Author: Loquitur Veritatem

See https://politicsandprosperity.com/about/.

The Election Comes Down to One Thing

The post-convention bounce for Bush — which began a week before the convention — leaves me with the following big questions:

1. Are there enough truly undecided voters left to make a difference in the outcome of the election?

Probably not, especially if the Republican base is energized to turn out in large numbers. And the base seems to be energized.

2. What — if anything — would change the minds of enough voters to swing the election to Kerry? Is there a scandal in the wings? Might Bush stumble so badly in the debates that his performance turns off borderline supporters? And how would voters react to a successful terrorist attack in the U.S. or against U.S. interests overseas?

Scandal-mongering at this point is more likely to backfire on Kerry than to hurt Bush.

Bush seems unlikely to stumble badly in the debates, if stumbles at all. He still misspeaks, but not as often as he used to. And his inarticulate directness is more impressive than Kerry’s grandiloquent circumlocutory style.

The real joker in the deck is terrorism. A thwarted attack would be a big plus for Bush. A successful attack might cut either way.

Absent a terrorist attack, the election is now Bush’s to lose.

Proof That "Smart" Economists Can Be Stupid

Ten recipients of the Nobel prize for economics have signed an open letter in support of John Kerry’s candidacy for president. These geniuses have resorted to the usual arguments of the economically illiterate: those big, bad tax cuts for the “rich”; those big, bad deficits underwritten by foreign investors; rising income inequality; and the rising costs of health care. Their views, in other words, are a combination of wrong-headedness, xenophobia, and welfare-statism.

Kerry, of course, is going to do things right because he’ll restore fiscal responsibility. I guess they missed The Washington Post‘s analysis of Kerry’s proposals, which shows that Kerry’s ideas, if enacted, would add more than $2 trillion to the federal debt over the next 10 years.

On top of that Kerry will “do something” about health-care costs. What, repeal the laws of supply and demand? Nationalize medical care so that Americans can go to Mexico for better treatment?

Well, what do you expect from a bunch of lefties like Paul Samuelson who can explain economic principles without understanding them? They simply don’t trust free people and free markets, because they (the lefties) are smarter than the rest of us. Just ask them.

Hellfire and Brimstone from Zell Miller

From Zell Miller’s speech to the Republican National Convention, quoted without comment:

In the summer of 1940, I was an eight-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley.

Our country was not yet at war but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America “all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.”

In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee.

And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man.

He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between “here lies a president” or “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom”, he would prefer the latter.

Where are such statesmen today?

Where is the bi-partisanship in this country when we need it most?

Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat’s manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in- Chief.

What has happened to the party I’ve spent my life working in?

I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny.

It was Democratic President Harry Truman who pushed the Red Army out of Iran, who came to the aid of Greece when Communists threatened to overthrow it, who stared down the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by flying in supplies and saving the city.

Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter. But not today.

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.

And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

Tell that to the one-half of Europe that was freed because Franklin Roosevelt led an army of liberators, not occupiers.

Tell that to the lower half of the Korean Peninsula that is free because Dwight Eisenhower commanded an army of liberators, not occupiers.

Tell that to the half a billion men, women and children who are free today from the Baltics to the Crimea, from Poland to Siberia, because Ronald Reagan rebuilt a military of liberators, not occupiers.

Never in the history of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the freedom and liberty of total strangers than the American soldier. And, our soldiers don’t just give freedom abroad, they preserve it for us here at home.

For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.

It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.

No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this country if he doesn’t believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home.

But don’t waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution.

They don’t believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.

It is not their patriotism – it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking. They claimed Carter’s pacifism would lead to peace.

They were wrong.

They claimed Reagan’s defense buildup would lead to war.

They were wrong.

And, no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

Together, Kennedy/Kerry have opposed the very weapons system that won the Cold War and that is now winning the War on Terror.

Listing all the weapon systems that Senator Kerry tried his best to shut down sounds like an auctioneer selling off our national security but Americans need to know the facts….

