It’s Monday, June 22nd, but before we begin, a few random thoughts on the passing scene.
First, we never thought anyone or anything could cause us to miss Johnny Miller…until this weekend, watching FOX’s coverage of the 2015 U.S. Open. Here’s the 411: (a) if we want overhyped drama and stirring sentiment, we’ll leave the sound on next time Jim Nance is announcing; (b) if vertigo truly prevented Jason Day from playing, he should have withdrawn; but since he didn’t, PLEASE spare us the shot-by-shot analysis of how holding his head a certain way is the result of some debilitating condition and thus constitutes courage; and, (c) can we all agree Tiger not playing on Saturday is no longer cause for viewers to miss 30 minutes watching the guys who will be?!?
Second, what we consider one of the better explanations of Conservatism , courtesy of Jonah Goldberg:
“Conservatives are for the most part comfortable with material inequalities — so long as the system that produces them is fair and open — because we understandthat’s how life works. Indeed, it’s how life should work.If you put in the work, if you have the great idea, you should do better than someone who doesn’t. We’re comfortable with this contradiction.
Philosophically and psychologically, this fact is offensive to the socialist mind. Philosophically, because it seems unfair. Psychologically, because it is un-fun. In a socialist economy, the socialist intellectuals and bureaucrats have the power (and, truth be told, the wealth). In a free economy, the socialist intellectual is a performance artist and the socialist bureaucrat has to work for a living.
“No political philosopher has ever described a conservative utopia,” Samuel Huntington writes. That’s because there is no such thing as a conservative utopia — because there’s no such thing as a utopia(the very word means “no place”). The socialist cannot accept this and he spends his days arguing that it is better to constantly try to kill the two birds in the bush with one stone than to be grateful for the one bird he already has in his hand.“
To the enlightened, nothing seems more natural or easy to understand; to The Left, Goldberg might as well be writing in ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, a few thoughts on the Charleston church massacre. TRIGGER WARNING: What follows is the unfiltered opinion of the author, and thus the unvarnished truth; consequently, it may cause psychological trauma and physical discomfort to those unaccustomed to residing in reality.
Consider the following from Commentary Magazine, an on-line publication we deem a dependable bastion of Conservatism, one which we frequently quote:
“The nation is in mourning today after the tragic shooting at a historic Charleston, South Carolina church where a pastor and eight worshippers were gunned down by what news reports say was a white supremacist. The alleged gunman appears to have been filled with irrational hatred of African-Americans and reportedly uttered an old stereotypical canard about blacks before he opened fire. In doing so, he sent a chill down the spine of every decent American who not only despises the twisted ideology he espoused but also understand the way an attack on a black church calls up horrible memories of the struggle for civil rights.“
Sorry, we challenge anyone even to suggest we’re not a “decent American”; yet while we continue to mourn with the Charleston congregation, the news sent no chill down our spine, neither did we suffer flashbacks to anything other than the last time a hate-filled maggot decided to make a name for himself by committing mass murder.
For what is racism but an illogical hatred of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of their skin, whatever the color? So do haters reside in the Republic? You bet; and they come in every race, color, creed, religion and sexual orientation…along with every other country in the world. Ask any Rwandan…still extent.
Hells bells; animals don’t even need hate as an excuse to kill these days, as this next headline proves:
But let’s be honest: race relations in America haven’t worsened over the last six years because America elected a BLACK President. Rather, they’ve regressed so dramatically because we elected a RED President; one totally dedicated to destroying the greatest country ever conceived by any and every means possible, including his personal favorite: ex uno plures.
And his allies in the MSM and Hollywood have been only too happy to carry the water for his campaign of misdirecting blame to others. Case in point: Bill Maher recently criticized “right-wing” media such all FOX, Drudge and The Daily Caller for inciting this latest incident of mindless violence:
“Well, we can never tell why someone snaps, but I bet you I can tell ya where he got his news. I looked at [The Daily Caller] the last week, it was a lot of stories about black people. Same with Matt Drudge. I think they present a really twisted view. I’m not surprised this guy thought they’re ‘taking over the country.’“
Though, absent Bret Baier, we largely discount FOX, we read Drudge and The Daily Caller…well,…daily. And we’ve yet to encounter anything which would even remotely incite racism, let alone the wanton murder of nine practicing Christians.
Fortunately, at least in this case, Matt Lewis was around to confront Maher with the rankness of his own hypocrisy, recalling:
Lewis recounts Maher at least acknowledged his duplicity, noting, “Okay, you got me on that one.” Which makes Maher both a hypocritical opportunist and an ideologically-inspired liar.
