Buckley on Ayn Rand
Happy Labor Day, everyone! What better way to celebrate a day off from work then by discussing Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley, am I right?
Rand's two classic works, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), are engaging, insightful novels that remain must-reads for any proponent of de-centralized government and economy. Atlas remains the best-selling novel of all time, but I actually personally prefer The Fountainhead.
In recent years, and due in large part to the waning confidence most Americans have in their ever-increasing-with-power-and-control government, Rand's writings and philosophies have found their way into the consciousness of a whole new generation of Americans. Although an unapologetic atheist and fierce critic of religion, Rand still has many important things to teach all those willing to wade through her massive epochs.
The late, great William F. Buckley had this to say (on The Charlie Rose Show) on Ms. Rand a few years ago:
There's no reason for a religious conservative to run and hide from Ayn Rand; but there's also no theological or moral ground for a one to embrace her ideology. Taken to their logical conclusions, objectivism and compulsive individualism are no better than the secular collectivism of Marx, Mao and (unfortunately) many others.
Liberals - especially religious ones - enjoy lumping all "limited government" conservatives and libertarians in with the cold, calculating, selfish Rand, but this is not the case. For most Center-Right Americans, the definition for a statement such as "pursuit of one's own self-interest" does not exclude things like God, charity, compassion, etc. as Ms. Rand's does.
For more on this important subject, check out these two excellent resources:
- The late Whittaker Chambers' column (mentioned by Buckley in the video clip above) from National Review in 1957: "Big Sister Is Watching You"
- My friend Joseph Sunde's recent treatment of it on his website Remnant Culture.com.
Enjoy the day off, folks!
A View From the Left
By: R.J. Moeller
Bill Maher: It’s Sarah Palin’s birthday today – do you have any special wishes for her?
[Sarcastic laughter and snickering from the audience and Real Time with Bill Maher panel]
Hooman Majd: I don’t think we can say it. Even on HBO.
Matthew Perry: Do you think she even understands that it’s her birthday?
[Raucous laughter from the audience, grins from the panel]
Bill Maher: I don’t. I think they said, ‘Sarah, it’s your birthday,’ and she thought her water broke.
[More approving laughter]
And thus began the “Ask the Panel” portion of the most recent episode of HBO’s political talk-show Real Time with Bill Maher. Straddling the same “It’s a comedy show when I want laughter and applause (or when I get in trouble for going too far), but I really want to subversively promote an ideological agenda the rest of the time” line that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert walk every night on Comedy Central, Real Time offers the hard-hitting analysis one can only find anywhere two or more liberals are gathered in President Obama’s name.
To say that the banter I printed above is childish and petty is a slight against all children and petty people everywhere.
But it’s a “comedy” show, dude. Why take it so seriously?
It is my belief that politically-involved public figures are who they really are when no one is voting – when elections are not imminent, politicians and pundits become increasingly loose-lipped.
I am a student of the culture, as we all should be, and I know (as we all do) that there is more than a hint of truth in any joke. More people under the age of 40 get their information about current events from fake news and political talk shows like Real Time and The Daily Show than anywhere else. The opinions offered on these mediums matter. It wasn’t my decision to make these shows and these comedians the gatekeepers of information in this country, but for (far too) many they are.
And I think it more than fair to say that after watching the clips I’ve included in this column, you will see that the smokescreen-like attempts by people on the Left to dismiss the importance of these shows simply because comedians host them is either misguided or purposely misleading. The Left want students and young adults to watch these shows and lap up the ideas and values streaming off their television and computer screens. They want parents to remain where (far too) many of them are: oblivious, out of the picture, and utterly disengaged from the ideological development of their child’s worldview.
Now, if a show like Maher’s Real Time or Stewart’s Daily Show simply had actors, actresses and entertainers on as their guests, they might be able to get away with the “We’re just joking around, bro” excuse. But the cavalcade of intellectuals, politicians, and influential members of the mainstream media that grace the sets of these shows reveals the deeper intent: they want to promote a specific, progressive, liberal-Democratic understanding of everything from foreign policy to the abortion debate.
Alright, enough with the (valid) generalizations. Let me show you what I mean when I say that not only are these types of shows actively pursuing the hearts and minds of as many Americans as they can, but that what you hear on such shows is typically how the guests and their host truly feel about the matter being discussed.