This is the man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces?

U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?

Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of campaign rhetoric.

Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are. How you vote tells people who you really are deep inside.

Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations.

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide.

John Kerry, who says he doesn’t like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security.

That’s the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world.

Free for how long?

For more than twenty years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure. As a war protestor, Kerry blamed our military.

As a Senator, he voted to weaken our military. And nothing shows that more sadly and more clearly than his vote this year to deny protective armor for our troops in harms way, far-away.

George Bush understands that we need new strategies to meet new threats.

John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterday’s war. George Bush believes we have to fight today’s war and be ready for tomorrow’s challenges. George Bush is committed to providing the kind of forces it takes to root out terrorists.

No matter what spider hole they may hide in or what rock they crawl under.

George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a better grip.

From John Kerry, they get a “yes-no-maybe” bowl of mush that can only encourage our enemies and confuse our friends….

This election will change forever the course of history, and that’s not any history. It’s our family’s history.

The only question is how. The answer lies with each of us. And, like many generations before us, we’ve got some hard choosing to do.

Right now the world just cannot afford an indecisive America. Fainthearted, self-indulgence will put at risk all we care about in this world.

In this hour of danger our President has had the courage to stand up. And this Democrat is proud to stand up with him….

Iran, Praying to Allah for a Kerry Win?

“Watchdog: Iran Plans to Process Uranium.” Dumb, dumb, dumb. The only question is who bombs first, Israel or U.S.

Don’t Back Down, Governor

I’m not referring to Governator Schwarzenegger, who needs no counsel on that score. I’m referring to Governor Robert Ehrlich of Maryland, a Republican (oddly enough for Maryland), whose Lieutenant Governor, Michael Steele, happens to be black. Ehrlich, in the course of defending Steele against the usual “Uncle Tom” charges from black Democrats, pulled a reverse and played the race card against Democrats. Here’s some of the story from The Washington Post:

High-ranking Maryland Democrats yesterday denounced Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.’s remarks this week that the Democratic Party is “racist” in the way it appeals to black voters.

Ehrlich told members of the Maryland delegation to the Republican National Convention in New York on Monday that the “message” conveyed at last month’s Democratic National Convention is that “if you have black skin, you have to believe one way. You have to. Or you’re a traitor to your race.”

Ehrlich’s statement was intended as a defense of Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele (R), an African American who addressed delegates last night.

“That’s the message we’ve seen from a number of conventions,” Ehrlich said. “That’s why it’s important that this lieutenant governor speak to this country. That’s racist.”…

Precisely. The presumption that the only “good” black is a Democrat black is blatantly racist. It implies that blacks can’t think for themselves. And it’s sad that some blacks — partisan Democrats all — live up to the stereotype of blacks as “Uncle Toms” to the Democrat Party’s condescending white, liberal “massahs”.

Here’s a Bait-and-Switch Opportunity

Joanna Glasner at Wired News reports on this year’s vote-swapping schemes:

Supporters of third-party candidates, be they save-the-spotted-owl Greens or trim-the-government Libertarians, are finding themselves in a similar quandary this presidential election year.

They dislike both George W. Bush and John Kerry, but not equally. The dilemma: By casting a vote for a third candidate, they fear they’ll inadvertently boost the campaign of the major-party candidate they despise most.

Help is on the way. While their methodologies may not be legal or even tested, a number of websites are cropping up to allow backers of presidential wannabes from alternate parties to vote their conscience without draining support for a preferred major-party candidate in a crucial swing state.

So-called vote-swapping, or vote-pairing, efforts under way for November’s election largely mimic those that cropped up in 2000 to minimize the impact of Ralph Nader on Democrat Al Gore’s chances of victory. Through such websites as like VoteSwap2000, Votexchange2000 and Nadertrader.org, Nader supporters in swing states agreed to vote for Gore if a voter in a solidly pro-Bush or pro-Gore state agreed to vote for Nader in their stead.

