A Tale of Two Debates
Now Playing: "Savitri" by Lane, Hellborg, Srinivas and the Vinayakrams, from the San Diego "Muzik3" concert 02/24/01, via DVD - as spellbinding a night as I'd remembered...
'Back from a brief vacation of sorts from all of this, and well, things haven't improved much in the Presidential Election arena.
On Sunday, June 3 the Democrat-Socialist Party of America held its second debate for the 2008 Presidential campaign. I missed it for some reason (?) so caught it in pieces later at You Tube (see link.)
What I heard didn't surprise me much except perhaps in the depth of potentially catastrophic naïveté on foreign policy - and let's face it folks, that would be the Go/NoGo test for any prospective President at this particular point in history.
It would appear that by some odd coincidental quirk these eight distinguished collectivists had all slept soundly through the month of September 2001...? The one striking aspect of their comments on foreign policy, particularly but not exclusively as relates to the war in Iraq, was that their entire context for policy is not American national security, but momentary American polling data.
Go ahead, listen to the segments of the debate addressing foreign policy. What you will hear is a consistent refrain of "The American people want out of this war," and "we need to bring the troops home," somber concerns about "the need to work with our allies" and "restore America's reputation with the rest of the world," and "This is Bush's war!" What you will not hear is any reference to the gravity of the situation we continue to face on a number of fronts. That very cut-and-run weakness and inconsistency the Demo-Socialists have adopted as their official Party policy on the Arab world since the Carter years has been a major factor in the rise of Islamic terrorism. As I've posted earlier, there remain areas beyond America's leftwing ivory tower that are similarly infested with predatory haters of individualism, of liberty, of trade, of prosperity - and which, like all predators, sense weakness in their prey. The Demo-Socialists won't even say the phrase "Islamic terrorism" publicly.
The Democrat-Socialist candidates, each and every one, show an unnerving obliviousness to the implacable danger America and the whole of Western Civilization face in the post-9/11 world.
* * * * * *
I've long thought that pacifism as a political ideology is an expression of perceptual-level hedonism, or more deeply of the subordination of reason to emotion. The emotionalist/hedonist mentality - an honored tradition with the "live for today" American Left since the '60s - wants to feel good at all costs and in defiance of all conflicting contexts. No matter that an international cabal of fanatics wants to kill us because we've moved out of the Dark Ages and are proud of the fact; "We wanna feel good" and... war feels bad.
Add to that the frantic need to cater to the actual or perceived whims of the masses as indicated by the poll du jour, plus the stultifying dread of offending "the International Community" (presumably as exemplified by the International Tyrants' Day Care Center, Manhattan Campus, a.k.a. the UN,) and what you've got is...the Democrat-Socialist Party platform, ca. 2007.
On an epistemological level pacifism is a manifestation of the skepticism/subjectivism/relativism axis that festers at the core of American leftism - respectively: "There are no absolutes, your ethical evaluations are just opinions, and nobody is more evil or more good than anyone else."
Voting Democrat in time of war is like snorting coke: It's pushed as something that'll make you feel real, real good, but in reality it's something that will ultimately kill you. They're not even particularly subtle about this, their blissful disconnect from reality. If you listen to the Demo-Socialist Party candidates for the 2008 election, then stack them up against the Republican candidates (contemptibly lame as these latter are,) what will smack you right between the eyes is the utter juvenility, the intense naïveté of their attitudes toward the dangerous world in which we live.
As I've mentioned before, what is at stake here is nothing less than the very survival of Western Civilization. It is absolutely not something to be entrusted to children.
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_
The third Republican debate was held two days later and was thoroughly as annoying, but for an entirely different reason. In a word: Default.
