A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Honduran Update

In July I wrote a piece on the plight of people in Honduras who have had the world community almost entirely turn their backs on them for doing little more than ousting their power-hungry president who tried to circumvent the law and set himself as ruler for life.

Today Sec of State Hillary Clinton made the official announcement that the United States is cutting aid to a country we should be doing literally everything in our power to support.  This is a sad day for freedom-lovers everywhere.  Make no mistake about it: the administration is dead-wrong on this one.

Texas men survive 8 days at sea

Three friends from Texas went fishing August 22nd in the Gulf of Mexico.  Their boat cap-sized, and for 8 days the men survived on crackers, beer, and water from the tank on their boat reserved for cleaning fish slime.  They were surrounded by sharks (my personal biggest fear in life) and 130 miles from land.

"Phillips said the roughest time was during the heat of the day, when they would try to endure the sun's rays and keep up their spirits. The men also started seeing things.

"About the fourth or fifth day we started hallucinating about people dropping off food and water," Phillips said. "And we were talking to them, but they weren't there," Phillips said.

One thing the men saw that wasn't a hallucination was sharks.

"We had a bunch of black-tipped sharks schooling up under the boat," Phillips said. "One of them jumped across the back of the boat."

My hats off to you, gents.  Not all news is bad news these days.

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Mad About You (Actually Voicing Your Opinion)

It seems that the White House is hopping mad about members of various communities organizing themselves to try and impede the march towards Obamacare. Strange coming from a president and administration that offered as their credibility during the campaign the fact that they were able to organize so many unhappy Americans to bring about change.

The White House said Tuesday that some of the anger that Democratic lawmakers have encountered at town hall meetings over the past several days is "manufactured."

"In fact, I think you've had groups today, Conservatives for Patients Rights, that have bragged about organizing and manufacturing that anger," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

This is literally the definition of community organizing, and almost verbatim a description of what Barack Obama spent his entire professional career doing in Chicago. From the liberal magazine The New Republic in 2007:

Yet Obama connects his past as a Chicago organizer to his presidential bid with surprising ease. Last month, during his first visit to South Carolina since his campaign announcement, we discussed his community-organizing days. He sat at the head of along table inside a dimly lit hotel conference room in Columbia and ate a chocolate energy bar. When I began to suggest links between his organizing work then and his current campaign, he interrupted:"I think there is. I don't think you need to strain for it." He was at home talking Alinskian jargon about "agitation," which he defined as "challenging people to scrape away habit," and he fondly recalled organizing workshops where he learned the concept of "being predisposed to other people's power."

Obama's self-conception as an organizer isn't just a campaign gimmick. Organizing remained central to Obama long after his stint on the South Side. In the 13 years between Obama's return to Chicago from law school and his Senate campaign, he was deeply involved with the city's constellation of community- organizing groups. He wrote about the subject. He attended organizing seminars. He served on the boards of foundations that support community organizing. He taught Alinsky's concepts and methods in workshops. When he first ran for office in 1996, he pledged to bring the spirit of community organizing to his job in the state Senate. And, after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter, "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change." Recalling her remark in 2005, Obama wrote, "I take that observation as a compliment."

By defining himself as a "community organizer" above all else, Obama is linking himself to America's radical democratic tradition and presenting himself as an heir to a particular political style and methodology that, at least superficially, contrasts sharply with the candidate Obama has become. Community organizers see themselves as disciples of Thomas Paine and the colonists who dumped tea in Boston Harbor. Historically, they have revered the tactics of the labor militants of the 1930s, and they became famous in the '60s for the political theater championed by Alinsky, illustrated most memorably by his threat of a "fart-in" at a Rochester, New York, opera house to bring attention to the Kodak company's refusal to hire blacks.

Please understand that even if you support the president, what he and his people are doing to try and undermine those opposed to socialized medicine (via Obama's "public option" scam) is hypocritical on a scale seldom seen. Anyone has just as much right to organize themselves to complain about their government as anyone else. That isn't reserved only for demographics popular with the mainstream media and who agree with David Axelrod's vision to "re-make" America.

What A Guy Wants

I'll let Lt. Dangle from the Reno Sheriff's Department do my talking for me. Here's what this blogger is looking for.

Conservative in Grand Rapids

Hey folks, I'm sorry for no posts this week, but I am attending The Acton Institute's "Acton University" in Grand Rapids, MI and won't be blogging until Sunday.

Obama = Carter

Columnist Ann Coulter's latest piece is a gem. She comments on Obama's Cairo speech and the false idea that the war on terror is somehow a "war of choice."

An excerpt:

Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization. Except we didn't colonize them. The French and the British did. So why are Arabs flying planes into our buildings and not the Arc de Triomphe? (And gosh, haven't the Arabs done a lot with the Middle East since the French and the British left!)

In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.

California, Dennis, and Me

Not Much "Roasting" at Presidential Roast

I often post columns by renowned atheist and Left-of-Center writer Christopher Hitchens and his article for Slate.com this week was fantastic. In it, Hitchens points out that at the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner, an event traditionally meant for some good-natured ribbing of the current Commander-in-Chief, comics like Wanda Sykes spent their time praising the president and attacking his critics instead. Not only did she not partake in the spirit of the evening, she wasn't funny either.

An excerpt:

I absolutely believe that jokes should always be at someone's expense. But for that very reason they must also be highly amusing and—just perhaps—imaginable when told of one's own "community." Low score for Sykes on both counts.

President Bush used to tell jokes about his weaknesses, the most salient of these being his tragic struggle with grammar, itself quite possibly rooted in dyslexia. Many of President Obama's jokes, his speechwriters should take note, were at the expense of his strengths—"I might lose my cool"—and were thus bordering on the narcissistic. (If I have a fault, and I'm the first to admit it, it's probably this: I am too sweet and too patient and too tolerant of the mistakes of others.)

Any tendency to narcissism doubles the need for a follow-up speaker who can make the president wince, not smirk. This we did not get. And Limbaugh's dependence, like Bush's dyslexia, is actually a disability. Can you easily picture any jokes from the Sable Sapphist that would in any other way breach the protocols of the Americans With Disabilities Act? Any other person of whom she would dare say, "I hope his kidneys fail"? Any other context in which would be funny enough for her to yell, "He needs a water-boarding, that's what he needs"? Reality and comedy check here: Would she even say this about Osama Bin Laden?

When comedians flatter the president, they become court jesters, and the country becomes a banana republic. There are probably even people who would wish to misconstrue that last phrase of mine if they felt "sensitive" enough. In which case they can take a number, get on line, and ask to suck my thumb.

Blame Me

An excerpt:

In the past, Democratic populists could rail against the Wall Street excess that had helped to wreck Americans' retirement portfolios. These populist Democrats, though, are gone, replaced by liberal grandees who are more interested in the money of Wall Street than its ethics.

Today's Democratic-led government, meanwhile, has gone on a spending spree, taking on massive debt for all sorts of new "stimulus" - and Republican conservatives, given their recent profligate past, can hardly serve as credible watchdogs.

So, take your pick whom to blame: not-so liberal Democrats, now trashing the Wall Street that enriched them, or not-so conservative Republicans, suddenly railing against Washington's out-of-control budgets that they themselves had
never balanced.

In a democracy that chooses its own leaders, maybe the real problem is ourselves - for wanting big government without big taxes, big stock returns without big risk and easy money without hard work.