This year, with fewer votes expected to go to Nader, some want to make it more comfortable for voters of all stripes to withhold support for the Democratic and Republican candidates….

Who’s more gullible, Nader supporters, Bush supporters or Kerry supporters? Let’s put it to the test. I live in Texas, a sure win for Bush. I’ll honor the request of the first person who asks me to vote for Nader, under two conditions: (1) That person must live in a state in which the Bush-Kerry race is very tight. (2) That person must agree to vote for Bush. Come on, let’s hear from you gullible Naderites out there.

It’s Time for James Carville to Go Home

“Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away.”

Nailing the Nanny State

Occam’s Carbuncle — operating in high-irony mode — has the perfect prescription for the nanny state:

Ban danger and unpredictability. Ban cars. Ban alcohol. Ban cigarettes. Ban harm. Ban guns. Ban variability. Ban bodychecks. Ban slingshots. Ban mean people. Ban sex. Ban hate. Ban religion. Ban disagreement. Ban boxing. Ban bicycles. Ban Alberta. Ban hurting. Ban straight pins. Ban sewing needles. Ban shouting. Ban whispering. Ban being born without a helmet. Ban birth. Ban tripping and falling down. Ban elastic bands. Ban scissors. Ban mortality. Ban fallibility. Ban indigestion.

The proprietor of Occam’s Carbuncle is Canadian. Thus “Ban Alberta.” What he has for or against Alberta, I don’t know. But I’m sure he has a good reason for it.

UPDATE: From the proprietor himself, “I love Alberta and all things Albertan (well, actually I’m not a huge fan of Anne McLellan). My attempt at irony might have had one too many layers.” But it’s great irony, nevertheless.

I Blame TV

Q&A at The Corner:

Reader: …When did the voices of American young women get to be so universally, gratingly, nasally flat, all across the country? And why? Who stole away the huskier voices, the rounded deep-southern tones…the ability to use any vocal range and inflection at all?”

John Derbyshire: …There is, in fact, a very distinctive American-female voice developing. It’s the “Valley girl” voice basically — even though the Valley in question is 3,000 miles from where my daughter grew up….

It’s true, and it’s because kids watch too much TV, which has homogenized America’s once-rich variety of regional accents. Turn off the damn TV and read to your kids in the accent you grew up with. Well, just turn off the TV. Your kids will be the better for it.

The Doctor Diagnoses Another Case of Simplistic Socialism

Dr. Henry I. Miller is a physician and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was an FDA official from 1979 to 1994. And he understands economics. It’s too bad that most other medical insiders aren’t as savvy as Dr. Miller. Writing today at Tech Central Station he delivers a deadly diagnosis of Dr. Marcia Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About, a compendium of simplistic, socialistic nostrums. Miller’s bottom line about Angell’s book:

Dr. Angell’s proposals to, in effect, nationalize the American system of drug development reflect almost inconceivable naiveté. They are reminiscent of economist Milton Friedman’s example of a flawed syllogism: Capitalism has worked everywhere it has been tried; socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried; therefore, let us try socialism.

A spirited diatribe can educate and entertain, but in The Truth About the Drug Companies, Dr. Angell does neither. Her diagnoses are wrong, and her remedies — which are reminiscent of the government controls and centralized planning of the old Soviet Union — are far worse than the disease.

Don’t bother to read the book, but do take the time to read Dr. Miller’s article, and anything else by him that pops up on the web.

Psychoanalyzing Peace Protesters

NYTimes.com headline: “Hundreds Are Arrested as Protests Escalate”

Scene: A psychiatrist’s office in Manhattan

Patient: Please tell me, Dr. Spielvogel, why do I become so violent when I protest for peace?

Shrink: Vy not? Unlike zose against whom you protest, you haff no responsibility for defending ze nation. You are venting your feelings of powerlessness.

Patient: But vy — why — do I become violent when I vent?

