Category Archives: morality

Merry Christmas

Posted on by
Reply

Reposted from Christmas 2011, with an update.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.  If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Remember in your prayers and actions the tragedy of Newtown, CT, and their elementary school.  Think of  the victims, and especially of their survivors.

A Press Conference

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s what was said at a recent press conference:

So I’m going to continue to talk to the President and the other leaders up in the Senate.  But, ultimately, they’ve got to do their job.  Right now their job is to make sure that middle-class taxes do not go up and that we have a balanced, responsible package of deficit reduction.

It is there for all to see.  It is a deal that can get done.  But it is not going to be—it cannot be done if every side wants 100 percent.  And part of what voters were looking for is some compromise up here.  That’s what folks want.  They understand that they’re not going to get 100 percent of what they want.  And for some reason, that message has not yet taken up at the White House or in the Senate.

And when you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple of months—a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory—the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good, and not tangle themselves up in a whole bunch of ideological positions that don’t make much sense.

So I remain not only open to conversations, but I remain eager to get something done.  I’d like to get it done before Christmas.  There’s been a lot of posturing up at the White House and over in the Senate, instead of just going ahead and getting stuff done.  And we’ve been wasting a lot of time.  It is the right thing to do.  I’m prepared to get it done.  But they’re going to have to go ahead and make some adjustments.

Was that Speaker of the House John Boehnor (R, OH)?  Not really.  It was President Barack Obama, and he wasn’t talking about himself and his allies; he was disparaging Republican efforts to avert our fall over the cliff.

Never Let a Crisis….

Posted on by
Reply

The Democrats, led by President Barack Obama and Senators Diane Feinstein (D, CA) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) want to “discuss” gun control and make it harder/impossible for us to retain our 2nd Amendment rights.  But this would make us more like Europe, and that’s a Good Thing, isn’t it?

Here’s what Europe is blathering on about in re the Newtown mass murder.

[The Newtown massacre] is once again the unavoidable result of a national culture….  Once again, the United States is debating its gun laws, even if the discussion is likely to be short and inconclusive.  But the real thing that must change (though it hardly will), is the misunderstanding that America’s formative myth of “freedom” allows for weapons to be as widespread as smart phones.

And from Süddeutsche Zeitung, this:

Their [Republicans and the gun lobby] opposition to almost any kind of gun control borders on political complicity in murder and manslaughter.

And from Die Welt, this, even as they “recognize” the legitimacy of private ownership of guns:

A country-wide weapons registry would make sense. … [A]t least a ban on semi-automatic weapons, such as the one that existed during the administration of Bill Clinton, makes sense.

And from Stuttgarter Zeitung, this:

[T]this variety of martial liberalism is a relic of a bygone era that no longer fits in the time.

Never mind our Creator’s endowment of rights and the expression of them in our Bill of Rights.  The latter exists to facilitate our satisfaction of our individual endowment of obligations, which includes our obligation to help each other enjoy those inalienable rights.  Which demands an ability to defend ourselves and our fellows by force of arms, if necessary, not only against other members of our compact and intruders from outside it, but also against an overweening, overly intrusive government that is a necessary evil and not the fount of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms.  Which in turn demands a 2nd Amendment that explicitly acknowledges our inherent right to be adequately armed for executing that self- and mutual defense.

Disarming us, as even the Süddeutsche Zeitung understood elsewhere in its editorial, cannot have prevented such mass murders.  Disarming us would not disarm the criminals, or the insane, or the criminals who would use the insane.  Progressives dismiss this as ridiculous, a catch phrase, but it is no less a truth for that.

Nor has the threat receded in a modern, dangerous world, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung so innocently hopes.  Thinking so is dangerously naïve.

Government has no need to know what its employers have in our possession.  Fishing expeditions, which include a national gun registry with its associated limits on the purpose for which we might be permitted to possess and use a firearm, and of which restrictions on what we are in the end permitted to own are a subset, are at once an early step in the erosion of freedom and a textbook example of why another requirement was written into our Bill of Rights: the need for a separately court-approved search warrant before our government might pry into our private affairs.  A government that assumes, a priori, that its employers are dishonest is a government that, even more so, cannot be trusted.

