Tag Archives: morality

Progressive Civility

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In the run-up to the Wisconsin recall election, we got the Democrats’ attempt to smear Governor Walker with a carefully timed, just before the voting, dishonest claim of having fathered a child out of wedlock as a college kid.  We also got the Progressives’ preview of one of their core beliefs, that of a surveillance state, with a mailer they sent to all potential voters in the state:

We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicise who does and does not vote.

… The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past.

After the June 5th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn’t.

Ann Althouse has posted an image of the letter she received.  As Dr Althouse says, “This…is truly despicable.”

Now, post-election, Walker is the target—literally—of Democrats’ death threats.  Here are some of the…saner…threats.  And lest a reader thinks these are just angered BS, the Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice think they’re real enough to investigate.

I wanna kill scott walker so fucking baddd!!!!! & the racist dumb assholes that voted for him

Please somebody kill Scott Walker.—

Scott walker will die within the next week ive already payed for the hit—

Oh Yeah, Somebody Gone Shoot Scott Walker White Ass.—

Scott Walker needs to die—

NBS I Know What School Scott Walker Son Go To—

As backdrop, we have this from last February by Congressman Michael Capuano (D, MA) about the Wisconsin recall election:

Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.

It’s been interesting to see the denunciation by the Democratic Party leadership and by the NLMSM of these Progressive examples of civil discourse.

Here they are from President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, David Axelrod, Jim Messina, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, and Valerie Jarrett:

…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg

Here they are from the NYT, LAT, WaPo, CNN, and MSNBC:

MSNBC had this on the 6th, the day after the elections and the day the threats began appearing.  And WaPo had this piece on the 6th, which though is more along the lines of mine.  Since then, it’s been

…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g04aCp3ej-I

for all of them.

Pair this with the Democrats’ atrocious attacks on the very fabric of our democracy 15 months ago when they ran from the state of Wisconsin (and Indiana) in order to block the democratically elected government from being able to function at all, solely because those Democrats were unable to impose their views on the majority.

The Progressives’ view of democracy and of individual liberty is not something we can afford four more years of.  Or ever again.

Two Kinds of Politics

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We have two kinds of politics that seem to be coming to a head in this presidential campaign season: the politics of class warfare and envy and the politics of respect for individuals and for the collective wisdom of American citizens.

On the one side, we have, as one pundit puts it

…to a very real degree, 2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear.

And of jealousy.

This campaign is aimed at those John Agresto described, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about a related matter, who

…wish to have what others have worked for, those who think there should be “preferential options” for their kind and those they favor, those who believe that they are entitled to have their desires satisfied, [who] only see other people as means to their ends and not as ends in themselves.

They can only see that others have what they do not, that others possess what they want, and they command the redistribution of these things to themselves.

This is a campaign of class warfare, of redistribution for no other reason than that some have and others want it, and of increasing the dependency of Americans on government; and votes are to be had here.

On the other side, we have a campaign of real hope and change, a campaign of a return to a government that fosters individual responsibility and individual opportunity for themselves and their families.  Their campaign centers on a return to a small government that does not presume to do for Americans what we can do for ourselves: these campaigners, these candidates, trust Americans, individually and collectively, to make the right choices for themselves far more often than government can for them.

This is a campaign in favor of lower taxes all around, less government spending all around, less government regulatory interference in the affairs of private citizens and our businesses—all to leave more money in the hands of those who’ve earned it.  And thereby make everyone better off.

As one campaigner has put it,

Dependency is death to initiative, to risk-taking and opportunity.  It’s time to stop the spread of government dependency and fight it like the poison it is.

Right to Vote and DoJ

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The Federal Department of Justice has written a letter to letter to Florida’s Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, ordering him to stop trying to purge the Florida voter rolls of ineligible “voters.”  Interestingly, the order is predicated on technical, procedural grounds: five counties in Florida still are subject to the National Voting Rights Act of 1964, and Detzner didn’t say, “Mother, may I?” to DoJ before attempting the purge.

Never mind that an early inspection of the state’s rolls turned up as many as 182,000 folks registered to vote who may not be US citizens.  Never mind that, as the spokesman for the Florida Department of State, Chris Cate, said,

Bottom line is we are firmly committed to doing the right thing and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot[.]