Shrink: Vell, ven you vere an adolescent, and you rebelled against your parents, you had to do it by nonviolent means because you depended on zem for your bed and board.

Patient: So, you think I’m really acting out my adolescent rebellion against my parents?

Shrink: Vell, zince you are only capable of shouting mindless slogans — ven you aren’t doing zomesing violent — it is clear to me zat you haven’t advanced beyond adolescence. In fact, I sink you have regressed into childhood.

Patient: I’m not going to take this lying down.

Shrink: Lying down, zitting up, makes no difference to me. Zat will be $200. And no protesting or I’ll cut off your prescription of Thorazine. Next patient…

Al Franken — leftwing nutjob, alleged comedian, and front man for Error America — sharing his wit and wisdom with a political opponent, at the Republican National Convention.

A Word or Two for Ideological Purists

William Watkins at Southern Appeal has a post in which he quotes from James Bovard’s The Bush Betrayal. Watkins says of Bush:

No matter what his failings, so the argument goes, surely he is better than Kerry. Perhaps he is better than Kerry, but ought not we have higher standards than this? If John Kerry is the measuring stick, then I would venture that there are a large number of rascals who would be better leaders than him. But if we measure Bush by a legitimate standard, then we see much is lacking Here is a taste of Bovard’s indictment….[long quotations here]…So this is the man who is about to lead what used to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility. What a shame.

The quotations are about the Medicare prescription plan, a farm bill with “generous” benefits, steel tariffs, foreign aid, and education spending. William characterizes some of those measures as “vote-buying”; hell, they’re all vote-buying.

Now let’s talk about why the glass is half-full, not half-empty. What Bush gave with prescriptions he will try to take back (and then some) through partial privatization of Social Security. Farm subsidies are a bi-partisan addiction; find a president who can resist them and you’ll find a nation in which the electoral college has been abolished and most farm products are imported. Bush’s overall stance on trade is good, why get upset by a blatantly political and short-lived bit of protectionism? Almost everyone’s against foreign aid, but it’s almost inconsequential and it might actually pay long-term dividends in the war on terror. A successful push for vouchers — a key item on the Republican agenda — will have a much greater positive effect on education than the feeble negative effect of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Bovard and Watkins seem to live in the perfect world of perfectly rational, non-political politicians. It doesn’t exist. Kerry is the standard to which Bush should be compared — this year. And defeating Kerry must be number two on Bush’s agenda — this year. Number one, of course, is fighting the war on terror, which Watkins doesn’t mention. I hope he doesn’t think that’s unimportant.

Next year, if Bush has been re-elected, Bovard and Watkins can rightly complain if Bush continues to disappoint them. But before they complain they should consider Bush’s entire record, including — most importantly — his performance in the war on terror. If that doesn’t satisfy them they should do more than complain; they should actively support the nomination of a better Republican candidate in 2008.

But they should never lose sight of the fact that the real world of presidential politics — as opposed to their ideal world of ideological perfection — will almost always produce a choice between the greater evil and the lesser evil. The last time it produced a clear choice between evil and good was in 1964. And look what happened then: Voters mistook good for evil and evil for good, and evil ensued, both at home and abroad.

Would Bovard and Watkins prefer the unelected Goldwater or the elected Bush? I’m sorry to say that’s the sort of choice the real world usually offers, my friends.

Cold Mountain, the Movie

I finally saw the movie based on Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel, Cold Mountain. The movie is good, but disappointing. The novel draws its power from Inman’s long, perilous journey home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the bloody battle of Petersburg (Virginia), where he almost perished. In the novel, Inman’s journey is intercut with the tribulations of Ada, with whom Inman had fallen in love before going to war, and Ruby, a mountain woman who “learns” Ada how to run her farm without a man. The story of Ada and Ruby, though suspenseful and fascinating in its own right, serves mainly to make Inman’s journey seem longer and more suspenseful. Inman’s tragic end, the emotional climax of the novel, follows his return and blissful reunion with Ada.