After bravely mocking Sarah Palin’s intellect, raising the level of civil discourse in this country by complaining that the Republican Party is merely the party of “insane people,” claiming that Abraham Lincoln would not be a Republican if he were alive today, and insisting that the French and Russian revolutions were each hijacked by “right-wingers,” Bill Maher opened a discussion with his panel of experts on the topic of Barack Obama’s personal and religious convictions:
So much to say about what you just saw, but let me quickly introduce the players involved in this little drama. First there is Bill Maher himself. Most of you are familiar with him, but for those who aren’t, all you need to know is that stand-up comedian Maher is an outspoken far-Left atheist who despises religion, Judeo-Christian morality, conservative politics, and not being able to use profanity and coarse sexual humor (which is why he had to leave network television for HBO).
Going from right to left on the panel you had MSNBC political correspondent Norah O’Donnell, Iranian-born author Hooman Majd, and Professor Cornel West of Princeton University. Oh, and next to Maher was, of course, actor Matthew Perry (aka Chandler, from Friends). O’Donnell works for MSNBC, so I’ll let you do the math on where she’s coming from politically. Mr. Majd writes books and articles for publications like The New York Times and Huffington Post, and loves playing the moral equivalency “they’re bad, but we’re not great either” game between the dictatorial regime in his native Iran and the republican democracy known as the United States of America.
Last, but certainly not least, is Professor Cornel West. A practicing Christian, and outspoken Socialist, West is an “expert” on racial issues in this country. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. This group’s founder, and someone West holds in high regard, Catholic-turned-atheist Michael Harrington, once explained the organization’s political ideology like this:
“Put it this way. Marx was a democrat with a small d. The Democratic Socialists envision a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning...and racial equality. I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism.... I want to be on the left wing of the possible.”
Nice.
With the introductions out of the way, let’s tackle the actual words spoken – and valuable insights revealed – in the YouTube clip above.
Commenting on the president’s insistence that he is a “Centrist” politically, Maher said, “I think [Obama] is a Centrist the way he is a Christian…He’s pretending to be a Centrist.”
I applaud Mr. Maher for his candor in recognizing what any casual observer ought to clearly see in our president (and, to be fair, a large number of politicians): an unnatural comfort-level with presenting yourself as one thing, when you really you are nothing of the kind. To the issue of his politics, it is without a doubt true that the president often tries to cover up his true ideological leanings. We on the Right see right through this and are disappointed, both by the fact that he is a progressive liberal to begin with, and also by the fact that so many people buy the moderate rhetoric he has peppered throughout a decidedly far-Left political career.
As to his faith in God – no one can know another man’s heart, and it is not my place to speak to the nature of a personal relationship one has (or does not have) with their Maker. We generally take someone at their word about such matters.
But Bill Maher is insinuating what we all know to be true: actions speak louder than words. What about the president’s actions since taking office point to a real, energetic faith in God? We all knew George W. Bush was a Christian, in large part because the media never shut up about it. They mocked President Bush for being honest and direct about his prayer life and faith in Jesus Christ. With President Obama, in between the times it is convenient to reassure Americans that he is a Christian, the media goes out of its way to downplay the man’s faith.
The only way someone would know President Obama is a Christ-follower is if he or she has read either of his two memoirs. But those are the books that also tell us about the radical nature of the president’s political ideology and worldview, as well as his deep affection for (and connection to) people like Jeremiah Wright. If we’re supposed to look at the president’s own words about his own beliefs, we find an affinity for the Marxist rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky and his radicalizing manifesto Rules for Radicals (which Obama believed so much in that he took action and taught classes on the text to up-and-coming community organizers in Chicago for more than a decade).
Please hear me: I do not stand in judgment of President Obama’s heart. Only his actions. In this case, however, even Bill Maher can read through these lines.
The conversation continued:
Bill Maher: His mother was a secular-humanist, and I think he is too…It’s like when he (Obama) says ‘I struggle with the issue of gay marriage.’ You don’t struggle with it. You’re fine with it.
Professor West: He supports gay marriage, of course.
Maher: No, he says he struggles with it…that he doesn’t like it.
West: Yeah, but that’s the political answer…
[Panel concurs with knowing glances]
Hmm.
When a conservative or Republican, say, Rush Limbaugh, for example, attempts to analyze the president’s track-record and make pronouncements about his actual stance on the issues they are scoffed at and accused of having partisan blinders on. When one of the most respected liberal professors in the country comes to the same conclusion that Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity have about the president’s disingenuous position on the redefinition of marriage, it is affirmed as a fact that everyone ought to already know.
This, of course, says something less-than-favorable about President Obama’s character, but it also speaks to the minimal importance that modern liberalism puts on the subject of character and integrity in its leaders. Neither Right nor Left, Republicans nor Democrats, hold the moral high ground in the sense that one side or the other are literally “better” people. We’re all sinners. But the comfort-level that the Left has with morally-questionable (or out-right immoral) behavior on the part of their leaders is worth noting.