We should also point out, with NO disrespect towards the departed WHATSOEVER, as well as any allocation of BLAME, the shepherd of this particular flock opted to deny his sheep the right to protect themselves from such predators:
Which is particularly when one considers Roof reportedly reloaded five times, providing even an amateur marksman…or woman…ample opportunity to either take him out or at least discourage him from continued mayhem, as bothCharl van Wyk andJeanne Assam…
…can attest.
Here’s the juice: THIS…
…isn’t the problem. Neither are these long-discredited fools:
And as Bill Meisen so eloquently observed, any of presidential-wannabe Marty YO’Money’s farcical solutions notwithstanding…
Should O’Malley get everything he’s asking for, it would not have prevented this shooting:
– Even under the most strict background check, the father could legally have purchased that pistol.
– I’m not sure what an ‘assault weapon’ is. I’ve never seen one advertised… Whatever definition he wants to use, it won’t include a .45 pistol.
– Straw man purchases are already illegal. In fact it’s a felony. The son had been arrested but not convicted of a felony and was being treated for mental illness. As a result, the son could not legally buy a pistol without lying about those facts on the background check, a felony. If the father knew this and bought the pistol in his own name and then gave it to his son, that’s a felony.
– If the father bought the pistol with the intent of keeping it himself and his son stole it, that’s a felony.
– If the son possessed the pistol while under the influence of narcotics, that’s a felony.
– The son brought the pistol into a ‘gun free zone’, that’s another crime.
– The son illegally fired the pistol in the church, another felony.
There were no shortage of crimes committed here and even with all the laws already on the books, this tragedy could not be prevented. Adding more gun laws may make Liberals feel good, but it won’t prevent these crimes. Then again, name one problem a Liberal policy ever solved.
Almost every one of these shooting have a few things in common. It’s a twisted, complex brew that mixes mental illness, mind-altering drugs and pure evil. I don’t know what that solution looks like but this should be the focus. Gun control is nothing but a campaign “bullet” point that appeases The Left without solving a thing.
All while countering the Constitution.
And for those still clinging to the vain hope banning guns would somehow prevent such acts of insanity…
“Seriously; what’s a few, four million murdered people between ideological soulmates?!?”
“…The left’s embrace of the pope is entirely a matter of political expediency. Among other things, they seek, as another Washington Post headline puts it, to put “2016 GOP Hopefuls on the Defensive.” Karen Tumulty reports:
Catholic politicians face a balancing act, given the popularity of a pope who had an approval rating of 86 percent among U.S. Catholics and 64 percent among Americans overall in a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a Catholic convert campaigning in Iowa, was asked Wednesday about the papal document.
“I respect the pope. I think he’s an incredible leader, but I think it’s better to solve this problem in the political realm,” Bush said. “I’m going to read what he says, of course. I’m a Catholic and try to follow the teachings of the church.”
Later, Bush added: “I don’t go to Mass for economic policy or for things in politics.”
Sen. John F. Kennedy said much the same thing in 1960: “I believe in an America where . . . no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act. . . . I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source.”
The New York Times evidently disagrees. From today’s editorial:
“Laudato Si” is the first papal encyclical devoted solely to environmental issues—and also, Pope Francis clearly hopes, the beginning of the broad moral awakening necessary to persuade not just one billion Catholic faithful, but humanity at large, of our collective responsibility to pass along a clean and safe planet to future generations. In other words, to do the things that mere facts have not inspired us to do.
The paper took the opposite position in a May 2012 editorial on a different subject:
Under the Constitution, churches and other religious organizations have total freedom to preach that contraception is sinful and rail against [President] Obama for making it more readily available. But the First Amendment is not a license for religious entities to impose their dogma on society through the law. The vast majority of Americans do not agree with the Roman Catholic Church’s anti-contraception stance, including most American Catholic women.
The Times further defended the legitimacy of forcing devout employers to act against their faith by providing contraceptive and abortifacient drugs and devices via workers’ medical benefits.
An obvious question arises: If many individual Catholics feel free to reject their church’s teachings on contraception and even abortion, why should anyone expect them—never mind “humanity at large”—to fall into line with global warmism on the pope’s say-so?
Great question!
In a related item the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins details how, in reality…
Pray is right; for a new President…and a new pope!
“…With unintended sacrilege one news-service headline this week credited the pope with “finding religion on climate change.”
Maybe it would be truer to say Pope Francis has tried to annex one of the newer religions, that of global warming, to Catholic liturgy, though this would also paint a sorry picture of his political judgment. For if anything has been demonstrated over the past three decades, it’s that moral hectoring of voters does not produce notable progress on this vexing issue.