The movie spends too much time on Ada and Ruby, shortchanging the epic nature of Inman’s journey. The interaction of Jude Law (Inman) and Nicole Kidman (Ada) fails to match the attraction that leaps from the pages of Frazier’s novel. Perhaps it’s the script, perhaps it’s the direction, and perhaps it’s the actors. I think it’s the actors: Frazier’s Inman could have been played perfectly by a young Gary Cooper — strong and silent, in contrast to Law’s rather short and loquacious version. Frazier’s Ada could have been played perfectly by a young Vivien Leigh — who, in fact, played Ada’s prototype in Gone with the Wind.

Having said that, I must defend Renée Zellweger’s Ruby. Zellweger did not overplay the role, regardless of what some critics say. Those critics must never have met an up-country native of the Appalachians. Zellweger’s Ruby is a perfect characterization, in accent, attitude, and manner — rude, crude, suspicious of outsiders, and aggressively defensive. Zellweger deserves her Oscar.

The movie version of Cold Mountain deserves a viewing, but don’t expect more than 152 minutes of entertainment. You won’t remember it as one of the greatest movies ever made — not by a long shot.

How’s That for Credibility?

John O’Neill, a key member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, recently gave a revealing interview to the L.A. Times. A key paragraph says this about O’Neill:

He portrayed himself as a political independent — a Reagan Democrat, he said, if he had to have a label. Although he typically supports GOP candidates, he says, he voted for Democrat Al Gore in 2000. And although the “Swifties” have agreed to focus on Kerry and not to discuss President Bush, O’Neill made it clear he is no great fan of the president, whom he has described to several friends as an “empty suit.”

O’Neill may not represent all the SwiftVets — or even a small fraction of them — on that score, but it makes his anti-Kerry passion all the more convincing. The Vets, as a group, seem genuinely motivated by their justifiable hatred of Kerry’s perfidy and lack of moral character. Karl Rove couldn’t have invented them if he’d tried.

(Thanks to One Hand Clapping and Michelle Malkin for the tip.)

In the "It Could Be Worse" Department

UPDATED BELOW

Yesterday I attacked FCC commissioner Michael Copps, in particular, and the federal government, in general, for paternalistically and unnecessarily regulating the airwaves. Thanks to a tip from the proprietor of Occam’s Carbuncle, a Canadian blog, I’ve learned how much worse it is in Canada. As he says:

Copps would feel right at home in Canada, where our FCC equivalent, the CRTC, routinely sticks its nose in where it doesn’t belong. One of our better blogs, Trudeaupia, has been all over this issue.

(CRTC stands for Canadian Radio-television Communications Commission or, in French, Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes.) Anyway, here’s the issue, in the words of CRTC:

In a decision issued today,…CRTC…denies the application…for the renewal of the broadcasting licence for the French-language commercial radio station CHOI-FM Québec….

The Commission considered that offensive comments made by the hosts over the station’s airwaves tended or were likely to expose individuals or groups of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of mental disability, race, ethnic origin, religion, colour or sex. The Commission also considered, among other things, that the station’s hosts were relentless in their use of the public airwaves to insult and ridicule people….

According to CBC Montreal, reporting on August 26:

A federal court has made it official—CHOI-FM can continue broadcasting after its licence expires at the end of this month.

The controversial radio station has reached an agreement with the CRTC to keep broadcasting until a final decision comes down about the fate of the station….

Trudeaupia is skeptical: “Or is this just a delaying action until the protest dies down, then they’ll abruptly close it?”

So, it could be worse here in the U.S. of A. First, we could have to say everything twice: once in English, again in French. Second, we could have to put up with limitations on freedom of speech that dwarf the infamy of McCain-Feingold.

UPDATE:
How could I forget that other bastion of freedom in the English-speaking world, our “mother country”? Well, here’s Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy to remind me (quoting from Bloomberg.com):

Ford Motor Co., the world’s second biggest carmaker, has had a television commercial for its Land Rover brand banned by the U.K. communications regulator after it was judged to “normalize” the use of guns.