To the majority of Americans, traditional marriage is held up and recognized as a sacred institution – the building block of society. It is a massively important issue. In order to garner votes in 2008, the president and vice president claimed to be on the side of history, biology, 6,000 years of religious teaching, and the will of the American people when it came to keeping marriage one man-one woman. But again I ask: what actions have these men taken to solidify and strengthen the institution of marriage? Heck, what words have we heard from either of them in 2 years on the matter (other than their enthusiastic support for the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy)? With a heavy heart, I must admit that I think Professor West speaks the truth in this matter.
Admittedly, one episode of Bill Maher’s show is not a comprehensive or exhaustive representation of all Center-Left thought – but it is a fair one. It is fair because it is common. You can hear such things any night of the week on everything from The Daily Show to The Rachel Maddow Show to TBS re-runs of The Steve Harvey Show.
If you only get your news and information about politicians and the issues they represent from skimming newspaper headlines or Katie Couric’s nightly reports on CBS, you will assume that Maher and his panel are joking. With even a minimal effort to investigate the people you lend power to, and the issues that are impacting your jobs, schools, and families, you will learn that the joke has only been on you. (And that the Left has been laughing us all the way to Western Europe for 40 years.)
It is said that a nation gets the leaders it deserves. If West and Maher are correct in their appraisals of President Obama, what does that say about us?
Obamacare Is A Loser
You simply cannot explain the scope and breadth of the Obamacare debacle in one column...unless your last name is Krauthammer.
As an aspiring writer and commentator, I spend a great deal of time reading the books and articles and speeches of the people I feel effectively communicate the ideas I believe in better than anyone else.
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and Fox News Channel is one of those people.
Every night of the week, at roughly 6:40 p.m. (Eastern Time), Dr. Krauthammer is a member of the "All-Star Panel" on Special Report With Brett Baier. (You should be watching or DVR-ing this every day). And each Friday, his nationally syndicated column is read in newspapers all across the country.
Today he treated his reading audience to this gem on the current state of the Pelosi-Reid-Obama health care plan:
After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.
The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.
Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.
The Health Care Summit last week was a dog-and-pony show, meant to portray the Republicans as obstructionists and big old meanies. But the president was confronted by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), and the fact-based disagreements conservatives have with Obama's brand of "reform." Republicans DO have ideas, and many key members of the GOP on the state and national level have been promoting them all year.
Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections -- contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.
Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.
Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?
And now, in what can only be described as the most brilliant summation of the American peoples' opposition to Obamacare, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of Charles Krauthammer in its rarest of forms:
Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.
However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?
Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.
Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.
Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.
That's it, folks. Everything the Left promises sounds nice on an individual level, which is how they present their collectivist policies. The problem is, of course, that all of their policies are implemented on a national level and cannot possibly succeed. This is the heart of the debate between Right and Left: can the few rule, and provide for, the many? Can "experts" in Washington "control" the expenses and costs of 300 million-plus liberty-loving Americans?
The good intentions of liberals are heart-warming and bone-chilling, all at the same time.
Chuck closes out his devastatingly informative column with the following:
The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.
Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.
Health Care Summit = Joke
President Obama and the Democrats have been trying for a year to get their brand of health care "reform" passed. They had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, yet nothing happened. The American people have shown up at town hall meetings, called and emailed their representatives, and the people of the most liberal state in the Union (Massachusetts) turned out in droves to vote for a Republican whose sole campaign promise was to vote against the president's health care package.
Today he is holding what seems to be his 54th "summit", this time on health care. Liberals love talking about things when they could have just been doing them. But why pass up a chance to try and make the Republicans look like the overly-used cliche "Party of No"? Why pass up an opportunity for a photo-op that makes un-informed Americans think you are really trying to reach across the aisle?
This is all you need to know about the White House's true intentions:
From Politico.com
After a brief period of consultation following the White House health reform summit, congressional Democrats plan to begin making the case next week for a massive, Democrats-only health care plan, party strategists told POLITICO.
A Democratic official said the six-hour summit was expected to “give a face to gridlock, in the form of House and Senate Republicans.”
Democrats plan to begin rhetorical, and perhaps legislative, steps toward the Democrats-only, or reconciliation, process early next week, the strategists said.
After the summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid planned to take the temperature of their caucuses.
“The point [of the summit] is to alter the political atmospherics, and it will take a day or two to sense if it succeeded,” the official said.
"We're going to have a health care summit to look like we're listening to the people, but you can go jump off a bridge for all we care America 'cause we're not really listening anyway.
You republicans never listen...and oh, btw, we're not listening to what you say in this meeting we called to show how much more we listen to our political enemies than you. Meanies!"