And voters are not stupid in this regard. As Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry has explained: “One argument that President Obama hasn’t tried to make explicitly is that the U.S. commitments to emissions reductions will actually slow down warming in a meaningful way. If you believe the climate models, the U.S. emissions reductions would reduce the warming by a fairly trivial amount, that would get lost among the natural variability of climate.”
That’s right, Mr. Obama, who has referred to the “urgent and growing threat of a changing climate,” without benefits…”
A concept into which Francis has apparently bought in…hook, line and sinker:
“…The attempt to create a Europe at one with itself, living prosperously and happily under a new kind of unelected government, has led it to become such a sad, unhappy, divided place, economically in decline compared with the outside world, ruled by a strange form of government it no longer trusts, respects or understands.
Similarly, the last desperate throw by the EU and the US to achieve a world agreement next December to “halt climate change” is not going to succeed, not just because the “science” on which it is based is so increasingly questionable, but because the emerging powers of the East, led by India and China, are simply not prepared to go along with it.If the West wishes to commit economic suicide, so be it. In their own national interest, they are not willing to follow.
In fact, what we are seeing here is a geopolitical shift of huge proportions.So lost is the West in its bubbles of self-deceiving fantasy that the hegemony it so long exercised over the rest of the world is passing to the world outside it, to India and China, even, in its own way, to Russia, still a nuclear power which can prevent us pushing too hard in our support for a bankrupt Ukrainian dictatorship, and which also still supplies Europe with a third of the gas it needs to continue functioning.
How forlorn in light of all this looks that would-be well-meaning 300-page document in which the Pope, under the spell of his chief scientific adviser, a fanatical German climate activist called Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,(You can catch Schellnhuber’s greatest quotes here!)calls for an end to use of the very fossil fuels which keep the Vatican’s own lights on.In asking us to pray for that global climate treaty, Pope Francis solemnly trots out all those familiar plaints about “melting polar ice caps”, “rising sea levels”, unprecedented droughts, “extreme weather events” and the rest of that greenie litany which has no basis in honest science whatever…”
Which makes Francis either an ideologue, misinformed, or…ignorant; take your pick!
Meanwhile, remember Francis’ call for respecting the opinions of the opposition?
Pope Francis was about to take a major step backing the science behind human-driven global warming, and Philippe de Larminat was determined to change his mind.
A French doubter who authored a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming, de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions.
After securing a high-level meeting at the Vatican, he was told that, space permitting, he could join. He bought a plane ticket from Paris to Rome. But five days before the April 28 summit, de Larminat said, he received an e-mail saying there was no space left. It came after other scientists — as well as the powerful Vatican bureaucrat in charge of the academy — insisted he had no business being there.
“They did not want to hear an off note,” de Larminat said.
Oh, you’re a climate skeptic?
So much for respecting dissenting points of view.
Let us guess; Francis knew nothing about it until he read it…
…in the Vatican newspaper!
Since we’re on the subject of Liars and the Lies They Continually Tell, courtesy of NRO, Deroy Murdock describes how…
“Hillary Clinton “re-launched” her floundering campaign Saturday on Roosevelt Island, formerly and fittingly known as Welfare Island. Clinton’s desperate effort to associate herself with “everyday Americans” contrasts starkly with the crooked elites with whom she and Bill normally cavort.
In fact, the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary’s elaborate slush fund, includes numerous donors and even one-time board members with dodgy backgrounds, shady dealings, and even criminal convictions that should repel rather than lure a once and perhaps future president of the United States.Peter Schweizer’s meticulously researched new best-seller Clinton Cash (complete with 635 endnotes) delineates this ultimate power couple’s sordid circle.
…“Why do the Clintons put themselves again and again in positions that raise questions about their ethical conduct?” Schweizer wonders.While his critics say he has yet to unveil a smoking gun, Schweizer has identified enough smoke to asphyxiate the entire population of Chappaqua. Lacking subpoena power and arrest warrants, Schweizer and his forensic team have accomplished about all that they can with their phones, computer keyboards, and indisputable talent for analyzing documents and connecting dots.
“The pattern of behavior I have established is too blatant to ignore,” Schweizer writes, “and deserves legal scrutiny by those with investigative capabilities that go beyond journalism.”
For their part, Democrats should think long and hard about whether nominating the first woman for president is worth having these and other hoodlums dominate the headlines in a fall 2016 campaign that reeks of a RICO indictment.“
Which means they’re already planning a second coronation.
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