The advertisement, which featured a woman brandishing a gun later revealed to be a starting pistol, breached the Advertising Standards Code and must not be shown again, Ofcom said in an e-mailed statement. The regulator received 348 complaints against the ad, many concerned that the commercial glamorized guns and made it “appear that guns are fun and cool.”…

Ofcom said glamorization is “part and parcel” of the advertising process but this commercial “normalized” gun ownership in a domestic setting. The pistol, fired by the woman into the air as a man got into his car, was used in “an apparent casual manner and just for fun,” Ofcom said….

George Orwell, wherever you are, call home.

Broder Boots Another One

David Broder of The Washington Post, called by some the “dean” of Washington pundits, is true to form in this wrong-headed column:

Policing Political Ads

By David S. Broder

Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page B07

…With total reported political contributions for this cycle already past the $1 billion mark — and the heaviest ad buys still to come — the character of the perpetual debate about campaign financing has begun to shift. Instead of focusing on who is giving how much, the argument now seems to be about who has the right to join in the spending spree….

With record sums available to both sides — either through their official committees or through the independent groups supporting them — the real issue is not one of finance but of accountability….

The institutions and individuals with a stake in the presidential election are far more numerous than two parties and two candidates. All sorts of other groups — from left and right, from environmentalists to anti-abortionists — have much riding on the outcome. By what logic are they to be prohibited from running their ads?…

The reality is that, in a nation with our Constitution’s guarantee of free speech and a government whose decisions affect every aspect of life, the flow of money from the private sector into the political world will be almost impossible to control.

What can be disciplined is the tendency of these ads to exaggerate, distort or flat-out lie. And the candidates who benefit from the ads are the ones who have the first responsibility — along with the media — to police them. The candidates ought to be judged by their willingness to tell their supporters when they have crossed the line.

The headline is scary, but it belies the message. Broder was doing well until the last paragraph. Then he booted it.

The only “policing” that’s needed is the policing that citizens do in the privacy of their own minds. It’s impossible to take at face value a candidate’s disavowal or repudiation of ads attacking his opponent. Is the candidate being sincere or merely observing the niceties of political decorum? In the end, citizens are left to make up their own minds about the validity of third-party attack ads, just as they are left to make up their own minds about the validity of candidates’ ads.

But Broder is just being Broder, a paternalistic Washington insider who doesn’t trust “the masses” to think for themselves.

Where the French Went Wrong

A review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity says it well:

…Now comes distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (married to Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the godfather of the neoconservative movement) to add some intellectual heft to the right’s Francophobia.

Himmelfarb’s basic contention, one she supports with great passion and wide-ranging scholarship, is that the great 18th century French Enlightenment has been vastly overrated and that the British and American Enlightenments have been comparatively underrated. Her goal in writing this book is to “reclaim the Enlightenment…from the French who have dominated and usurped it” and restore it to the British and Americans.

So who stole the Enlightenment and gave credit for it to the French? Himmelfarb never says so directly, but one can venture a guess: liberals in academia. Her critique of the French Enlightenment is twofold: First, the French philosophes, from Rousseau to Voltaire to Diderot and the rest, were anti-religious, and second, they were elitists who scorned the common people. The French so worshiped reason that they denied the value of faith, thus cutting themselves off from the multitudes.

The great Voltaire, Himmelfarb points out, opposed education for the children of farmers on the grounds that they were mired in religious superstition and thus largely unredeemable. This kind of elitist thinking, Himmelfarb tells us repeatedly, pervaded the French Enlightenment. So did totalitarian impulses, impulses embodied in the French Revolution and “the Terror.” Himmelfarb spends much space describing Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” and how it influenced Robespierre and hence “the Terror.”…

Exactly. Rousseau, the godfather of communism, believed that individuals had surrendered their will to the state by entering into an imaginary social contract (somewhat like John Rawls’s imaginary “veil of ignorance”). And it was all downhill from there. Now we have Rousseau’s descendants — modern-day Democrats — who want to regulate our lives for our own good. That includes, of course, denying a good education to poor children in the name of “public” education.