Wait until you get home tonight and watch how ill-tempered President Obama was with Republicans like John McCain (AZ) and Eric Cantor (WI).
I smell another Beer Summit to mend some fences!
This is the Left's attempt to give the federal government control over health care permanently, and create a new and eternal entitlement. The president has said so himself, in his own words. It is about ideology (progressivism) and it is about politics (buying voters). It stands against everything the Founders envisioned.
Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”
By: R.J. Moeller
G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin; and intellectual cruelty is the worst kind of cruelty.”
Written a century after Chesterton’s remarks, Thomas Sowell’s latest effort, Intellectuals and Society, is, broadly speaking, a 317-page cultivation of precisely those sentiments. Combining the heady ideological exegesis of Conflict of Visions (1990) with the utterly graspable dissemination of facts and statistics in both Basic Economics and Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, Dr. Sowell offers the reader of Intellectuals and Society a part-academic lecture, part-fireside chat, and part-Greek tragedy glimpse into a world few of us would otherwise ever experience.
That world is the realm of the “Intellectual”. It is a world where ideas, so long as they conform to the agreed upon norm, reign supreme, and consequences are rendered inconsequential by the insulation afforded to the idea-makers by things like academic tenure, a highly complicit media, and the unnecessary (and unhealthy) intimidation John and Jane Q. Taxpayer feel in the presence of intellectuals and their ideas.
Sowell’s intent in this book is to explain what an intellectual is, expose what it is an intellectual actually does, and examine what impact an intellectual’s end-product (ideas) has on the society around them. I picked up on seven primary themes/concepts which are developed throughout the entire book.
1) It’s not enough to know; you must be able to apply (and apply correctly).
Using the formula “Intellect < Intelligence < Wisdom”, Sowell stakes out his position on the undue levels of prestige given to those who are, as my generation would say, “book smart.” He explains:
The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all – the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.”
2) Incentives and Constraints are universal
”Intellectuals”, as a group, are people whose professional task it is to create and cultivate ideas, as opposed to implement them. An intellectual is a member of an occupational category, and the behavior of the members of this category can (and should) be studied to discover characteristics and patterns among them. In Sowell’s mind, the pivotal question that is asked far too infrequently is: What incentives or constraints affect the behavior and patterns of Intellectuals?
Society as a whole suffers when people erroneously assume that the only people with incentives (i.e. money, fame, advancement of ideological beliefs, prestige amongst colleagues, etc.) are “capitalist fat-cats” in expensive suits. Another serious error occurs when people assume that to put any constraints on an Intellectual, on a professor for example, is a horrible thing that will limit creativity or curb academic curiosity. This is rubbish. Without constraints of any kind you have anarchy, even in the academic world.
3) If you ain’t Left, you ain’t right
The “realm of ideas” in which Intellectuals reside is overwhelmingly Left-of-Center in its political and economic ideology. Sowell defines the “vision of the political left” as follows:
…Collective decision-making through government, directed toward – or at least rationalized by – the goal of reducing economic and social inequalities.
The majority of the academic world is progressive, liberal, or far-Left. The majority of the academic world would be included in Sowell’s definition of an Intellectual. You do the math.
4) It’s nice to be needed
Intellectuals tend to “manufacture” a public need for their ideas. There are three basic explanations Sowell offers for why this happens.
The first is completely understandable: intellectuals, like anyone else, want what they do to matter and have a positive impact on the world.
The second is not very flattering: ego. From the time an intellectual is a young student in junior high or high school, they have been told they are the “smart” kid. After attending the best universities for undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees, many intellectuals succumb to the notion that they are the “philosopher elites” envisioned by the likes of Plato and Karl Marx, destined and ordained to guide the un-enlightened masses to social utopia.
The third explanation for why intellectuals often “manufacture” a public need for their ideas (and services) is, put simply, “dolla’ dolla’s bills ya’ll.” By manipulating the very free market principles so many of them hold in open disdain, intellectuals help to create a demand for themselves, which they are only too happy to supply. Intellectuals need funding, and it is hard to get a grant from the federal government if your area of intellectual expertise involves the teaching of such ideas as limited government.
5) Intellectuals have an influence on society and culture, and friends to help facilitate that influence
After creating a need for themselves, it comes as no surprise that intellectuals end up having a tremendous impact on the society and culture around them. Intellectuals influence public opinion, which is the very air politicians (the decision-makers) breathe, even though the vast majority of Americans do not know the names and faces of the intellectuals who have influenced them.
