Point - Counter Point

Those who used to chastise America for acting alone, cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone.

- Barrack Obama at U.N. last week.

It's only a matter of time before the other guys at the bar start to think: Oh really? Who are you to say we can't?

And what are you going to do about it?

- Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard

Will Rogers On Republicans

An old, long-wiskered man once said to Teddy Roosevelt: "I am a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat." Roosevelt then said: "Then if your father had been a horse thief and your grandfather had been a horse thief, you would be a horse thief?"

"No," the man said, "I would be a Republican."

The story is not true. All Republicans are not horse thieves. At the biggest estimate, not over 90 percent are horse thieves. Every once in a while you meet a pretty nice one.

Just want everyone to know: my grandfather was not a horse thief. He was a smuggler. Had a respectible job in Arizona working in the Post Office. That's how he got Grandma to marry him. Once they tied the knot, he got the smuggling operation going. (This was during Prohibition.) Was pretty good at it, too. Ran semi's out of Mexico. The FBI caught up with him, though. He did a stretch at MacNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Grandma loaded up my father and the rest of the kid in the car and drove up to Seattle to wait for him to get out. That's how the family wound up in Washington State.

The foregoing is a true story.

Coulter 9/15/09

Left's Healthcare Lies - Part 3

My take on Ann Coulter's latest. Her column was published on Townhall.com.

Summary: This time she covers Medicare, Illegal Immigration, and The Public Option. The Obama supporters are using different terminology for the same concepts. If we run health care like Medicare, then note that Medicare is already on the path to going bankrupt. As for Illegal Immigration, it is one thing to legislate that they will be excluded from the new health care plan, it is another to enforce the law. Won't Obama's policy to this mirror his policy on enforcing the present laws about illegal immigration? Public Option: they will do it under a different name.

List: The New National Health Care Plan will:

9. Be like Medicare.
10. Not cover illegal aliens.
11. Not have the "Public Option".

Quote:

Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. "Abortion" becomes "choice," "communist" becomes "progressive," "communist dictatorship" becomes "people's democratic republic" and "Nikita Khrushchev" becomes "Barack Obama."

My Views: Okay, she is provacative and witty at the same time. I just like this style of writing. Her strongest point is on illegal immigration. Hey! It's already illegal. If they don't want to enforce that, what makes anybody think that they would enforce an anti-illegal provision in The Health Care Bill any better?

Part 2

Series Summary

Part 4

---

Anybody who is as hated as Ann Coulter is must be doing something right. She is very right-wing but every left-wing blogger would love to write like her. I hate rants; opinion pieces must argue from the facts. Pay attention to how she uses facts and draws politically incorrect connections among them. People would do well to think and not just be outraged.

Here's her Wiki bio. Her latest book is at the right.

Some Cool News Articles

Here's some interesting stuff that I've seen on the internet.

First this by Noemie Emery on the disunity of Conservatives. I never really understood why the intremural attacks on Sarah Palin. Sure, to some extent but the over-the-top rejections of her smacked too much of pandering to the establishment elite.

Second, this is an historical ranking of America's top political dynasties. I like the objective criteria employed. This gives me confidence in the historian's conclusions.

Last, I had forgotten Bill Clinton's ringing declaration last decade that "the era of big government is over". Did you forget, too? This article by Mike Flynn pinpoints the real reason why so many people are concerned about the direction that Obama is taking the country. It is not necessarily any one issue like health care. It is the larger concerns about government not only getting bigger, but stultifying.

Will 9/8/09

Withdraw From Afghanistan

My take on George Will's latest. His column was published in the Washington Post.

Summary: This is the big bomb that he dropped a week ago. He sees this developing into another Vietnam. Ingredients include: corrupt government, apathetic people, and feckless allies. Plus the enemy has North Vietnam style sanctuary in Pakistan.

Quote:

Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan's recent elections were called "crucial." To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American "success," whatever that might mean.

My Views: My first thought was the predictablity of this. For years we have been told that Afganistan was the good war and that it was Iraq that was was the bad one. (John Kerry made this the central issue in his campaign against George W. Bush in 2004.)

Now that we're withdrawing from Iraq, sure enough, right on schedule, the calls for withdrawals from Afganistan begin. For many, being for Afganistan but against Iraq was just a ruse to be able to be dovish to left wing voters and hawkish to right wing voters.

As for George Will, these reasons he cites have been known for years. So, why didn't he come out against Afganistan before now?

---

George Will almost didn't make it as a syndicated columnist. His style was considered too erudite for a general audience.

Whatever one thinks of his views, read his work for use of language and for how he marshals facts and uses logic.

Here's his Wiki bio.

His latest book is at the right.

Vilifying Opponents

Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin are again in the news. One just turned upon her tormenters with a lawsuit; the other was driven out of office. One women ran for Miss USA; the other ran for Vice-President. For both women, it was not enough that they were defeated in their respective contests; they had to be humiliated, ruined, and stigmatized for all time. Both are part of a disturbing phenomenon in American culture.

Let’s take the two cases one by one.

CP was a beauty contest winner – and looser. As Miss California she lost the contest for Miss USA. She was ambushed with a gay-marriage question in the final moments and answered against it. The judge bragged afterwards how he used that answer to defeat her.

But that was not enough.

The pageant officials denounced her. An investigation targeted her – just her, not any of the other beauty contestants – and found some bad things. Not anything very bad, mind you, but bad stuff, nevertheless. This was the excuse for a new round of denunciations.

They even went after her Miss California title! A straight-up attempt to remove her from that failed. (The firestorm from the left triggered a backlash of negative publicity on the pageant.) Trump caved. (Donald Trump owns the beauty pageant.)

But as many of may know from much experience, there’s more than one way to get rid of someone. After a length of time, the officials who had denounced CP so vociferously, announced their excuse: she had failed to make 75 appearances. So they fired her and Trump okayed it. Now she’s suing.

Sarah Palin underwent a similar ordeal. Her family was targeted, the parentage of her children was questioned, and worst of all, so many ethics complaints were filed against her that she ran up $500,000 in legal fees just to defend herself. Then the newspapers announced she was getting divorced (false).

Both women did not handle the onslaught very well. Thrown into minefields, they stepped on a few. But did that justify the vilification that they both endured?

- And remember: Carrie Prejean was only a beauty contestant!

In the end, it was not these two women that were hurt the most; it was our culture. Whatever happened to the kinder, gentler America?