Mitt Romney a Cyborg, Ron Paul Supporters Allege

Courtesy of Proof Positive

"Dude, he's like so upright and never makes a mistake. And what does he put in his hair, shellack?" said 23-year-old anti-war activist Shay Leggard.

Romney supporter Norman Workman dismissed the robot allegations as the ramblings of pot-smoking draft-dodgers.

"That's bogus, dude!" countered Leggard, spilling bong water all over his medical marijuana card, adding an emphatic "dammit," before warning reporters to clear out before his mom got home from work and "got all pissed because there's too many people in the house."

I love this picture.  Wish I'd thought of it...

A big-time blogger quoted me!

How cool is this?  Walter Russell Mead quoted me in a blog post!  And he agreed with me.  It was a comment I made in a previous post of his, concerning discipline and self-improvement.

  I'm the second quote that he introduces with ... " Another reader countered, writing..."

Check it out here: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/11/self-improvement-isnt-only-for-elites/

Professor Mead writes cogently of the failures of "The Blue Model."  Yeah, anybody, including me, can write about that, but he provides in-depth analysis and explores solutions.  I highly recommend him to my fellow Right Blogistan thinkers.

Clarence Thomas: Constitutional Hero

Clarence Thomas could end up destroying progressive statism

Walter Russell Mead writes that the left has gone from declaring Clarence Thomas a dunce to ringing all-hands-on-deck alarm bells over the horrible realization that this justice has been patiently sapping the very foundations of New Deal statism for over 20 years.  Shock and horror, ladies and gentlemen:  The left has finally realized, hopefully too late, that Justice Clarence Thomas is a brilliant constitutional scholar of formidable intellect.

What we didn’t know, and what the world at large didn’t know until very recently, was that the New Deal constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked.  Intellectually its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.  (New Blue Nightmare:  Clarence Thomas)

The Sun Also Sets

In the case of the Second Amendment, the collapse has already come.  Back in my Pundit High days, anyone who dared to suggest that the Bill of Rights gave individuals the right to bear arms would have been laughed out of the class as an ignorant yahoo.  These days, that is the accepted view of the US Supreme Court and most of the legal profession.  The resurrection of the Second Amendment proves that the “dead letter” clauses of the Constitution can come back to life — and suggests that Clarence Thomas understands how this can be done.

Justice Thomas is the intellectual firepower that will eventually blow the Obamacare Battlestar Gallactica out of the sky...

...which is why liberals are screaming for him to recuse himself on such a flimsy premise:  His wife, instead of being an angry feminist footsoldier in progressivism's long march, instead has become a tea party activist.  Liberals hate how conservative male chauvenist pigs control their women, but hate it more when they don't.

The next topic for Constitutional revisionism is the expansive reading of the commerce clause that the New Deal judges used to justify the Roosevelt administration’s ambitious economic programs.  The Obamacare health reform depends on that kind of reading of the commerce clause; the penumbras must stretch pretty far for the Constitution to give Congress the right to require all Americans to buy private health insurance.  And if the commerce clause can be stretched this far, one must ask whether there is anything that the Constitution blocks Congress from doing.

The terrified left realizes that this is not the end of Thomas' efforts, but rather just the beginning...

The Second Amendment was a constitutional landmine for the left; the Tenth is a nuclear bomb.

A strict reading of the 10th Amendment would invalidate many expensive and expansive federal programs.  Thomas's cogent arguments in a few key cases could restore personal liberty to its rightful primacy and return us to a serious reading of the enumerated powers, finally arresting the progressives of all parties who have hijacked the ship of state.

Taken seriously today, that approach to the Constitution would change the way Washington does business.  Radically.  The list of enumerated powers is short and does not include, for example, health care, education, agricultural subsidies, assistance to the hungry or old age pensions.  Most of the New Deal and Great Society (with the interesting exception of civil rights laws which enforce the Civil War era amendments) would be struck down.  Whole cabinet departments would close.

Mead tempers expectations, saying none of this will happen tomorrow, if at all.  But it is the single greatest threat the all-encompassing progressive state has ever faced.  Even if nothing dramatic transpires, Justice Thomas has moved the intellectual football and advanced the cause of liberty, actually changing scholarly legal thought, and that will redound to our good for decades to come.

I've only given you a taste of this erudite and entertaining writer's article.  I recommend you go read the whole thing.  It will lift your spirits while enlightening you.  He couches this entire article in a Lord of the Rings theme, making the reading of such weighty matters an absolute delight.  

All quotes from:  New Blue Nightmare:  Clarence Thomas

Please go read the original Jeffrey Toobin article, Partners.  You will gain a great appreciation of just how badly Justice Thomas and his brilliant wife frighten the left.

What's Wrong With America

Walter Russell Mead is a classical liberal and a Democrat.  Other than voting for Obama, he is a paragon of lucid thinking. He wonders if Americas decline can be traced to the decline and debasement of our elites.

We Americans have a disdain for royalty. Like most of my fellow countrymen, I paid scant attention to the recent royal wedding in Britain (I can’t even give you the names of who got married).  But reading Mead’s article, I realized one practical purpose for royalty:  To be a shining example of moral virtue and self-sacrificing patriotism, thus inspiring the rest of us to similar heights.  America’s elites, whether we like it or not, have historically served a similar purpose here.

Of late, American elites, like British royalty, have fallen into debased decline, and it puts our society in peril.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. 

It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. 

Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. (Mead)

While conceding that religion is no guarantee of moral virtue, he nonetheless fingers a lack of moral virtue as a contributor to our troubles

What a surprise!  We raised a generation of bright kids without a foundation in religion, and they’ve grown up and gone to Wall Street.  We never told them that the virtuous life was both necessary and hard, that character was something that had to be built step by step from youth, that moral weakness was both contemptible and natural: and we are shocked, shocked! when, placed in proximity to large sums of loose cash, they grab all they can. (Mead)

Today's Wall Street makes the robber barons look like Mother Teresa.  Add in Arnold's groping infidelities, an IMF Chief raping a hotel maid, serial crimes and outrages by the Kennedy family…  It’s rape, pillage and plunder at the hands of the world's "elites."

Many problems troubling America today are rooted in the poor performance of our elite educational institutions, the moral and social collapse of our ‘best’ families and the culture of narcissism and entitlement that has transformed the American elite into a flabby minded, strategically inept and morally confused parody of itself.  (Mead)

Worse, it has trickled down to the Hollywood pseudo-elite that so much of our society lamentably now looks to for guidance.  Is it any wonder a libertine anti-intellectualism has seized much of middle America?  The Establishment is perpetually disappointed in us.  It’s bad enough being preached at by your “betters,” but ordinary Americans can no longer abide the perpetual lectures from the morally and intellectually flabby.

The elites have historically taken the slings and arrows of the hoi polloi with magnanimity, earning a grudging if hidden respect from us in return when they did something right.  No longer.  The waters are poisoned, we are jaded.

Lecture me?  Screw you!  I'd rather go hunting with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin.

Walter Russell Mead – Establishment Blues
Maureen Dowd - Powerful and Primitive
Globe and Mail – French Morals, American Justice

Saving Liberalism from the Liberals

Walter Russell Mead asks, "Can the L-Word be saved?"

It's a good question, and one important to this nation, which was founded upon classical liberal ideals.  It's been all down hill since then for liberalism, with its path winding through Fabian Socialism, illiberal nationalism, elitist progressivism and ending up in the dark caverns of tribalism, identity politics, and because-we-say-so-ism.

I do not hate liberals. Some of those nearest and dearest to me are liberals.  I was saddened when a liberal coworker moved on to greener pastures, because he is a very intelligent man and we had some awesome conversations while leaning on our shovels.

The words liberal and libertarian both come from the word liberty, but they diverged long ago and we here in America have hopelessly tangled up our terms.  Mr. Mead explains...

Politically speaking, America may be the most confused country in the world.  Millions of people in this country are conservatives and even reactionaries who think they are liberals; we have millions more liberals and radicals who call themselves conservative.

It is an unholy mess and it needs to be cleared up.  It’s time for a language intervention.

Many find such conversations pedantic and insist that the terms are what they are in this country and who cares if we've got it backwards?  But if you are a thinker trying to get to the root of the matter, you must start by defining terms and tracing today's movements back to their philosophical roots.  Clarity demands it.

"Liberals" sneering at tea partiers who cite the constitution provides a clue that liberalism has gone off the rails; progressives voluntarily severed ties with such antiquities in the early 20th century, and liberals inexplicably fell in with them.  Progressive politicians greatly expanded the commerce clause and the general welfare clause, and progressive judges let them get away with it.  We were grappling with wars and economic crashes, you see, so the president and congress needed extraordinary powers.  And today's liberals, with a straight face, would have us believe George Bush's post-911 bureaucratic expansion and increased government powers was a singularly unprecedented even in our nation's history.  Sadly, it was just one more brick in the wall.

Know Yourself (Socrates).  Know Your Enemy (Sun-Tsu)
Most liberals cannot explain liberalism, because it is an incoherent hodgepodge of pollyanic aspirations, musty dogma and high dudgeon.  Worse for them though, is that they cannot explain conservatism, and they are blind to the evidence that the tea party has a strain of radical liberalism running through it, while they have become the entrenched fuddy duddies on so many issues.  I urge my fellow conservatives and libertarians to not make the same mistake.  You must understand the ideology you do battle with.

most of what passes for liberal and progressive politics is a conservative reaction against economic and social changes that the left doesn’t like.  The people who call themselves liberal in the United States today are fighting desperate rearguard actions to save policies and institutions that are old and established, that once served a noble purpose, but that now need fundamental reform (and perhaps in some cases abolition) ...

Liberals Started With Noble Ideals
I also urge everyone to study liberalism with charity in your heart.  Along the way you may find liberalism has some admirable qualities.  American liberalism is not communism after all.  Liberals and Progressives did not set out with the intent to enslave us.  They perceived real problems and set about trying to solve them:

The industrial revolution and associated phenomena (urbanization, mass immigration from non-English speaking, non-Protestant societies, the economic decline of small farmers and rural communities) presented liberals with new and very complicated problems. The problems of urbanization, class conflict (and the competition with socialism for the support of urban industrial workers), assimilation, and the regulation of a modern industrial economy gave 4.0 liberals new issues to worry about.

The development of a professional, bureaucratic civil service and the regulatory state were intended to preserve individual autonomy and dignity in a world dominated by large and predatory corporate interests – and split into classes with most industrial and agricultural workers subject to very low wages, long hours and poor working conditions.

At the same time the challenges of modernization and urbanization (public health, food safety, provision of newly necessary services like electricity and gas) could best be met through public services and, in some cases, heavily regulated private monopolies.  The professional and managerial classes were not just middle classes in the sense of standing between the rich and the poor in income and status; they were mediating classes who sought through the state, the universities and the learned professions to impose a balance between the interests of the wealthy and the workers.

Mead gives them their deserved props, but concludes that rather than take a revanchist approach, liberals need to move on, and realize that while their goals were noble, they snuffed human liberty and initiative in the process. Keep the goals but ditch the totalitarian tactics

Mead also looks forward to a new liberalism, which he calls Liberalism 5.0.  I recommend you go read the entire article.  He provides a concise history of American liberalism.  If the libs got their heads screwed on straight, they'd make common cause with the tea partiers.

Walter Russell Mead - Can the L-Word be Saved?