What could be heard of this debate between CNN's mysterious audio anomalies - loud periodic crackles of static interjected freely over those speaking and strangely regular muting of Giuliani's microphone - was significant primarily in what was missing from it. Just a few absent items I jotted down:
- In context of war, ending the Clinton-era "Rules of Non-Engagement" that essentially transform American troops into shooting gallery ducks;
- In context of war, ending the Bush-era "Compassionate" war concept that has essentially transformed American national security into an immoral exercise in altruistic martyrdom rather than decisive victory;
- The full, absolute and comprehensive negation of John "Traitor" McCain's censorship abomination, the Shays/Meehan act of 2002 - as a first domestic priority;
- Evidence that any one of the candidates has seen and digested Martin Durkin's film "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and has the audacity to point out that anthropogenic climate change is at best a neo-Marxian myth;
- Proposals for the drastic reduction in the size, scope, expense and intrusiveness of government at all levels - starting with major "alphabet soup" government departments and the welfare state as a whole;
- The word "deregulation." Just the word, simple as that, is all I wanted to hear. I'd have settled for it in pretty much any context, but it has left these boneheads' vocabularies entirely while the great Ronald Reagan spins in his grave;
- The word "privatization" - see above;
- More specifically, privatization of the United States Postal Monopoly, so that we can have at least as good a level of service with first class mail as bureaucratic Japan, socialist Britain and Ahmad-in-a-jar's Iran - each of which has recently privatized its postal monopoly, successfully;
- Privatization of the TSA/ThousandsStandingAround, which, predictably, has morphed into an arrogant, monarchical, unaccountable and un-criticizable monster bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Gestapo or NKVD;
- The phase-out and ultimate privatization of Social Security - rather than Bush's timid proposal to "allow" up to 4% (zowie) of wages to be diverted into "voluntary" private accounts. The only ethical Ponzi scheme is a dead Ponzi scheme;
- The full privatization of that vast, colossal failure that is "public education";
- Replacement of the Income Tax with a consumption tax - not an elimination (yet) but a dramatic change with a multitude of positive consequences for American liberty, privacy and prosperity;
- On immigration, the elimination of any possibility of illegal immigrants to access public (read: taxee-funded) services of any kind; denial of voting rights until full citizenship is gained through normal, legal channels - i.e., after the people in line before them who've played by the rules.
So in the absence of these basic Reaganesque proposals or anything remotely like them - certainly they're radical but consistent with Reagan's vision of eliminating entire cabinet-level departments and the like - what we're left with is ten "Republican" candidates who seem committed to: the Status Quo.
Which means: committed to sliding into full-blown totalitarian statism, but at a slightly slower rate than their Demo-Socialist counterparts would do. Swell.
Again, what a dismal lineup.
Addendum, June 21:
WagTV has announced that an expanded version of Martin Durkin's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" will be released on DVD in July, and that you can reserve a copy now. I would hope that a full-blown theatrical release of the documentary could be arranged for North America and Europe given the film's popularity, but that we'll have to keep lobbying for and just wait and see.
'Back from a brief vacation of sorts from all of this, and well, things haven't improved much in the Presidential Election arena.
On Sunday, June 3 the Democrat-Socialist Party of America held its second debate for the 2008 Presidential campaign. I missed it for some reason (?) so caught it in pieces later at You Tube (see link.)
What I heard didn't surprise me much except perhaps in the depth of potentially catastrophic naïveté on foreign policy - and let's face it folks, that would be the Go/NoGo test for any prospective President at this particular point in history.
It would appear that by some odd coincidental quirk these eight distinguished collectivists had all slept soundly through the month of September 2001...? The one striking aspect of their comments on foreign policy, particularly but not exclusively as relates to the war in Iraq, was that their entire context for policy is not American national security, but momentary American polling data.
Go ahead, listen to the segments of the debate addressing foreign policy. What you will hear is a consistent refrain of "The American people want out of this war," and "we need to bring the troops home," somber concerns about "the need to work with our allies" and "restore America's reputation with the rest of the world," and "This is Bush's war!" What you will not hear is any reference to the gravity of the situation we continue to face on a number of fronts. That very cut-and-run weakness and inconsistency the Demo-Socialists have adopted as their official Party policy on the Arab world since the Carter years has been a major factor in the rise of Islamic terrorism. As I've posted earlier, there remain areas beyond America's leftwing ivory tower that are similarly infested with predatory haters of individualism, of liberty, of trade, of prosperity - and which, like all predators, sense weakness in their prey. The Demo-Socialists won't even say the phrase "Islamic terrorism" publicly.
The Democrat-Socialist candidates, each and every one, show an unnerving obliviousness to the implacable danger America and the whole of Western Civilization face in the post-9/11 world.
* * * * * *
I've long thought that pacifism as a political ideology is an expression of perceptual-level hedonism, or more deeply of the subordination of reason to emotion. The emotionalist/hedonist mentality - an honored tradition with the "live for today" American Left since the '60s - wants to feel good at all costs and in defiance of all conflicting contexts. No matter that an international cabal of fanatics wants to kill us because we've moved out of the Dark Ages and are proud of the fact; "We wanna feel good" and... war feels bad.