This Isn’t News

This has been blogged before, but it bears repeating:

Reuters Editor’s Email ‘Sad But Revealing,’ Pro-Life Group Says



(CNSNews.com) – A Reuters news service editor sent an e-mail to a pro-life group last week, criticizing the group’s stance on abortion as well as its support of the Bush administration….

According to the National Right to Life Committee, the email came “out of the blue” from Todd Eastham, a news editor for Reuters. Eastham was responding to a press release that the National Right to Life Committee sent to hundreds of news outlets after a federal judge in New York struck down a ban on partial birth abortion.

Eastham’s email read as follows: “What’s your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?”

Douglas Johnson, the National Right to Life Committee’s legislative director, called it “sad but revealing to see an editor for a major news service so casually and gratuitously express such blatant hostility to both the Bush administration and to the right to life of unborn children….

At the bottom of Eastham’s email is a statement that reads: “Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Reuters Ltd.”

That “boilerplate material” invites Eastham’s readers to visit the Reuters website, Johnson noted. Johnson said he did visit the website, where he found a Reuters’ editorial policy, which said, “Reuters journalists do not offer their own opinions or views.”…

Normally they slip their opinions and views into the articles they write for Reuters, but with no more subtlety than Eastham’s email.

Entertain Me!

Michael J. Copps, a Democrat member of the Federal Communications Commission, believes

our broadcast media owe us more coverage of an event that remains an important component of the presidential campaign. Yet tonight, if people around the country tune in to the commercial broadcast TV networks, most will not see any live convention coverage. That’s not right.

Let’s remember that American citizens own the public airwaves, not TV executives. We give broadcasters the right to use these airwaves for free in exchange for their agreement to broadcast in the public interest. They earn huge profits using this public resource. During this campaign season broadcasters will receive nearly $1.5 billion from political advertising.

Where to begin? Let’s start with fundamentals and go from there:

1. American citizens don’t own the public airwaves. The federal government, acting through the FCC, regulates the airwaves in the mistaken belief that chaos would ensue if the airwaves weren’t regulated. If the FCC didn’t regulate the electromagnetic media, the users of the media would regulate themselves, just as surfers regulate themselves.

2. How much money broadcasters make is therefore none of the FCC’s business.

3. What broadcasters broadcast is therefore none of the FCC’s business.

4. Broadcasters should broadcast in order to maximize their profits. A concept that happens (through the magic of the “invisible hand”) to serve the interests of consumers.

If Copps thinks that people who watch political conventions actually learn anything they can’t learn by watching or listening to news programs, reading newspapers and magazines, surfing the web, and — best of all — reading political blogs of all persuasions, then Copps is a fool. But we already knew that, didn’t we, when he said that a convention is an “event that remains an important component of the presidential campaign.” That’s true only in the sense that a convention affords a major party the opportunity to grab some free advertising for its candidate.

Copps is more than a fool, however; he’s a paternalistic fool. He’s itching to force broadcasters to cover conventions because watching them would be good for us, the unwashed masses who, obviously, don’t know where to turn for our political news.

Well, Copps’s term as commissioner expires June 30, 2005. So, if Bush wins re-election, Copps won’t be around the FCC much longer.

Lame Protest of the Day

Here’s a member of “Billionaires for Bush” mocking Republicans for their purported monopoly on rich adherents:

Of course, there are some real billionaires for Kerry (including George Soros, Ted Turner, and Warren Buffet), and a bunch of Hollywood fat-cats who aren’t living on food stamps. In fact, most of the wealthiest zip codes in the nation are Democrat bastions. It just proves, once again, that you don’t need a lot of sense to make a lot of cents.