and to which I have belonged off-and-on since 1972, long before I became Medicare eligible. Group Health combines all the benefits of private-sector insurance with all the benefits of socialized medicine and none of the disadvantages of either. It is also democratic as few organizations are: any insured can become a member of the co-op (as I have been since ‘72) and thus gain eligibility to vote on GHC policies. Though I differ with GHC administration over some positions – I do not for example believe that members of the co-op should have to pay for the birth control and gynecological services that finance the sex lives of young single women – I have never felt enough inclined to impose my own values on others to become an activist over these matters.
It is perhaps an aside, but I do not believe it is in my interest – or in the interest of anyone else on the short end of the socioeconomic stick (which includes most single women) – to allow the indifference of the plutocracy to set all of us here below the salt at one another’s throats. Fighting over the few scraps and tidbits we are flung by the barons of the boardroom and their wanna-bees in the electorate merely perpetuates the vast dearth that has already led us to a two-party system that represents only the wealthy. The truth of this statement is proven absolutely by the present health-insurance crisis: the rich have their insurance, and their politicians in the White House and Congress and the 50 state houses and legislatures don’t give a tinker’s damn that paying for it is beyond the reach of all the rest of us. If it were otherwise, the problem would have been solved years ago.
Back to the topic of Group Health, I have never known GHC to misinform its members. With this preface note the co-op’s apologetic explanation of its unprecedented Medicare program rate hikes: “...although the federal government increased its payments to us for your care by about 5 percent, the cost of that care is rising far more than the increase in payments – by 12-15 percent a year. Multiply that rate of increase by the amount of care we provide, and we end up with significant increases to our members.” On two recent occasions, when the Washington state Congressional delegation was finally pressured to act on this issue, the Medicare reimbursement formula was modified enough that GHC was able to give its members and ratepayers substantial premium reductions. But the federal changes were never anything more than emergency measures, supposedly preludes to more extensive reforms – reforms that never occurred. Why? The Republicans aren’t concerned about anyone save the fat-cats who contribute to their coffers. And the Democrats are not one scintilla better: Sen. Patty Murray was too busy defending Osama bin Laden – and then too preoccupied with her fight for re-election – to trifle with fulfilling the real needs of any Washingtonians outside her immediate matrifascist constituency. Hence the increases that take effect January 1: an annual premium increase of 22 percent, from $924 to $1128 per year; a 50 percent increase in co-payments for office visits, from $10 to $15; a 333 percent increase in the stop-loss ceiling (the maximum amount of co-payments you have to make in a single year), from $300 to $1000; a 750 percent increase in the ambulance-service copay, from zero to $75; a 3000 percent increase in the hospitalization copay, from zero to $300.
The worst part of the impact of all this on me personally is its Catch-22 element. Because eviction from my longtime country home forced me into “Senior Citizen Housing,” the amount I can earn in a given year – pension included – is strictly limited. The upper margin is about $15,000 per year – which is why I am not (and will never be again) allowed to work full-time even if my health permitted it. But the sum I need to earn so I can pay for my medical insurance without severely handicapping my ability to pay other bills will exceed $15,000 as soon as the increases become effective – especially since the standard federal Medicare premiums, which I also pay, soared an unprecedented 17 percent to $78.20 per month – this thanks to the Bush Administration’s bogus prescription drug “benefit.” Which means my total annual predictable medical costs, including prescription drugs, will top $3000 – small change for some executive-suite oligarch, but fully a third of my pension and a fifth of my total allowable income. God forbid I should have to go to the hospital: it will truly bankrupt me, something from which at my age there is no recovery. In other words, it would literally be better I die. Will the bureaucracy raise the income ceiling for my housing? Maybe – if it gets around to it. Medicare costs went up last year too, and the ceiling was not raised. So in reality, the ceiling will probably stay the same. And I will be, in a word, screwed.
But our entire nation will be screwed if Kerry wins the election – which brings me to the Tech Central Station matter.
One of its better writers, Carroll Andrew Morse, discusses at some length how U.S. foreign policy has often been based on what he labels “declinism” – the notion that America is in decline and therefore cannot impose its will abroad. Morse discusses this in the context of refuting the hawkish beliefs that prompted Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens to endorse Kerry, but actually Morse’s primary thrust is a critique of Kerry himself. Here is Morse’s key paragraph:
Now, a third wave of declinism is taking shape. The new declinists, like the first wave, assume that the idea of pursuing victory is too risky to be considered -- the world is too dangerous, and outright victory over terrorism is not possible for any President. Instead, the primary function of the President should be to manage the damage created by terrorism. Kerry expressed this view in his New York Times interview with Matt Bai, saying "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance". Senator Kerry is not alone in this belief. Just one year after September 11, for example, Arthur Schlesinger wrote an op-ed where he said, "Americans can learn to live with minor terrorism, as the people of Britain, Spain, India, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Sri Lanka and most of the world have already learned to do."