Add to that the frantic need to cater to the actual or perceived whims of the masses as indicated by the poll du jour, plus the stultifying dread of offending "the International Community" (presumably as exemplified by the International Tyrants' Day Care Center, Manhattan Campus, a.k.a. the UN,) and what you've got is...the Democrat-Socialist Party platform, ca. 2007.
On an epistemological level pacifism is a manifestation of the skepticism/subjectivism/relativism axis that festers at the core of American leftism - respectively: "There are no absolutes, your ethical evaluations are just opinions, and nobody is more evil or more good than anyone else."
Voting Democrat in time of war is like snorting coke: It's pushed as something that'll make you feel real, real good, but in reality it's something that will ultimately kill you. They're not even particularly subtle about this, their blissful disconnect from reality. If you listen to the Demo-Socialist Party candidates for the 2008 election, then stack them up against the Republican candidates (contemptibly lame as these latter are,) what will smack you right between the eyes is the utter juvenility, the intense naïveté of their attitudes toward the dangerous world in which we live.
As I've mentioned before, what is at stake here is nothing less than the very survival of Western Civilization. It is absolutely not something to be entrusted to children.
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_
The third Republican debate was held two days later and was thoroughly as annoying, but for an entirely different reason. In a word: Default.
What could be heard of this debate between CNN's mysterious audio anomalies - loud periodic crackles of static interjected freely over those speaking and strangely regular muting of Giuliani's microphone - was significant primarily in what was missing from it. Just a few absent items I jotted down:
- In context of war, ending the Clinton-era "Rules of Non-Engagement" that essentially transform American troops into shooting gallery ducks;
- In context of war, ending the Bush-era "Compassionate" war concept that has essentially transformed American national security into an immoral exercise in altruistic martyrdom rather than decisive victory;
- The full, absolute and comprehensive negation of John "Traitor" McCain's censorship abomination, the Shays/Meehan act of 2002 - as a first domestic priority;
- Evidence that any one of the candidates has seen and digested Martin Durkin's film "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and has the audacity to point out that anthropogenic climate change is at best a neo-Marxian myth;
- Proposals for the drastic reduction in the size, scope, expense and intrusiveness of government at all levels - starting with major "alphabet soup" government departments and the welfare state as a whole;
- The word "deregulation." Just the word, simple as that, is all I wanted to hear. I'd have settled for it in pretty much any context, but it has left these boneheads' vocabularies entirely while the great Ronald Reagan spins in his grave;
- The word "privatization" - see above;
- More specifically, privatization of the United States Postal Monopoly, so that we can have at least as good a level of service with first class mail as bureaucratic Japan, socialist Britain and Ahmad-in-a-jar's Iran - each of which has recently privatized its postal monopoly, successfully;
- Privatization of the TSA/ThousandsStandingAround, which, predictably, has morphed into an arrogant, monarchical, unaccountable and un-criticizable monster bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Gestapo or NKVD;
- The phase-out and ultimate privatization of Social Security - rather than Bush's timid proposal to "allow" up to 4% (zowie) of wages to be diverted into "voluntary" private accounts. The only ethical Ponzi scheme is a dead Ponzi scheme;
- The full privatization of that vast, colossal failure that is "public education";
- Replacement of the Income Tax with a consumption tax - not an elimination (yet) but a dramatic change with a multitude of positive consequences for American liberty, privacy and prosperity;
- On immigration, the elimination of any possibility of illegal immigrants to access public (read: taxee-funded) services of any kind; denial of voting rights until full citizenship is gained through normal, legal channels - i.e., after the people in line before them who've played by the rules.
So in the absence of these basic Reaganesque proposals or anything remotely like them - certainly they're radical but consistent with Reagan's vision of eliminating entire cabinet-level departments and the like - what we're left with is ten "Republican" candidates who seem committed to: the Status Quo.
Which means: committed to sliding into full-blown totalitarian statism, but at a slightly slower rate than their Demo-Socialist counterparts would do. Swell.
Again, what a dismal lineup.
Addendum, June 21:
WagTV has announced that an expanded version of Martin Durkin's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" will be released on DVD in July, and that you can reserve a copy now. I would hope that a full-blown theatrical release of the documentary could be arranged for North America and Europe given the film's popularity, but that we'll have to keep lobbying for and just wait and see.
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