What those who idolize Government, those who truly think that government is the origin of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms—rather than an unfortunately necessary tool for helping us preserve our individual liberties and satisfy our individual responsibilities—do not understand is that these are truly individual; our liberties and obligations are individual and are inherent in us as individuals.  Thus, we cannot wish them away onto another entity for preservation or satisfaction.  They cannot be divorced from us any more than our lives can be.

In the end, the only ones who want to disarm a population are those in Government with guilty consciences about their own designs on liberty and those who truly believe that freedom flows from Government and not from God.  Both sorts are dangerous.

Cynical Refusal to Negotiate

Posted on by
Reply

Fox News has this example from the Progressives in Congress.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is refusing even to discuss the possibility of raising the initial eligibility age of Medicare, and Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) echoes her no-negotiate position.

Raising the Medicare age represents more of the same.  For seniors nearing retirement, it means less security for themselves and their families.  It betrays the bedrock promise of Medicare: that Americans who work hard and take responsibility all their lives can know dignity in their later years.

Yet how can Americans know dignity in our later years?  An overweening government forces us onto the largesse of strangers for, in the present case, our health concerns, and it denies us our ability to set aside those funds for our own future welfare thereby denying us our ability to satisfy our duty to see to our own welfare to the maximum extent possible?  We are denied our dignity by an intrusive government, led by Progressives who refuse to negotiate reform.

Another Party?

Posted on by
Reply

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R, OH) is now joining the growing chorus of…Republicans…who are begging for surrender on the economy: he’s offering tax rate increases, albeit on Americans with more than $1 million of annual income.  This will be an abject failure: President Barak Obama, standing tall with the Republicans now on their knees in front of him, has no need of accepting this.  In fact, he has an excellent chance of succeeding with a gambit that seemingly failed in the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011, when he made a last minute demand for even more taxes: with Republicans now begging for mercy, he can, at this late hour, add to his demands—yet more taxes beyond the $1.6 trillion he’s currently demanding (the offered reduction to $1.4 trillion was never serious).

Given this abject failure, should we walk away from the Republican Party and form a third national party, one more honest and courageous and better rooted in the principles of conservatism—the 18th Century Liberal principles on which our nation was founded and which underlie our prosperity and power?

I’m of two minds on this.  On the one hand, with the Republican Party as currently constituted now empirically in shambles and a failure, we need a national party capable of retrieving our nation from the nearby disaster of Europe-like social and political failure, and from the disaster waiting to be imposed politically and militarily later by our enemies.

The Tea Partiers have the national reach, but remain politically naïve.  They are, however, learning.  Forming a new national party would represent a strategic retreat for the principles of individual liberty and responsibility and of the small, limited government that is the only thing that can help preserve these.  However, sometimes retreat is necessary in order to be able to reengage from a position of greater strength.

On the other hand, the infrastructure of an existing national party is no mean thing.  The primary things wrong with the Republican Party are the RINOs in positions of leadership, who are too willing to sacrifice principle for political expediency however well intended the sacrifice, and their utter inability to make their case in the practical terms of interest to their constituents—and to their neighboring Progressives’ constituents.

The Tea Partiers have made great inroads in the last few years in inserting greater conservatism into the GOP, along with inserting people who will actually hew the GOP to those principles.  Their success was demonstrated in 2010, and confirmed in 2012, other than at the Presidential level.  Their success was both confirmed and expanded down-ticket in the state houses in those 2012 elections.

The Tea Partiers, though, whether in a new national party or through further recovery of the Republican Party, will need to communicate, also.  It isn’t sufficient to make tempestuous—or mild—speeches on the floor of an empty House or Senate and hope the Progressives’ news outlets will give it coverage.  Nor are digital media, important though they are, sufficient.  The new or recovered party needs to get out among the people—in their neighborhoods, their community centers, their diners, their living rooms, and in those of their Progressive constituents’—and explain in practical terms the values of conservative principles.  For this, the Professional Communicators of the GOP need not apply.  They’ve shown their level of competence already.

And the leaders, and membership, of this new or revised national party must understand that this is a struggle for our nation’s soul.  There will be conflict.  There will be demands for compromise of principles.  But they must also understand that if a man has no principles for which he’ll sacrifice, he has no principles.  That means that, sometimes, we have actually to sacrifice, not just bleat.  The present crop of Republican leadership seem to have lost sight of that last, critical part.  And it’s been fatal.