A largely complicit media do what they can to advance the ideas of intellectuals, and thus their influence grows and grows. In the chapter entitled “Optional Reality in the Media and Academia”, Sowell discusses the ease with which the Intelligentsia (Intellectuals + Gate-keepers of information) ignore facts that contradict their worldview, manipulate data that doesn’t corroborate their hypotheses, and in some extreme cases, lie as if their trousers were engulfed in flames.
Like the militant Muslim who has convinced himself that it is okay to lie under oath to “infidels”, the insulated, self-satisfying world intellectuals can create for themselves is a place where the truth is secondary to the “cause.”
6) Heads in the proverbial sand
It isn’t just that intellectuals, like all fallible human beings, have been wrong about certain things, but it is that they seemingly refuse to learn from their mistakes, and the mistakes they make involve some of the most important things with the furthest-reaching ramifications.
In chapter three, “Intellectuals and Economics,” Sowell gives the example of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs enacted in 1930. In the year following the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment topped out 10%, and by the time the federal government took its first (of many) giant Keynesian steps and signed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariff into law, unemployment had already dropped to just over 6%. The stated goal of the tariffs was to reduce unemployment, and was based on the idea driven by leading intellectuals of the time that the State must act, and act big, to save an economy from crisis. By 1931, however, unemployment was more than 15% and in 1932 it was 25.8%.
Have intellectuals learned their lesson in subsequent decades regarding the detrimental nature of government intervention into the economy? NOT EVEN CLOSE!
See: The Obama administration, one saturated with intellectuals, and its preposterous economic antics of the previous year-plus.
7) How are the people who won’t change their minds called “progressive”?
There are three reasons why intellectuals typically do not learn from their mistakes.
First, their presumptions about human nature and knowledge are innately flawed. Intellectuals, on the whole, tend to believe that human beings are inherently “good”, and simply need guidance and direction from the powers on high. This then leads to their fundamental error in how they view knowledge. Knowledge is dispersed among the people and no one person, or oligarchy of intellectuals, can know everything. This logically infers that it is impossible to centrally plan something as big and vast as a nation’s economy (or educational system). A refusal to accept this truth is, as F.A. Hayek wrote, the intellectual Left’s “fatal conceit.”
Second, intellectuals tend to be removed from the results of their ideas. There are so few external tests or criteria for an intellectual to meet. An engineer building a bridge is judged on the soundness of the bridge. Vince Lombardi was judged by his winning record. Intellectuals who come up with a horrendous idea, say, for example, that paying able-bodied “poor” people not to work, and preventing them from saving or investing the money you pay them, will have no ill effects on society, suffer no real consequences for their wretched schemes.
Third, and final, they are surrounded by so many like-minded people, who hail from equally impressive intellectual backgrounds and pedigrees. How can I be wrong when so many of my colleagues (i.e. the other “smart” kids) think the same way? In business they call it “group-think.” In the land of the intellectual, it’s known as “progressive thought” to walk lock-step in line with your peers.
Don’t think for a moment that Dr. Sowell isn’t aware of the fact that his is a book about the potentially dangerous influence intellectuals can have on society, written by an intellectual trying to influence society. Sowell is open, honest, frank, and uncompromising in his assessment of the career he chose for himself. His aim is to educate, not indoctrinate; lead a horse to water, not drown it in elitist condescension.
Thomas Sowell’s writing is an oasis of reasoned thought and discourse, and after finishing (and thoroughly enjoying) Intellectuals and Society, I can confidently say that I’ve been refreshed.
(Do yourself a favor and watch the 5-part interview with Sowell at National Review Online here.)
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A View From The Left
As one of my intellectual mentors Dennis Prager likes to say, "Clarity over unity." In other words, we don't have to all agree...but we would do well to know what it is we disagree about, and why. I've made it a goal to frequently post the columns of thinkers and writers on the Left here at AVITW.
She's not too happy with Dick Cheney going on different Sunday Morning Talk Shows to point out the current president's less-than-inspiring policies when it comes to terrorism, and has created a fictional, hypothetical dialogue between Obama, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, and Cheney to vent out her frustrations.
It continues on from there, which you can read here, but I suppose you get the gist of it. Bush was/is dumb; Cheney is insensitive and "batty"; Obama is patient and non-ideological in his pragmatic benevolence. (Note: If you just threw up a little bit in your mouth, don't worry...me too.)
Just like Howard Dean claiming after Scott Brown's election in MA last month that it was really a signal from the electorate to get socialized medicine passed even quicker, liberal columnists like Dowd seem incapable of accepting the fact that this is still a Center-Right nation.
This last quote from her piece sums up the mantra we will continue to hear for decades after Barack Obama fails to win re-election in 2012.