The rest of Morse’s piece is available here. The commentary I sent to TCS in response – the commentary TCS suppressed – is below:
I agree with Mr. Morse's analysis as far as it goes, but I believe he overlooks five revealing elements of Kerry's history: (1)-Kerry's avowed opposition to United States Southeast Asian policy and his concurrent support for the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front and the Communist government of North Vietnam during the early 1970s; (2)-his record in the Senate of reflexively opposing all increases in defense or intelligence spending; (3)-his repeated pledge to unilaterally disarm the United States of its nuclear bunker-buster bombs, the only weapon in the U.S. arsenal that promises effectiveness against the bunkerized nuclear sites in Iran and North Korea; (4)-his 100 percent record of favoring draconian anti-Second Amendment measures, which reveals that despite his "hunter" smokescreen, he views an armed population at home with as much repugnance as he views an adequately armed United States military; (5)-his ongoing refusal to answer Bob Woodward's 22 key policy questions.
The portrait of Kerry that emerges from these indisputable facts is not that of a "flip-flopper" but rather of a leftist ideologue whose values are remarkably constant -- and cleverly concealed in the interest of winning election.
Reasoning backward from point (5), if Kerry intended to fulfill his own promise of vigorously waging the war on terror, he would have had no difficulty answering Woodward's revealing questions; the pacifist support Kerry would have lost (probably to Nader) would have been more than compensated by hawkish independents, political eclectics and conservatives who are appalled by Bush's dunderheaded ineptitude if not by his (theocratic?) arrogance. But if Kerry plans to order a wholesale retreat from Iraq -- as I believe he does (and precisely as his history indicates) -- he could not answer Woodward's pointed questions without ensuring his defeat on Tuesday. Hence his silence -- the very silence that proves my analysis is correct.
Alas, I believe Kerry will win the election by a small but decisive majority. Thus I believe we will see an utterly shameful withdrawal from Iraq within months -- a replay of our equally shameful withdrawals from Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Concurrently Kerry would set about fulfilling all his other campaign promises. He would unilaterally disarm America of its nuclear bunker-busters even as he imposes a parallel disarmament policy at home, browbeating Congress into approving anti-Second Amendment tyrannies that could well include the worst elements of New York City/New Jersey/Massachusetts/Washington D.C. gun control, not to mention universal permits and national registration. Meanwhile, to silence the growing outcry over the rebounding threats from criminals and Islamic terrorists, Kerry would propose hate-speech laws identical to the most restrictive of those already enacted by Canada -- laws that effectively outlaw critical discussion of feminism, Islam or any other ideology associated with protected groups and minorities -- and he would achieve passage of these too when religious fundamentalists unite with feminists and other victimhood ideologues to pressure Congress. Just as Mr. Morse said, "effectively incorporating a constant threat of terror...into a permanent part of day-to-day life."
Since the essential objective of Kerry's Middle Eastern policy would be a return to pre-9/11 "stability," I believe it is at least conceivable he would re-establish Saddam Hussein as dictator in Iraq. (Yes I admit this is far-fetched, but it is not without precedent: recall how the British released the MauMau terrorist Jomo Kenyatta from prison and set him up as prime minister of Kenya.)
Unless Bush somehow manages to prevail (I have already voted for him as by far the lesser of two evils), this final twilight of American liberty would truly be all Bush's fault: his repeated blunders combined with his breathtaking arrogance -- not to mention his association with a singularly malevolent form of Christofascism -- will have engendered a defeat that turned the country over to the most dangerously Left-radical ticket ever embraced by the U.S. electorate. The resultant bitterness at Bush and the Republican Party would probably exceed any comparable outpouring in U.S. history.
As for Hitchens and Sullivan -- both of whom I read regularly with considerable respect -- I believe their very Britishness blinds them to the malignance of the poisons that were unleashed in America by the conflicts of the 1960s -- toxins that have been eroding our political system ever since. Speaking as a former leftist, I am convinced Hitchens and Sullivan woefully underestimate both Kerry’s lingering post-Vietnam down-with-America antagonism and the subversive skill of the "by-any-means-necessary" half of the Democratic Party that makes up his true following.
Verily, I fear for the Republic.
Woodward’s 22 questions are available here (sorry, registration required).
Because most of the responses to Morse’s analysis were neither particularly well-thought-out nor especially articulate (and many of them were as long or longer than mine), I can only speculate as to why TCS chose not to run my e-mail. Perhaps my conclusions were too radical for the editor’s comfort – never mind the fact they are solidly based on indications derived directly Kerry’s record. Or perhaps the editor that night was someone who is a clandestine Kerry partisan – and therefore felt that while my letter is pure speculation (note the repeated use of “would”) it is also too dangerously revealing of Kerry’s intentions. Whatever, my readers – especially those on Lucianne.com – know that some of my most seemingly outrageous speculations are often proven true. In this case of course I hope I am wrong – and that is all I will have to say on this or any other subject until after the election.
Nor am I certain just when I will be back: I have seven news reports to research, photograph and write in just three weeks, but the complete electrical-system failure of my 12-year-old Ford Tempo has thrown a huge monkey-wrench in my progress toward meeting the deadline: repairing it with my best friend’s help will kill at least a whole day, more if I have to hire a mechanic. Plus I will lose an entire additional day Tuesday waiting in line for a flu shot. Nevertheless I will continue blogging short posts, but until I catch up on the work that will begin paying the soaring costs of my new living situation, this site is going to take second place in my priorities. Sorry – and thanks for your patience.