Never mind that the state has had in place for months a request to the Department of Homeland Security to match the state’s driver’s license records with the DHS’ databases to facilitate the assessment of citizenship and thereby of voting eligibility.  The DHS has been unresponsive.

This move comes on the heels of Attorney General Eric Holder’s racist speech which he gave to the Council of Black Churches last Wednesday concerning voter eligibility.  The Wall Street Journal had some choice words concerning those racist words from our AG; I won’t go into that here.

But such attacks, together with Advancement Project Co-director, Penda Hair’s ironic remark, which included this

We commend the attorney general of the United States Eric Holder for ensuring that the right to vote, the fundamental pillar of our democracy is protected for all American citizens

make the larger point here.  In the name of protecting the sanctity of an American voter’s ballot, Progressives are actively attacking it.  They pretend not to see that if ineligibles aren’t prevented from voting, the votes of honest Americans are diluted or outright cancelled by ineligible, false, votes.

Al Franken (D, MN), for instance, was elected to the US Senate in 2008 by 312 votes out of 2.9 million votes cast.  In 2004, President George Bush carried Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.  Identifying ineligible voters and getting them off the rolls matters.

I have to ask: what’s the Progressives’ real objection to an honest voter roll?

Presidential Ego

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To be the leader of a large business, and especially of a great nation, it’s necessary to possess an outsized ego.

Here’s an example of an outsized ego, courtesy of Haaretz:

…Obama…met about 20 Conservative Jewish community leaders [prior to the White House Medal of Freedom award ceremony that afternoon]….

There were some questions directed at the presidents concerning his thoughts on the role of religious leaders in a more civil political dialogue, which then lead to the inevitable question—how does he feels about Israel?  Obama joked that [White House Chief of Staff Jack] Lew always warns him it will get to “the kishkes question.”

Obama remind[ed] his guests that he had so many Jewish friends in Chicago at the beginning of his political career that he was accused of  being a puppet of the Israel lobby.

Obama…stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it—and wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel about their support to Israel.

William Kristol, writing in The Weekly Standard after the meeting, had some comments.

1. The reason no one asks John Boehner or Mitch McConnell about their support for Israel is … because they really do support Israel.  The reason people ask Barack Obama about his support for Israel is because his support for Israel has been equivocal.  [Blogger’s note: I think Kristol is being generous here.  I would have said Obama’s support has been indifferent.]

2. It’s truly pathetic that Obama has to reach for the tired (to say the least) trope that some of his best friends were Jewish.  Actually, one wishes more of his best friends were pro-Israel Christians.  They might have had more luck convincing him, a fellow Christian, that he should be pro-Israel.  [Blogger’s note: Well, he did have Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, and Jeremiah Wright.  But then, they were just folks in the neighborhood and a guy in a church.]

3. And the claim that Obama knows more about Judaism than any president?  His vanity boggles the mind.  One could begin by citing Adams and Madison, who knew Hebrew, or Harry Truman, who knew Jewish history … but it’s silly to dignify this claim with a rebuttal.  In thinking about the presidents since Truman, though, I’d guess the president who knew the most about Judaism was Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday school and had a deep interest in religion.  [Blogger’s note: But, but—Obama read a book!]

To be successful as that leader, though, it’s also necessary to have an accurate picture of one’s self and of one’s place—both vertically, as one of many in a long history of predecessors creating and building that entity; and horizontally, as a part of the entity and just one of its many members.

Income Inequalities

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“Income inequality is a strange obsession, at least to the extent the obsessives focus their policy responses on trying to adjust the condition of the top 1% rather than improving the opportunities of everyone else.”
–Holman Jenkins, The Wall Street Journal

As Freud put it, “Everyone must be the same and have the same.  Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well.”

Or we could follow an alternative.  We could worry less about equality of outcomes and more about equality of opportunity, as our Founders suggested.  Since we don’t all have an equal endowment of ability or work ethic, and more importantly, we don’t all have the same goals for our lives, equal outcomes—equal incomes, equal wealth—is necessarily impossible.

But those equal opportunities, and the ability of everyone to satisfy his own potential in the manner and to the extent each sees fit, is the stuff of rapidly increasing wealth for all of us—not only of the pecuniary variety, but of the moral, as well.